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Comment by abdellah123 | Hacker News Reader

This is utterly nonesense. Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions? And what about those batteries?!

Last week, the battery for my cordless vaccum cleaner went flat. And to my surprise it costs half the price of the vaccum cleaner. But a bigger surprise was that they stopped making it ... even in China!

So I need to actually "buy" a new vaccum cleaner. But this time I learnt the lesson, and I like cords now !

Back to the point on electric cars, electricity pollutes, battery production (mining the materials) and lifespan (throwing old batteries) pollutes the environment. So I don't see any point in that ...

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> Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions?

I mean, yes, that is clearly the plan. A substantial proportion of EU energy usage is carbon-neutral already, and the current plan is that all coal & oil power plants will be closed entirely before 2040.

You can see current energy sources live on https://app.electricitymaps.com/ - even countries like Germany & Poland (famously fossil fuel keen) currently use 63% / 47% fully renewable energy today, and at the other end of the spectrum there's Iceland (100% renewable), Sweden (100% renewable + nuclear), Norway (98%), France (93%), Spain (86%) etc.

Not 100% yet, but heading in a good direction. There are of course other challenges, but on this specific point: I think it's clearly possible for the EU to get to a 100% renewable/nuclear grid by 2035 if they continue on the current trajectory.

thanks for the link. This is interesting.

By carbon free, do they actually mean e2e energy production? Do they include mining for the material needed to make the turbins, the batteries and the impact of throwing the batteries afterwards? ...

This is a very well studied topic. Here's a good intro, for wind turbines specifically: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/06/whats-the-carbon-...

In short, despite those costs, over the entire lifetime of the wind turbine this adds up to 5 - 26g of CO2 per kWh, as opposed to 437 - 758g (for gas) or 675 - 1689g (for coal).

So yes, it's not literally _zero_ CO2, but it is a 97.4% / 98.7% reduction in CO2 compared to gas/coal respectively. The same applies to most other similar questions: yes, there are lots of small non-zero factors, and it would be great to minimize those, but they're dwarfed by the massive emissions of the current approach.

The end goal here is _net_ zero, not strictly zero emissions output. Although there will still be some emissions there, they will be far far lower than today, and the remaining emissions are intended to be offset through all sorts of measures like increasing greenery, emission improvements in those production steps themselves, direct carbon capture, etc etc etc.

> Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions?

There's multiple ways deployed on a mass-scale, and hopefully by 2035 those will provide the vast majority of electricity. So yes.

CO2 emissions are one way of polluting the environment. Nuclear trash is another. Is there a way of producing enough energy without pollution?

Not all pollution is created equal. Small amounts of nuclear waste stored in concentrated isolated locations doesn't impact anyone, meanwhile CO2 pollution is impacting the whole world extremely negatively.

> Is there a way of producing enough energy without pollution

Can't think of a single energy generation method that doesn't result in at least some pollution from raw material extraction, byproducts or remains after the end of the lifecycle. Maybe geothermal, but I don't know what goes in a geothermal plant.

Wind, water, solar, geothermal energy…

Producing isn't actually enough, let's talk about the full cycle. Even if you produce it cleanly, you'll need to store it + production of the turbins ...

And battery production (and mining for materials) pollutes the environment as well.

So let's not compare only parts of the system ... let's be real here

Most of these things are one time investments (plus maintenance), which you need for non-renewable energies just as well (and one might argue that building oil rigs and refineries and transporting the fuel is more CO2 intensive than windmills and power cables).

People are already working on all of those things.

Even with coal electricity, electric cars have lower total-lifetime CO2 emissions.

Also, the more low-hanging fruit we fix, the more time we have left for the hard stuff.

Yes electric cars produce C02 but its less (arguably 1/6) than petroleum cars. Electric cars are actually driving the research into recycling batteries.

> Do you produce electricity without CO2 emissions?

Not yet, but just because switching to EVs is not a sufficient step towards CO2 neutrality doesn't mean it's not a necessary step.

Who said that batteries are the only way of energy storage. Hydrogen is discussed because of that. And yes, energy production also need to switch to reach CO2 emission goals.

It's more efficient to charge a battery and drive with an electric motor than use electricity to create hydrogen and use that to drive a car. Hydrogen might become useful for things like planes, where electric isn't good enough yet.

If you span some ten-thousand solar panels in e.g. Northern Africa your problem is not the loss of energy because you have far too much green energy. Same is true for nearly all summer months when it comes to photovoltaic on the roofs of houses. There is too much of it.

in its e2e cycle, does it not pollute the environment in any way?

in theory it extract O2 from the air and produces H2O (otherwise known as water). But the devil is in the details. Also, green energy is mostly photovoltaic/wind ... so panel/wing environment costs and transport costs factor in.

> So I need to actually "buy" a new vaccum cleaner. But this time I learnt the lesson, and I like cords now !

I had the same problem, but I decided to buy a diesel-powered vacuum cleaner.

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