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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

(www.newyorker.com)
353 points dmazin | 3 comments | 09 Jul 25 12:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.739s | source
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rel_ic ◴[10 Jul 25 13:39 UTC] No.44520938[source]▶
Renewable energy is great, but we're not replacing fossil fuels with it, we're just adding more energy usage. And our energy usage is destroying the environment.

Don't let these advancements in solar make you think things are getting better. We need to reduce fossil fuel usage, not just increase solar usage.

https://pocketcasts.com/podcasts/b3b696c0-226d-0137-f265-1d2...

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DrBazza ◴[10 Jul 25 14:54 UTC] No.44521802[source]▶
Can anyone point me a genuinely unbiased comparison of solar, wind, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, in a reputable scientific journal that covers all of the 'criticisms' that are raised for some but not others?

There's at least:

- creation of infrastructure

- maintenance of infrastructure

- mining/acquiring fuel

- waste fuel

- retirement of infrastructure

and then for each point:

- something like cost per MWh,

- human deaths,

- animal deaths,

- CO2 emissions

- land area usage (or land area damage)

- others???

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1. ZeroGravitas ◴[10 Jul 25 15:42 UTC] No.44522261[source]▶
Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.

What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels

https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

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2. DrBazza ◴[10 Jul 25 15:45 UTC] No.44522290[source]▶
I've looked at these before, and the charts are nice, but I feel like there's a better way of displaying the data in some sort of matrix.
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3. ZeroGravitas ◴[10 Jul 25 15:45 UTC] No.44522300[source]▶
Some of the graphs have options to switch to multiple comparisons, or to log scale and similar. They often have table formats and allow you to download the data for your own use.