Not wasting electricity is absolutely good news for the environment. At the same time, they were wasting electricity before... so I don't know about admirable, they've stopped doing something they shouldn't have been doing in the first place.
Even if the electricity were 100% generated by wind farms and solar panels, what a colossal waste of it - rather than helping humanity it goes to feed racks of millions of red hot machines to solve useless hash puzzles all day.
It's like feeding vast amounts of wood into an ever growing fleet of steam engines that just travel in circles all day, and once every 10 minutes one of the trains throws off a piece of gravel or a paint chip that humanity has decided has incredible value due to how hard it was to obtain.
I agree with your sentiment, but any unnecessary energy use is still wastage and still needs to be generated, leading to pollution, even if the carbon footprint is smaller than when using coal power plants.
It doesn’t matter where it is used up, the point is that it is unnecessary work taking a huge amount of energy, that could be used for better things. Even using up purely renewable energy makes every other industry rely more on non-renewables, so it is a lose-lose either way.
If you are generating electricity where it cannot be used, then you are causing needless environmental damage and you should almost certainly stop doing that.
The problem is that you can never remove them, we just have to replace them.
Unless we reduce our use of electricity or come up with a new source, those panels will always be there.
It will also take time for the wild life to grow back and if the the ecosystem has changed enough it won't come back the same. This isn't a problem by itself. But if Chernobyl is an example all you have to do is wait 50 years and wild life will move back in too.
I'm 100% for renewable energy, but we're making a lot of assumptions on how we're going to get rid of and recycle solar panels. That's a lot of material we have to re-process and see how much we can use and how much was consumed.
Going all electric is all good and we’ll but it in effect just pushing the pollution out somewhere else... that issue still has to be solved. Electricity doesn’t grow on trees
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