alt Hacker News"Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage,"
Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?"
But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
Replies
> there's no significant recycling of solar panels
There will be when it’s needed in a decade or two. Right now solar farms installed recently have years to go until they’re decommissioned. There’s already processes for it.
There’s no significant recycling of solar panels because they’re still in operation and don’t need to be recycled. Turns out solar panels last decades with only minor degradation so they haven’t needed to be recycled at scale.
They’re almost entirely glass and aluminium anyway. We know how to recycle glass and aluminium.
> storage
There’s the direct answer to your question, cost of installed grid battery storage are getting cheaper by the user and it’s completely viable option at present. It’s not some vague fantasy idea like power plants in space or something, just look at California’s energy mix during peaks that in just a few years has become dominated by solar+batteries.
For longer periods of low-sun in a climate like Ireland see the other renewable options he mentioned. Plus a couple natural gas plants for fallback that can comfortably sit idle until needed.
If some combo of renewables are used 90% of the time when possible, no one is going to be mad about modern clean-burning LNG plants compared to a toxic, expensive relic of the past like coal.
Current trends make it clear the future will be renewables, grid battery storage, and however many natural gas plants are needed for reliability based on local climate (plus keeping nuclear online if you already have it). And that “future” is pretty much here already in places like California.