I don’t doubt that the return on investment for solar and wind will continue to improve relative to fossil fuels when used for electricity generation, but the problem seems to be, again, the manufacture of infrastructure such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and so on, which require energy-intensive mining and refining of minerals. Unless every stage of the manufacturing process can be electrified, the efficiency of generating electricity using wind and solar won’t matter in the slightest, as there will be no way to use that electricity to eventually recycle/replace the existing wind/solar infrastructure, let alone to deploy more of it or to do either of these while maintaining the high energy return on energy invested.

To be clear, I don’t want solar/wind/etc to be dependent on fossil fuels at all, and so I would be interested to read an explanation of how these (or other) clean energy technologies can be deployed without using fossil fuels at any stage of the process. The problem presented in the article seems to be that such technologies currently do depend upon the use of coal, and I posted the article here with the idea that it might get people to start thinking about potential solutions to this problem, not to suggest that the deployment of clean energy technologies is not worthwhile.

Realistically, even if photovoltaic panels and wind turbines can be recycled 100% efficiently, the supply of energy from these sources at any given time will still have an upper limit based on the finite supply of the minerals required for these technologies, so people cannot continue to increase their energy consumption indefinitely even from “renewable” sources. But that’s a separate problem.

Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.

It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…

Remove all of the grass, let it bake in the sun until it dies, and then mulch with the dead grass. Living grass will suck your garden dry of nutrients in a time short compared to 20-30 years.

While that sounds like an interesting project, I’m not trying to invest a lot of time and effort into this. The grass won’t stop growing back while I figure it out.

Even Trump already did, sort of.

That would be nice.

Is your summer long enough for that? It needs very warm, like coastal SE Asia warm. Otherwise it doesn’t grow much, so as a leaf crop, it isn’t worth it. (I grew it years ago, and though I live in a place warm enough for durian, this never did very well.)

Water spinach as in Ipomoea aquatica?

That makes sense. Thanks. I’ll have a look at that list.

Definitely not.

I don’t know who “owns” the land, but no humans live there. They haven’t planted the grass yet, but that seems most likely since that’s what people do around here. The grass would most likely be for cattle pasture, though some people also plant maize for pig/chicken feed for a year or two before converting to pasture.

I had planted various fruit trees in the gaps of a nearby secondary forest that had been logged over years ago, and they were really growing well. Mainly jackfruit, engkala, pulasan, and a few smaller native fruit trees and shrubs where there wasn’t as much space. Yesterday some people came and clear-cut that entire patch of forest (probably to plant grass), and there is now no sign that the fruit trees were ever there. The birds who used to perch in the trees over there seem very upset. Fortunately whoever cut down the forest hasn’t been able to burn it yet due to all the rain, but it’s only a matter of time.

I harvested 5 big jackfruits yesterday though, and I also recently received seeds of a strange funky fruit from a friend in the Amazon. We have no idea what it is, and Jim West can’t tell from the photos that my friend sent to him either. There was a delay in getting the seeds here, but I stuck them in some soil two days ago, and they are already starting to sprout, so they seem like survivors!

If anyone knows what this is, please don’t hesitate to comment.

I don’t want to run Openwrt or Tomato precisely because they include non-free firmware blobs in order to support the ac/ax WiFi chipsets, and I don’t want to spend the time and effort figuring out how to remove those when the developers of libreCMC have already done that.

I do not want non-free firmware, such as for the ac/ax WiFi, installed on the device.

I don’t want to run Openwrt or Tomato precisely because they include non-free firmware blobs in order to support the ac/ax WiFi chipsets, and I don’t want to spend the time and effort figuring out how to remove those when the developers of libreCMC have already done that.

basically any other router

And what would make a particular model the exception to this?

I have a laptop that I use at the desk next to where I will put the router, and any network-attached storage will also be right there next to the router, so I have no need for WiFi. It’s fine if the WiFi could work of course, but I wouldn’t use it, and I imagine that many routers would be 100% compatible with libreCMC if not for the WiFi requiring non-free firmware. What I want to know is which routers these are that don’t require any non-free firmware for any of the hardware other than the WLAN.

No need, and it’s just easier to secure that way.

®

Nope.