marlboroughman wrote: ↑Sun Oct 14, 2018 3:01 am
Greenturtle wrote: ↑Sat Oct 13, 2018 2:26 pm
Total WORLDWIDE Lithium production in 1 year:
43,000 tons
Coal burned in the USA ALONE in 1 year:
1.1 BILLION TONS
And just in case you’re actually interested (you're not) Thats -
7 BILLION TONS OF COAL BURNED WORLDWIDE EACH YEAR
Yeah. Try and tell me how bad rare materials mining is again Marl. Go on. Seriously go ahead.
Imagine your dream came through and all cars were electric and houses would have batteries too, like they tried in Germany. Now, that would be environmental catastrophe but it will not happen because there is not enough lithium on this planet, so snap out of it.
I am a bit sentimental about coal because my grandparents survived the war thanks to it. The whole country had infrastructure completely destroyed yet every house had a coal furnace and a stove and people survived without any help from the non existent state for five years. One horse wagon of coal in the basement that's all you needed to survive the winter. When I was a kid my grandparents still used coal because they were used to it. I remember that even the food prepared on a coal stove tasted better like it was massaged into perfection by slow and steady burning coal. So you can't make me hate coal. I know this new generation doesn't get any of this, maybe except the survivalist types. Maybe when we go full renewables utopia and power goes off and you start burning furniture to stay warm (happened in England) maybe then you gonna go, hm is there something better to burn before I destroy my lazy boy.
Anyways enough nostalgia, coal is getting replaced by gas, making US a leader in reducing emissions by pure market forces, sounds like a winner to me.
I get that, I really do. I grew up in a home that burned 8 cords of firewood every winter, and there is nothing like it. Many people here still had coal stoves, since the less pure coal / tailings was (and still is) laying around discarded in piles and you could literally just back your truck up to it and load up.
My coal reduction dream does not necessarily use batteries at all. Im sure you’re familiar with solar/wind systems that feed directly into the grid with no batteries. The coal / gas plants stay, but are supplemented heavily by the renewables. Batteries are eliminated from the equation, we keep all the modern conveniences, and burn / mine a fraction of the currently insane volume of coal.
I am not a complete fossil fuel hating extremist, but a reductionist.
As for off grid locations my experience is this:
I have an off the grid cabin with a solar system that produces a surprising amount of power given the investment, and uses good old fashioned lead acid batteries, which have been happily chugging along for 10 years or so. When they die they will get recycled easily and economically.
I was skeptical at first but its pretty awesome and the longevity of the system is solid. The output from the panels themselves has, so far, not changed.
I too am nostalgic, but in my case it is for the trout streams I fished as a kid for a special and healthy meal that are now acidic and dead (as if there weren’t enough dead streams already), for public state owned lands I used to hunt deer and grouse on that now are covered in new roads to drilling pads with limited or no public access. At least the roads to the wind farms are generally open and dont have heavy truck traffic on them as the gas pads do.