- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
Source - The colors of the grids represent CO2 emissions
The title is a reference to the 2021 Texas power crisis
Source - The colors of the grids represent CO2 emissions
The title is a reference to the 2021 Texas power crisis
That’s technically true, but more a consequence of fossil fuel infrastructure peripheral to the power plant itself. Switch your rail network to full electric and use more electricity in your steel manufacturing (already the predominant modern foundry production technique), you’ll solve a big chunk of this problem.
After that you’re talking about CO2 produced by setting concrete to build the plant, and that’s functionally a push relative to any other power plant that also uses concrete (basically all of them, concrete is popular for a reason). You’re also moving well below the carbon emissions targets we need to hit by 2050, so its an efficient move.
German domestic firms were making huge margins on Russian gas imports right up until the Ukraine War broke out. That’s a big problem with fossil fuels. They’re still incredibly cheap to mine, with a lot of the cost coming via markups in the retail sector. There’s also a huge incentive to simply import PVs from countries with dirt cheap labor costs. So… mostly China with a bit of Canada thrown in there. Germans, like the Americans before them, no longer want to invest in industrial capital because it has a shit ROI. They want to invest in the FIRE and Tech Sectors, because they’ve got crazy high returns.
So more and more industrial capital keeps getting dismantled, with imports filling the gap. And nobody really seems to care about what this does to domestic security or capacity in the event of supply chain disruptions, because that’s Future Peoples problem and we’re making so much money right now.