/sci/ - Science & Math

B-BUT RENEWABLES ARE BETTER

Here’s where the beating really starts.
Renewables are Unreliable, expensive to maintain, aren’t as environmentally friendly as said to be and require a myriad of support in order to offset issues with intermittency (when the wind and sun goes down) and the major grid infrastructure upgrades needed to support renewables, renewables are inherently inferior to Nuclear Energy, Renewables, on top of construction and maintenance, need energy storage to solve intermittency issues, because unfortunately for most developed countries, energy demand kicks in when Renewables are teetering out of the grid, Pumped Hydro is an idea solution, but unfortunately Pumped Hydro is dependent on geography and adequate rainfall to be viable, and there are also issues with habitat lost from reservoirs and the health of water courses that may be affected by such reservoirs, that leaves batteries which bring problems of their own related to proper disposal, heavy metal contamination. Overall, need for energy storage adds another cost to supposedly superior renewables. There is also the issue of Wind and Solar having a high land footprint compared to other energy sources, Wind takes up 70.6 Acres per MW while Solar needs 43.5, all that land that could have been habitats for tortoises, farm land etc. lets compare that to Nuclear or even Coal which only take up 12.7 and 12.2 Acres per MW respectively, it’s clear Renewables are inferior in energy density compared to Nuclear.
https://strata.org/pdf/2017/footprints-info.pdf