> I think you're assuming renewable means infinite.
No, for the purpose of this dumb exercise of mine, I mean the resource we use for energy production is replenishable.
> It's not a fixed resource that we're depleting.
What I mean is that the Sun is going to exhaust its H supply. We just happen to harvest part of its output, but it's depleting itself whether we harvest it or not, so we might as well do it :shrug:.
So at our scale it looks like infinite but in the strictest sense it's a consumable that does not replenish.
Fundamentally that makes it not different from nuclear fuel (whether heavy fissile ones or hydrogen if we manage fusion someday) which as you mention are in ample supply, yet we consider them to not be renewable while the sun would be? The only difference is a) the Sun is (much) bigger thus will last (much) longer and b) we delegate fuel logistics and fusion reaction to the sun.
But then again, trees are not really renewable, they got to get energy from somewhere to grow... IOW they're essentially CHO-based solar batteries.
As I said, I was not trying to make any point, just being extremely pedantic about semantics for fun ;)
> the definition of renewable
> A renewable resource (also known as a flow resource) is a natural resource which will replenish to replace the portion depleted by usage and consumption, either through natural reproduction or other recurring processes in a finite amount of time in a human time scale. When the recovery rate of resources is unlikely to ever exceed a human time scale, these are called perpetual resources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_resource
Essentially the definition is focused on resource when it's really about time (esp. our extremely small time scale vs stellar scale). The resource in reality doesn't replenish, rather it's so huge that we can consider our usage of it well below rounding error. IOW from our very small "rounding error" human point of view it might as well be considered infinite.