Once you have a solar panel you can't be cut off from using it. It's not like oil where you need regular deliveries forever.
They last 25 years. Enough time to spin up domestic manufacturing if you're really paranoid.
> or you need more
Lots of countries manufacture them today.
What chips are you talking about?
Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
Electronic chips in wind turbines, hydro stations, etc.. Believe it or not but all of these use chips...
> Again, by your definition, almost no country is "sovereign" for anything. Not fossil fuels, not PV and renewables, and certainly not nuclear. It's an impossible standard but only renewables get held to it.
I am not holding renewables to it. The person I was responding to made the erroneous claim that you would be sovereign with renewables. "Renewables are cheap now and they also solve the sovereignty issue." I am just pointing out that most countries wouldn't actually have sovereignty and would still be reliant on other countries.
I am the one holding the consistent standard since I believe most countries wouldn't be sovereign regardless of them using fossil fuels, nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
Might as well go with the source of energy that pollutes the least and allows you to be import-free for the longest amount of time - solar, wind, and batteries.
China, Brazil, Russia and other countries have a lot of rare earth minerals to build electronics for turbines and other sources of power.
Australia, Canada, Russia and other countries have a decent amount of uranium.
So, yes, some countries meet the definition of energy sovereignty.
They use exactly the same stuff. Nearly all power generation is just spinning magnets, obvious exception is PV. There are no particular electronic components you need for wind turbines that you don't also need for a coal or gas fired power plant. Everything uses electronic control systems.
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?
You are able to drill and burn oil along with transmit the electricity without technology that requires rare earth minerals which are the electronics I was referring to.
We also had windmills long before we had electricity. And the west has plenty of rare earth deposits, despite the name they're not actually that rare. They're just expensive to refine and the refinement process causes a lot of pollution. China does it cheaper, polluting itself in the process and that's why we don't do it. If they were to stop giving us access to these minerals we could restart our own production. It's not just used for electronics by the way, it's also used for magnets which are a key component in electric motors/generators, so without rare earth minerals you're not generating electricity regardless of having oil.
This whole argument of yours is asinine.