Apple CEO Tim Cook on creating a clean energy future
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Seems hard to believe the heat it generates actually warms the planet.
Many recent nuclear plants come online years late and many billions over budget. So he'd have a good point.
I'm all for keeping existing nuclear plants online, but I don't think building new ones is the right decision.
Also, yes, there are viable green hydrogen plants being built today: https://totalenergies.com/media/news/press-releases/total-an... . Also, France is likely to lead in this area because they just got hydrogen produced with nuclear to be considered "green", which is a great thing in my opinion.
Different forms of energy generation serve different purposes. I hope you can see why comparing nominal prices of solar panel installations vs a nuclear power plant is misguided. The latter can take you through a tough winter, the former cannot. Renewables are great, let's keep building them. For the times where they cannot help us, we can then choose to use a technology that is costly in dollars (nuclear) or lives (gas/oil/coal).
Nuclear has huge up front capital costs, which makes building new plants a non-starter if it is believed that other storage options (including batteries and things like green hydrogen) will be cheaper before the lifespan of a power plant can essentially recoup its large up front costs.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble but nuclear has an absolutely terrible track record. Compared to the things you dismiss that are currently running circles around nuclear in terms of cost, GW delivered, etc. It's outpacing nuclear every year more and more.
If somebody figures out how to do nuclear 10-20 times cheaper and faster, I'm all for it. But so far that doesn't exist.
1) Can be deployed at scale (ie, can cover for up to at least 10% of the world's energy needs) 2) Costs less than nuclear 3) Is cleaner than nuclear 4) Is not hydro
Nuclear is not a replacement for renewables. It does not have to compete in price with them. It is, however, our only viable alternative TODAY for base load needs, which obviously cannot be reliably supplied only with renewables.
That has never happened once in the last 30 years. The wind is always blowing somewhere. There have been times without both sun and wind in every single European country, but there has never been a time without both sun and wind across the entire continent, as long as you include the North Sea as part of the continent.
Sure. With enough power in places that we can reliably use it as our base load energy source? No. If you disagree with that, please point out an existing grid that is based on that assumption, or that is being built relying on such an assumption.
Not even France can supply its baseload with existing nuclear so why are my goalposts different than yours?
I am not moving any goalposts here. You have failed to answer my direct question, however: how do you propose a distributed grid would work without nuclear energy?
If the wind is always blowing somewhere within the grid, yes you can.
Adding storage makes it cheaper, but it's not a necessary part of the design.
Renewables plus batteries have no such issues. Imagine you want to equip your house: batteries for 24h and enough PV to handle the worst day of the year (a cloudy winter day). Done, you have 100% renewable 24/7. Super reliable. Want more reliability? Add more PV, more batteries.
Since nuclear had lost the battle of the costs, they invent nonsense rationale to try to save their industry.
These are of course not hypothetical fantasy projects that may or may not happen but actual panels on the ground or spinning wind turbines delivering lots of power to grids today.
It's well proven technology. Clean, cheap, predictable in performance and installation cost, etc. Sort of the opposite of nuclear where every new plant is a bespoke thing that is all but guaranteed to blow through it's time and cost budgets. We can speculate on why that is but the fact is that there just isn't a whole lot of nuclear capacity coming online. Which is perhaps part of the reason why it is proving so expensive and hard to build more of it. You might even say it has perpetual issues proving, or rather disproving, it's viability in recent decades.
Whatever the reason, renewables are now dominant in newly installed capacity. These don't need more viability studies. That happened years ago. Renewables are now well on their way to being the dominant source of energy in a lot of markets. In some markets it already is. 10% would be a a distinctly unambitious goal. 50% is a more ambitious goal that could be reached in a decade or so. This decade possibly. With nuclear, that amount of contribution is unthinkable. The cost would be astronomical and there are no concrete plans to make that happen. The budgets for that don't exist. All we have is a lot of magical and wishful thinking.
Also, base load is a very loosely defined notion that somehow never gets nailed down to actual GW of capacity or GWH of storage needed. Can you be specific? The reality is that the only western nation plagued by rolling blackouts is the US, which has a lot of aging nuclear plants and is a bit behind on investments in infrastructure. In places with a much higher dependence on renewables, more modern infrastructure, and less nuclear (like essentially most of Northern Europe) blackouts are basically not a thing.
And of course nuclear sometimes goes offline for maintenance and that can take up significant amounts of time. When it does, it's gone for months or longer.. France is a good recent example that had a large portion of their reactors offline for maintenance just when there was a big energy crisis on courtesy of Russia. Where did their base load come from? Imported energy. France was a net electricity importer during 2022 because of this. 16wth or so. Only about 4% of it's needs; but still. They managed fine. The European grid has a lot of resilience. What grew massively during this period? Renewable energy production.
