by yurisagalov on 12/1/20, 3:11 PM with 624 comments
by rossdavidh on 12/3/20, 12:09 AM
Now, instead of rooting for that change, we can think about the actual consequences. It's inevitable; fossil fuels are on the way out. What does that mean, besides lower carbon?
It means that countries which rely on fossil fuels for their economy, are going to see the same kind of crushing economic decline that, say, the UK coal industry has.
What do you suppose happens when, for example, Saudi Arabia can no longer feed itself? It just peacefully and gently starves to death?
To be clear, I'm not saying we should somehow try to prevent fossil fuels exiting the scene. The change in energy sources to lower-carbon ones is an old one, and there's no way to stop it, nor should we try. Wood gave way to coal and then oil and then natural gas, and the process will continue with zero-carbon sources like photovoltaics. That's a bullet that's already been fired, and there's no way to stuff it back inside the barrel of the gun.
But, do we really have a plan for the consequences, not only in Saudi Arabia but also every other nation that's dependent on oil? Hint: we do not.
by jhallenworld on 12/3/20, 1:00 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfNgF0WTeCM
Or grinding wheat:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G2evJOiU9I
The comments in these video are all about how much does it cost, what is your contact number, etc. Clearly this is a sea-change.
Also amazing that they all have cell phones :-)
The old system included 80+ year old hand-started diesel engines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZuqT7dgM08
These are very cool, but solar requires less man-power.
by mrfusion on 12/3/20, 12:48 AM
I think if we had variable pricing that matched the availability of renewables, consumers would shift quickly.
Say something like power costs .02/kWh while the sun is shining and .30 when it’s not.
I’d charge my car at work. I’d put a timer on my dryer to turn on at 10am. They probably come out with a hot water heater that goes really hot during the day and coasts through the night. Same idea for your freezer.
Heck I’d even blast my AC to ten degrees below where I want it during the day and then ride out the night.
by gandalfian on 12/2/20, 10:10 PM
by sxates on 12/2/20, 11:53 PM
In 2017 my 6kw system cost $24,000 before any incentives (by SolarCity).
In 2020 my 7.8kw system cost $15,000 before any incentives (by Tesla).
Of that $15k, $4.3k was for the panels themselves, $2k for the inverter, $1k for mounting hardware, and $8k for installation.
It's pretty shocking to me that in just 3 years the price per watt was basically halved, all in. Because looking at the breakdown, half the cost is in installation and presumably marketing and sales costs. Even if the panels themselves cost half as much, it would be a relatively small decrease in the total cost of the system.
I wonder what the practical bottom is - even if the panels were free, there's a floor on the labor cost.
by bregma on 12/2/20, 9:15 PM
by qPM9l3XJrF on 12/3/20, 1:35 PM
>Our hardest climate problems – the ones that are both large and lack obvious solutions – are agriculture (and deforestation – its major side effect) and industry. Together these are 45% of global carbon emissions. And solutions are scarce.
>Agriculture and land use account for 24% of all human emissions. That’s nearly as much as electricity, and twice as much all the world’s passenger cars combined.
>Industry – steel, cement, and manufacturing – account for 21% of human emissions – one and a half times as much as all the world’s cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes combined.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america...
We need to start putting just as much research effort into these areas as went into renewables.
by km3r on 12/2/20, 9:48 PM
Just as rapidly changing CPU and internet speeds changed the world over the past few decades, so too will an energy revolution. I look forward to this new world and how we can use the innovations to solve todays problems.
by albertop on 12/2/20, 9:08 PM
by ncmncm on 12/3/20, 9:11 AM
Electric vehicles convert power to motion several times as efficiently as internal-combustion equipment (except ships and aircraft), so much less total energy is needed to move the same mass of (especially) people and cars. This is most immediately visible in the current usefulness of electric scooters.
(Big ships are already 70+% efficient, so there is less room for improvement. Small aircraft can claim benefits similar to cars, but airliners will suffer losses converting to (e.g.) LH2 or LCH4, and/or after the electric motors have worked; but there is still room for some improvement.)
Similarly, and surprisingly to many, the same applies to building heating systems, where better than 300% efficiency of heat pumps means that 1 kW of electric power produces 3+ kW of warm air. (The extra 2 kW comes from outside air.
So, today, while we still get more than 80% of raw energy from petroleum, renewables driving electric systems already have reduced that to 60% of actual delivered service.
by 99_00 on 12/2/20, 9:21 PM
Does lazard include subsidies in their numbers or not? I can't figure it out.
I'm having trouble making sense of the lazard report, but to me it seems that it does, and ourworldindata.org is using their numbers while claiming they are without subsidies.
by BurningFrog on 12/2/20, 3:20 PM
Since the power plant replacement cycle is much slower than for phones, it will take a while to propagate the shift, but it is already inevitable.
by _carbyau_ on 12/3/20, 12:58 AM
Australian government approach is largely to subsidize homeowners to put solar panels on their roof. (They do do other things too! But billions in home owner subsidies...) The main incentive of course is they then have cheaper power bills for not much outlay.
If you rent, nearly nothing. You'd have to have a generous landlord or luck out on a house someone has already done and then moved from. The latter will admittedly will become more common over time.
If you live in an apartment, nearly nothing. While it is technically possible to put solar on the roof the extra complications of body corporate make it largely a non-starter. Besides, in truely large apartment buildings the roof top space is tiny compared to the number of apartments so the benefit is minimal anyway.
