Hacker News Reader

Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

There are no "increasingly rare components".

So, no, it is not any sort of legitimate question. It is, rather, concern trolling.

My guess is he's talking about Lithium and if so that's not concern trolling, Lithium mining is very expensive and if we want to go full renewable we'll need some major storage capacity. There's obviously ways around that, hydro storage being the most obvious, but it is something to think about.

The question was too vague to guess what it was about, if anything. It presupposes there is some resource used for renewables that is scarce and for which there is no viable substitute. Without identifying any, it is just trolling: there must be trouble somewhere, what can you come up with for me to carp about?

Lithium is about electric cars, not about renewable energy production.

To the popular imagination, it is easy to make a popular misconception linking renewable energy to rare earth minerals, because for good or for ill electric cars are a dominant facet of green technology. There is a not uncommon narrative that "electric cars are actually bad for the environment because they require scarce metals." News stories abound.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-metals-autos-neodymium-an...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2022/02/06/the-f...

Rude pedantic ill-tempered dismissals of conversation as "carping" discredit a good cause more than a thousand fusion startups do. Perhaps if you want to win hearts and minds, engaging in both education and a little empathy would do wonders for your position. And to the betterment of the discourse hereabouts.

"Rare-earth" metals, are not, in fact, scarce. Insisting otherwise is misinformed at best, or disingenuous in your case, because you have already been told otherwise.

I am misinformed. But you are impolite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com