You are being very aggressive and confrontational in your comments and people are responding in kind.

I'd disagree the fervor is religious.

I think it's more frustration. Pointing out there is a maintenance cost to infrastructure is silly and doesn't add to the discussion.

We all know materials have to be shaped into machines to extract energy.

The vagueness of your statement makes it impossible to discern any actual point outside of some broad anger/frustration packaged as humor.

Unlike the UK (which mothballed and eventually tore down its coal power stations) there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada.

Lingan Generating Station would be a typical example. Big thermal power station, built to burn local coal, realistically the transition for them is to non-coal thermal power, burning LNG or Oil, or trees or whatever else can be set on fire. If they burned trash (which isn't really a practical conversion, but it's a hypothetical) we could argue that's renewable because it's not like there won't be trash, but otherwise this is just never going to be a renewable power source.

Canada is a huge place, so I don't doubt that none those coal stations are near you (unless, I suppose, you literally live next to Lingan or a similar plant but just aren't very observant) but most of us aren't self-sufficient and so we do need to pay attention to the consequences far from us.

OP probably shouldn't have been replying to a Canada based question.

> In fact we did and we have an electric car, replaced our gas cooking top by induction, and our gas-based heating by a heat pump. Last time I boarded an airplane was in 2019 I think.

Fantastic virtue signaling. Of course totally devoid of any mention about the individuals picking raw materials for those electric car components though, since they're not "our" children.

The only thing strange is trolling comment history instead of rebutting the argument made on its own merit.

I live in a fairly arid place (Bay Area) where it rains in winter but gets quite dry and dusty in the summer. I've had rooftop solar since 2016 and have noticed that generation decreases by as much as 8-10% when the panels are covered in summer dust.

> I haven’t touched ours, they are clean and have been going fine with zero maintenance, though admittedly it’s only been a year.

> Where are you getting this maintenance schedule from?

The solar panel owner does not know the required maintenance they are now permanently responsible for. Ibid, your honor.

> I got solar panels installed two years ago

> I've washed them once.

> I'm still getting great production.

Thank you for reiterating my point.