Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway189262 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway189262

Construction material is a meaningless metric. If you compare coal or gas plants you need to consider the materials they consume and infrastructure needed for fuel transport. This is a big number, many times the material used for the plant itself.

The only meaningful comparison is material used vs solar. Once these things are built they use near zero resources. For everything else you have to keep mining shitloads of material forever.

How much coal do we have to mine for coal plants? How many gas wells and pipelines for gas plants? What about transport? How much does it take to mine and process all the uranium into fissile isotopes for nuclear?

With wind and solar you plop the thing in a field and get years, maybe decades of energy with no input.

I'm convinced that all these land use and building materials costs studies are just FUD funded by the fossil fuel industry.

Sorry but you don't get to discount wind turbines' ecological damage just because no more mining is involved post-construction.

It does far less damage than any other source of power. Unlike solar, it uses no space. Unlike fossil fuel and nuclear, it uses no continuous inputs.

Coal and gas plants use many times their weight in materials for a lifetime of operation. Nuclear probably does too because the massive waste involve in uranium refining.

What do you suggest as a greener power source than wind?

> Unlike wind, it uses no space.

Unlike solar?

Lol yeah

Please link to a source/calculation where a wind turbine uses more resources than a coal plant to build. I mean, you can even do napkin math and see that there’s no way multiple buildings and vast mining infrastructure take less material than a turbine farm.

If you want to take a coal plant, you have to compare it with something that's comparable.

A coal plant is a 1000MW machinery. A wind turbine is in the order of 10MW. Also, turbines have a very low capacity factor so you have to double them to guarantee their output and combine them with storage. So it's 1 coal plant vs 200 turbines at the very least.

But coal plants use an absurd amount of coal and everything they don't burn ends up as ash.

And have you been close to a big coal plant? They're massive. A coal plant probably used more land than 200 turbines and unlike turbines the land is unusable.

Coal plants use many times their mass in coal during their lifetime. If you're looking at total materials needed over the lifetime of the plant, I wouldn't be surprised if coal was 100X higher than 200 turbines.

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