by luqtas | 2025-12-15 22:18:22+00:00
> not sure if you mean buried or burned, but wind turbines are already being recycled and reused in bulk, and that is ramping up (and also offtopic from solar)

it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic mindlessly just because we can recycle it 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256

> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the... ¶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1

> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we compass the decentralized nature of wind and solar generation? there's a high cost of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and if done through roads, will contribute much more to their actual state of the worst offender of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide. i will just point some papers on the problem of recycling vehicle batteries (which is so small on scale compared to what we are discussing); https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/11/3/94 ¶ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... ¶ https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/21_ma...

> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene... ¶ https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul... ¶ https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...

> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested millions USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for the whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and trusting "green technology news headlines" than actually evaluating everything with skepticism

i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. that's why i don't even have a driver license. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India