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Comment by ImJamal | Hacker News Reader

> What chips are you talking about?

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.

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No one meets the ImJamal Standard of Sovereignty. It's completely useless.

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.

The US, Canada, Russia and many other countries could be sovereign with oil and coal.

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.

So you think oil and coal doesn't use electronics?

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?

We had electricity from coal and oil prior to electronics... Or do you think we had electronics in 1900?

Why do you people argue so incessantly when you clearly don't know what you're talking about?

We did have electronics in 1900: Kirchoff's circuit laws date from 1845, the first semiconductor device (crystal detector) is from 1874 and the first vacuum tube is from 1904. What we didn't have is transistors and the miniaturization technology that gave us integrated circuits and microprocessors.

The conversation was clearly about more modern electronics since I was talking about rare earth minerals which were not used in the devices you are 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.

You were able to drill and burn oil without modern technology. These days, pretty much all those easily accessible wells are drained and the only oil left is in harder to access wells that you'd never even find without modern technology. That's why we're fracking and messing around with oil sands and building offshore oil rigs etc.

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.

If you think all those countries are ImJamal Sovereign you don't know what you're talking about.

I'm not saying they are currently sovereign, only that they could be if necessary.

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