An energy grid must have a capacity to produce a given amount of energy over a certain period of time reliably, and this is called the base load. The capacity varies according to the region or grid - for example, for Europe you can find the average amount of energy consumed here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
We cannot use renewables for that, because they can be unreliable. Even if we saturated Europe's most suitable spots with solar panes and wind turbines, there will be days in which not enough energy would be produced in this scenario. Energy production from renewables is also seasonal, obviously. Therefore, you need a stable energy source that you can use to accommodate for that.
So, your alternatives for when that happens are essentially nuclear or carbon-based power plants. The latter are heavily favored at the moment, as you can see in the link above. They are currently what Europe largely relies on as a reliable energy source generator. Therefore, nuclear is the only existing alternative to oil/gas/coal.
I would appreciate if you read my comments carefully and realize that I am not arguing against renewables, so you can save your lectures for someone else. I am merely pointing out that renewables are not a solution for a reliable grid without another energy source, and that every alternative people like to cite to nuclear in this scenario (batteries, hydrogen, you name it) are currently not viable.
* fuel sources are finite ( non-renewable )
* disposal of waste is an issue.
* safety concerns makes building very costly ( have to be built to withstand an attack - not just an accident )
* nuclear energy is too adjacent to nuclear weapons for it to be a global solution.
Current nuclear tech is a transitional technology - important for providing base-load, until better storage & better distributed grids are put in place.
Yup, but the reality so sucks that we don't have alternatives proved to be effective in scale. We don't even have renewable energy that is eco-friendly through out its whole life cycle, just yet. Recycling tech is not catching up fast enough.
On the positive side - battery technologies [1] are still improving fast, there is lots that could be done on the energy efficiency side.
While big central powerstations are always going to be needed, I think the future will be more distributed generation and storage than today.
We don't actually have a problem with lack of energy - the problem is capture, storage and distribution.
[1] We need to think beyond just batteries for storage of course.
I do a full charge every two or three days.
How did we circle around to using more material as an impact-reducing measure?
It should be fairly simple to see how a slightly larger input up front could result in less maintenance over time.
Heavier phones hit the ground with more momentum. Moreover, how many people throw away—not sell or trade in—their phones because of battery alone? Given the ease of replacing iPhone batteries, I’d guess it’s minimal.
The only thing more battery grants in scale is on the packaging and microcontroller. Compare that to the excess material, on account of folks charging their phone every day (switching from daily to every-third-day charging is unlikely a meaningful behavioural update), and you see the net waste. Particularly when heavy users can be segmented to with external battery packs. (Which don’t add the momentum tax.)
It could help. But proposing using more material use in an environmental discussion without thought to its trade-offs isn’t serious debate.
At least something...
I bet no one ever thinks that!
We don’t have new gaming consoles every year, with iPhones being just as locked down, we could have new ones coming out every few years.
For Apple devices especially, this is incentivized by the culture around them - a lot of folks just want the newest.
Update the technology on a regular basis as everyone is on a different purchasing cycle.
I guess cars are the same. If you walked into a dealership and all the models had been released 2 years previous you might feel like you shouldn't be paying full price even though you are getting a brand new car.
Arbitrarily lengthening release cycles like this is performative. Particularly in high tech. Doubly so in a category that’s reducing its energy and material footprint.
Consider if we did this for cars. New model once a decade. This would be horrible for fuel economies. To say nothing about safety and EVs.
Based on what evidence?
It will get resold and reused.
Most people don't upgrade every year, but those that do, typically have a still very good condition and usable second hand device to sell or hand down to another friend/co-worker/etc - that same person would otherwise just have to have bought a new device. So on net, no difference.
I'm sure there are some people that both upgrade needlessly and just let them collect dust but I can't see it being a significant percentage?
(This is coming from someone who had every iPhone from the 3G through to the X on Day 1, though now I am going from a 12 Pro Max to a 15 Pro max :)
I don't upgrade every year and still was able to turn in my previous phone for some hundred bucks so far
> This past week Apple announced its first totally carbon-neutral product, its new Apple watch
I'd be happy if Apple announced an acid-neutral project (not counting other carcinogenic materials used to produce every single component in that device). Plants (even animals and, to some extent, people) can neutralize carbon compounds, but those acids can't.
And let me not start with all the necessary mining and production pollution for batteries and other components no one talks about.
If anything, the Apple products I had held their value much better than their Wintel counterparts. Writing this on a MacBook Pro from 2017 for example.
Let's be honest - in terms of reliability, it is very hard to out-compete Apple. What leads you to say they produce substandard products?