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I skipped the article but was quite taken by this comment from here : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959428

According to this article just 5% of the world’s power plants account for almost three-quarters of carbon emissions from electricity generation.

I think this may be one of the most encouraging bits of news about AGW that I’ve seen in a long time. 5% of electric power plants (about 1500 plants) is a lot, but it’s a manageable lot. This gives us a clearly defined area of attack with a very high ROI. It seems to say: if we’re going to get serious about saving ourselves, start here and go all in. The paper lists the top 10 polluting plants… unsurprisingly many of them are in China and India, but at least one is in Germany. If Germany wants to set an example, there’s where to start.

  • DBGamer@lemmy.ml
    41·
    3 years ago

    Yea… But good luck saving the Earth with just putting a giant ash cork on the biggest smoke stack you can find.

    You can’t just “pull them offline” without definitive solutions.

    Thus if we got a 1.5GigaWatts to “take out” then those 1.5GigaWatts needs to also be replaced say by ironically nuclear reactors. Because frankly that’s the only thing “as good if not better” than coal/natural fired plants. If we are to “drop in” replaces them so to speak.

    • Nasst@lemmy.ml
      11·
      3 years ago

      Is that really still the case? With the huge gain in renewable efficiency over the last decade, I’d be surprised if it was. I also heard it takes a long time from the start of construction until a nuclear plant goes online, which makes them less than ideal in a climate emergency.

      • DBGamer@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        Indeed if you want something as space dense, doesn’t requires energy storage and so forth a Nuclear Reactor is the “next centralized power plant” of the future. Short of a proper fusion reactor that is.

        There’s even reactors that are in the works attempting to rectifies or at least make nuclear reactors even more sustainable by running their waste byproducts for “another go around” dropping their half lives from thousands if not millions of years down to just years or a few decades at most.

        While I don’t think reactors are the “holy grail” of greenifying our grids I do think however they are the backbone of choice though. As compared to batteries of solar panels, turbines, battery packs, etc.