So for now, only standalone homeowners get this benefit. And while I am not sure, I suspect reducing homeowners customer costs shifts the cost burden for the grid slightly more to others.
I just want the government to fund society wide infrastructure to benefit everyone in society...
by biren34 on 12/3/20, 4:33 AM
1. The marginal cost per kWh is calculated based on amortizing upfront costs over 20+ years, and those schedules have often proven to be quite optimistic.
2. The marginal cost per kWh is only a small piece of the puzzle when it comes to intermittent power sources.
The proper cost needs to attribute the cost of matching supply and demand. The supposedly easy answer is storage, but storing electricity is hard. Grid scale batteries are quite expensive and general deployment would cause a very real spike in the cost the raw materials. With proper accounting, the cost of renewables are not cheap at all, as proven by Germany and California.
3. The renewables industry likes to downplay the sheer volume of fossil fuels required to manufacture the parts. The energy ROI on this is quite poor, and in many cases, we would have been better off skipping the intermediate step and burning the oil and gas directly.
by ed25519FUUU on 12/2/20, 9:34 PM
I personally don't believe batteries are going to do it. The world needs too many batteries. They're an important part but they aren't going to cut it, especially not fast enough.
The kind of power we need starts with an "N".
1. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
by marshray on 12/2/20, 9:18 PM
This is the thing our great-grandkids will ask us about. ("were you alive back when?")
Millenia from now, historians will not talk so much about the commercialization of electric power. They will divide time between the "pre-industrial" and "post-solar" eras, because that's what will be visible in the fossil layers.
by jamez1 on 12/2/20, 10:37 PM
https://www.pv-tech.org/news/wacker-chemie-blames-chinas-pol...
by kokey on 12/3/20, 11:16 AM
by tommilukkarinen on 12/3/20, 6:59 AM
by JoeAltmaier on 12/3/20, 2:41 PM
by peter303 on 12/3/20, 2:00 AM
by killjoywashere on 12/3/20, 6:15 AM
by throwaway12319 on 12/2/20, 11:19 PM
It completely ignores the LONG-TERM risk for human survival: catastrophic release of large quantities of active fuel or waste (due to events like war, terrorism, natural disasters).
by jillesvangurp on 12/3/20, 4:07 AM
What's more interesting is what is going to happen next: they prices going to be an order of magnitude cheaper; and then another one. And this is going to happen quickly. And unless something changes, it's happening on a predictable timeline even. Investors and policy makers are already taking decisions based on this.
The effects of a two orders of magnitude change in pricing are both easy and hard to predict. The easy part is predicting that we will not merely use renewables to replace non renewables. Or put differently, an order of magnitude change in price will be paired with an order of magnitude increase in demand. The world electricity right now is a bit over 30 PWH (peta watt hour) per year, give or take. Normal linear growth would probably get us to 50-100PHW in a couple of decades. However, orders of magnitude changes in prices (10x, 100X, 1000X) could put us on a different path where we are producing hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of PWH of electricity. Like this half of this century.
People worried about storage: Elon Musk is building TWH battery factories right now. A few decades from now we might have hundreds or thousands such factories: enough battery production to store current electricity production for about a year every year. And bear in mind that batteries can be used more than once. A single TWH worth of batteries with about 3000 cycles would store about 3PWH of energy; we only need ten such factories to get to 30PWH. Back of the envelope math is fun.
That's all easy part to predict but it may be hard for people to wrap their heads around the numbers. Exponentials are hard for people's intuitions. The only uncertainty here is how long the learning curves will apply. The most pessimistic perspective on that would be that thousands of R&D projects, startups, research institutes are going to fail 100% starting right now and the learning curves will flat line completely and immediately. Any other perspective means that 10x is 100% certain to happen in 15-20 years and 100x would be extremely likely by 2060 or so. I hope to still be around by then. I could be off by an order of magnitude (both ways) and basically the only change would be the years in this paragraph would change a little.
The hard part is predicting what we'll actually do with this energy. There's no shortage of interesting applications that are essentially cost bottle-necked on energy. Synthetic fuels, clean water, heavy industry, transport, mass transit, etc. all benefit from orders of magnitude changes in pricing for energy. This is a massive economic opportunity.
What that also means is that the learning curves this article talks about will start impacting the cost of things that currently don't have them. Including most of our legacy fossil energy infrastructure. A gas plant burning fossil methane doesn't benefit from this learning curve. The same plant burning methane produced from thin air using excess solar/wind does: that becomes cheaper to operate as the price of solar/wind drops.
Current fossil fuel energy consumption is going to be a rounding error when you consider the demand increase fueled by a 100x drop in electricity prices. Eventually, fossil fuel is going to be beyond irrelevant as we'll literally be able to synthesize the entire current demand for that orders of magnitude cheaper than current prices. All forms of fossil fuel exploitation will grind to a halt because of that. That's good news.
by mike_n on 12/3/20, 2:14 PM
And so it goes, a nice virtuous cycle of competition, some subsidies to help a nascent industry, decent deal economics for investors and early adopters, and manufacturing scale-up.
by skocznymroczny on 12/3/20, 8:19 AM
by mikewarot on 12/2/20, 2:07 PM
by konjin on 12/2/20, 11:04 PM
Saying renewables are cheap when it's sunny or windy is like saying coal is cheap at the mine.
For some reason people realize that distance in space is a problem. But distance in time is something that we can't wrap our heads around.
It would cost trillions to build up enough storage capacity in the grid to time shift the power needed, or to build a grid capable of moving power between regions on the scale of continents.