Jay, my point was that the possibilities of using the meager, intermittent energy available from renewables to help power a steel plant are akin to those of helping to power a cruise ship by handing out paddles to its passengers. They're insignificant - yet solar and wind are exactly the sources receiving the lion's share of funding in Joe Biden's Green New Deal.

There are no steel plants in Ohio or Pennsylvania which could sacrifice the reliability of nuclear energy, natural gas, or coal and remain profitable. So if Biden really wants to enable Green New Steel in the U.S., he would support legislation favored by Joe Manchin - a zero-emission credit to help keep nuclear plants open. But he isn't, and I suspect the American Petroleum Institute been lobbying in DC as they are in Ohio and Pennsylvania - hoping the renewables / paddles-for-passengers meme might help replace nuclear with gas plants.

I see you're associated with Rocky Mountain Institute, and I was curious: is Amory Lovins still doing six-figure consulting work for Chevron and other oil majors? He used to list payments as donations on RMI's taxes, but the IRS probably figured there was some quid pro quo going on.

Some more info on this subject:

Currently about 67% of the steel produced in US is at plants utilizing EAFs - Electric Arc furnaces. This share will continue to grow.

As for using solar to lower the CO2 from steelmaking ... well of course the mill is hooked up to grid so the CO2 from the mill would need to be calculated based on the CO2 of the grid at time of production.

What kind of solar farm could provide that much energy each year?  

Pretty much any large sized solar project can provide an equivalent amount of electricity to a minimill's annual electricity consumption.

The updated EVRAZ plant in Colorado is a great example. 

Bighorn solar project is a 300MW solar farm being developed in Colorado, US. It is set to be the largest on-site solar project in the country.

The Bighorn solar project is being built on 728ha of land on the EVRAZ Rocky Mountain steel property in the city of Pueblo in Colorado. It will produce 300MW of direct current (DC) and 240MW of alternating current (AC).

The solar farm will produce 613,400 megawatt-hours of energy a year, offsetting approximately 90% of the steel mill’s annual electricity demand.

Note that this plant is being built onsite.

Going forward in the 2020s we will see more EAF minimills in the US signing low-cost PPAs with renewable energy and locating in states with lower carbon grids.