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More accurately NOT switching to "renewables". They haven't. They had a promise that someday they would be all solar/wind/whatever, stuff mislabeled as "renewable". Which was an impossible promise. "renewable" is misused when talking about solar, wind. Driven by the sun, we can call these abundant and perpetual, because our use of it does not appreciably alter the available supply and the sun will be around for as long as we care. But we can not renew the sun. It will have wiped out humanity before it burns out, so there's where we get perpetual for our myopic view of time.

The "sustainable" label has some appeal, but not if you look closely at the technology. It takes a lot of finite resources to create PV and wind farms, and they have a limited lifespan. With current technologies we're not at break even. With 50+ year lifespan maybe - but still consuming resources.

Scaling down to put point of generation nearer to consumption helps efficiency and reduces recuring resource consumption. But you still have to store it to shift in time of conversion to time of use. Batteries are a tragically bad solution.

Feb 14
at
2:37 AM

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