alt Hacker NewsThis sentence really bugged me:
> A Minnesotan wind turbine shows that wind energy can produce more than just electricity.
No, it doesn't. It's just that electricity can be used to do lots of things, including splitting water as an input to ammonia production.
What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium), and the reason electrification is so important is because it allows faster replacement of fossil-fuel generation with carbon-free sources.
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Even if carbon was a complete non-issue, electrification and a greater diversity of energy sources would still have immense value.
Right. It also makes it sound like they’re not using the Haber Bosch process… but then:
> Electrolyzers are located on-site. They use wind energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
> Additionally, nitrogen gas is directly harnessed from the atmosphere using an air-separation unit.
> Hydrogen and nitrogen are combined under pressure, resulting in carbon-free ammonia fertilizer.
That sounds a lot like the Haber Bosch process to me. So they’re just saying, rather than divert excess generation to a battery, you could instead build a micro H-B plant on site to produce ammonia.
I doubt this makes any sense in the grand scheme of things as you achieve major efficiencies at scale for chemical plants. Makes more sense to just electrify existing ammonia plants and ensure they use renewable electricity sources.
The green chemistry industry is full of penny-wise pound-foolish concepts like this and it drives me absolutely nuts.
The whole article is trash.
Every sentence its own paragraph.
Every second word bold.
Who writes like that?
Is this some kind of stupid SEO/AI crawler optimization?
Just wait until you hear about the underwater turbine that can do far more than generate electricity!
https://energiesmedia.com/texas-turbine-under-water-more-tha...
Which is why I always advocate that countries should generate energy in abundance. You should have energy to waste. If you are burning fossil fuels, that should be considered a failure mode. Fossil fuels should be bottom of the barrel stuff, what you burn when you have no other options.
Otherwise, do whatever. Solar, wind, hydro, nuclear. Do everything. Do batteries. Do geothermal. Have so much energy you can waste on silly things. Diversity is good here.
> What this article shows is that nearly all of the potential "shortages" in materials on earth are really just energy shortages (with some small number of notable exceptions like helium)
You're saying freshwater shortage is really just an energy shortage?
> No, it doesn't.
Also it doesn’t need to, wind energy was used to produce things before electricity was harnessed in the first place.
Sailboats are harnessed wind energy and some 10kY old. Windmills and wind pumps were invented some time between 700 and 900.
> with some small number of notable exceptions like helium
Helium is one of the not-exceptions. Helium gets trapped in the same pockets as natural gas and we get it by separating it, which is an energy-intensive process, which in turn means that we don't do it for the vast majority of natural gas that gets extracted. If energy was cheaper then it would be viable to separate more of it.