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Notes -
Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
Non-battery based energy storage(like pumping water behind a dam) seems like it fills the niche, albeit with efficiency losses, does it not?
Have you looked at the numbers for pumped storage? A kilo of gasoline stores enough energy to raise a similar kilo of water more than four thousand kilometers. The sheer volumes you'd need to lift to match the energy density of a single floating roof tank (or oil tanker) would be absurd, and you'd need to scatter pumped lakes the size of Lake Mead all over the country, and even then probably couldn't handle seasonal variation. Not to mention that reservoirs are themselves not that environmentally friendly or that there aren't many good sites to start from that aren't already used.
IMO generating hydrocarbons is the most viable storage technology (plus it works with existing supplied energy infrastructure), but even there robust, scalable chemical processes are lacking. Hydrogen is easier chemically but harder to store.
Look up what Terraform is promising. Methane synthesis from water and captured CO2
I feel like it can't be real, that the numbers don't make sense, that making and running the machinery in a cost effective manner is impossible
Why can't it be real? The Haber-Bosch process is at least as impactful of an "air + energy + water -> bulk useful material" process, and it's real and cost-effective.
Anyone who comes up with some process that
has a license to print money when power costs dip to zero or below. Which they already do from time to time, and if solar power continues to be deployed more and more, that situation will happen more often.
Terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.
..there's such thing as manufacturing and maintenance costs.
You got 8 upvotes while completely neglecting that.
Terraform has some bullshit low price of $100k for a machinery that produces, without taking power into account something like $65 of natural gas per day. With solar it'd take 5 acres to power it.
So, I'm skeptical. Because industrial equipment is extremely expensive.
Look at this here. $100k for that much chemical processing?!
And does 40 tons of methane per year even get you $150k? 1 ton of methane is supposedly 14500 kWh (perverse unit to use).
1 kWh is 5 cents in the US or eastern Europe, .7 cents in Russia etc.
725$ per ton, 29k $ per year.
So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ? You can't hike price of heat up 10x like they did in western Europe and expect to not ruin any real economy. (based on production of actual stuff, not finance bullshit)
$100k for the machinery seems plausible to me -- you can see details of their proposed setup here (relevant sections are "Carbon capture", "Electrolyzer", and "Chemical reactor", the rest of that post is fluff). "Low maintenance" remains to be seen, but there's no reason in principle that it couldn't be.
But again, the viability of the entire project rests on the idea that in some places the marginal cost of power will be close to zero or even negative a substantial fraction of the time, and yet those places are accessible enough to construct one of these plants. If that's not the way the future pans out, this project winds up not being so viable.
So the answer to
Is "It's not. But not every place is reasonable".
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"handwaving infrastructure costs" strikes again, a good example of what I meant in that other subthread.
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