Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Much much cheaper still doesn't get us remotely close. Just a very quick calculation, according to this:
https://www.theenergyfix.com/solar-farms/
by my math we'd need 100kmē of solar panels for Alberta to match demand. At $500,000 per acre, that's 122 Billion USD. And that's not including increasing production for EV's and electrical heating. Nor does it include the excess generation you need to charge batteries(you only get peak output for a few hours a day), nor does it include battery costs, which are about a billion dollars per hour of storage(for all Alberta). Imagine trying to charge and store battery power in winter with solar, and these numbers go way up. So you are quickly reaching impossible numbers.
Nuclear is the most obvious one, which is expensive, but at least it's in the sphere of reality. I don't have any other solutions because there aren't any. Short of a massive reduction global population, no answers come close. Which is why I posted what I did earlier. We'll get through this with technological advances, but it's a long way down the road. I'm sorry that the reality is that it's a very difficult problem, and we don't have any magic bullets, let alone band aids right now.
We should absolutely keep working on progress, but saying that if we just built solar to power Alberta is not realistic. |
While it's tempting to say "we can't really do nothing because it's hard," the reality is that margins on solar and other renewables are plunging. There will be some hard choices to be made in the next ten years, and yes, it will cost a lot of money, but the downside to allowing our infrastructure and way of life to remain vulnerable to the very high costs associated with future climate change are much much much greater.
There a lot of options beyond power generation that will bring our emissions down, including construction denser, more efficient housing, expanding our public transit network, and investing in carbon sink technology/utilizing simpler methods of carbon capture.
I encourage you to read the recent report from Canada's Institute for Climate Choices on how we get to Net Zero.
https://climatechoices.ca/wp-content...re_FINAL-1.pdf