from Hacker News

The Energy Transition Isn’t

by mastry on 7/3/23, 12:39 AM with 28 comments

  • by woodruffw on 7/3/23, 1:43 AM

    This article is doing something weird: it's treating natural gas as an analogue for oil (and using the rise of natural gas exploitation as evidence for continued investment in other hydrocarbon sources) when natural gas is explicitly part of the US's energy transition plan.

    Is burning natural gas ideal? Absolutely not. But it's much better than burning oil or coal for electricity, and using heightened financial and generation figures for natural gas to imply that hydrocarbons as a whole aren't successfully being replaced is deeply misleading.

    (A cursory scan of this author's other posts indicates that this is a general theme of theirs.)

  • by fghorow on 7/3/23, 1:54 AM

    AVERAGE rate of renewable growth from 2004 to 2022 is less than the AVERAGE rate of growth in hydrocarbons over the same period.

    Just coincidentally, that period includes all of the boom in "unconventional" gas (i.e. fracking) which turned the US into a net gas exporter -- while only catching the tail end of the (roughly exponential?) renewable growth curve.

    Sorry, the author appears to be cherry picking here. Ask yourself, "why 2004"?

  • by sydbarrett74 on 7/3/23, 1:52 AM

    Robert Bryce has spent his entire career pooh-poohing solar and wind, and is a paid mouthpiece for the natural gas industry.

    He advocates increased fracking on public lands and a curtailing of environmental reviews.

  • by PaulDavisThe1st on 7/3/23, 1:48 AM

    (in the US) renewables overtake coal for the first time: "Wind and solar sources produced a combined 252 terawatt-hours in the first five months of 2023, compared with coal's output of 249 TWh,"

    https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/renewable-energy/wi...

  • by ahelwer on 7/3/23, 1:50 AM

    The author cites the BNEF energy transition investment trends report a few times, and I encourage everybody to flip through it. It contains many interesting facts, and you certainly have to take an extremely skewed view to arrive at the same conclusions as the author: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

    Notably, the banner fact that 2022 was the first year - ever - where global investment in renewables equalled investment in fossil fuels[1]. This was primarily championed by China, which produced one of the most astonishing graphs I've seen in recent times[2]. It entirely upended how I view leadership on this issue and what countries are taking it remotely seriously. Canada isn't even in the top 10!

    Anyway, given that - again - this is the first time ever that investment in renewables has matched investment in fossil fuels, it is not surprising that fossil fuel usage has continued to grow.

    [1] https://imgur.com/B2QBY6u

    [2] https://imgur.com/OlMAKVd

  • by megaman821 on 7/3/23, 2:25 AM

    What an odd comparison. He is comparing the primary energy from hydrocarbons, which will go through a 70-80% energy reduction before it becomes final energy, to solar and wind energy which will go through a 5-10% reduction. So even in the most favorable, cherry-picked time period hydrocarbon and renewable energy consumption grew about the same rate.
  • by jes5199 on 7/3/23, 1:46 AM

    this post is going to age poorly. The energy transition has been accelerating, and we’ve recently hit the point where, in more and more cases, it’s cheaper to switch to renewable than to maintain the legacy infrastructure. We’re already at the tipping point.

    We used to see articles all the time about “paperless office? but everyone prints out their emails” and that was true until it suddenly wasn’t.

  • by wkat4242 on 7/3/23, 1:38 AM

    He's complaining about the $4.1T investments in wind and solar not leading to it growing faster than carbon sources.

    But not investing that would have left the world in an even worse position. If anything it's just not enough but it will have to be.

  • by fwlr on 7/3/23, 2:53 AM

    (It’s not a great article - it is surely quite motivated in a certain direction - but I do not think it should be flagged. Not sure if it’s possible to register a vote against flagging.)

    “Energy-source politics” often reminds me of the Condorcet voters paradox. That paradox is where Voter 1 prefers A>B>C, Voter 2 prefers B>C>A, and Voter 3 prefers C>A>B. If A were to be declared the winner, one can point out two voters have “C>A” in their preference and only one voter has “A>C”, so C should be elected - but two voters have “B>C” and only one has “C>B”, so B should be elected - but two voters have “A>B” and only one has “B>A”, so A should be elected…

    It’s important to note this paradox is stronger than just “it’s a tie”. The meat of the paradox is that for any chosen winner, the majority actively prefers a different winner.

    The three candidates are fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear. Alice prefers fossil fuels > renewables > nuclear (she wants airconditioning at night and watched Chernobyl recently). Bob prefers renewables > nuclear > fossil fuels (he has a live feed of IPCC predictions and updates). Chuck prefers nuclear > fossil fuels > renewables (he is a techno-optimist who runs a Bitcoin mining farm 24/7).

    In this situation, if Georgia the governor announces a billion dollar subsidy for fossil fuels, Bob and Chuck (a majority of her constituents) will write her complaint letters suggesting nuclear instead; if she puts that billion towards renewables, Alice and Chuck (again, a majority) oppose her and demand she support fossil fuels instead; if she allocates it to nuclear, Alice and Bob (a majority) vote her out of office in favor of her opponent who will subsidize renewables.

    Into this dynamic you put Larry the lobbyist (a stand-in for Robert Bryce, the author of the article). Larry’s motivation is simple: he gets paid for every dollar of government funding he directs to the industry he is employed to lobby for. If he is employed by fossil fuel companies, his best tactic is simply to criticize renewables (as this will activate a majority support for fossil fuels).

  • by Qwertious on 7/3/23, 2:08 AM

    >some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.

    This is an interesting stat, but I think it's misleading - the vast majority of cost for solar/wind is upfront, so it will naturally appear more expensive in the short term even if it's cheaper overall. Also, obviously, there was far more invested into solar in 2019 than there was in 2006.

    I agree that the energy transition isn't (and obviously the Biden administration wants to pretend otherwise, because "we're solving climate change" is just great politics), but I want to attack some of the implicit assumptions why:

    First up, the problem isn't renewables being too expensive, it's that they're too cheap and competitive. If you expect the price of future goods in a market to drop like a rock, why on earth would you want to enter that market, let alone commit significant investment into today's goods? Companies care about being profitable, not about being cheap. And as a quick aside, of course more is invested into the tech that currently holds 90% of the market.

    Second up, reliability doesn't matter yet - if your electricity sources are 50% gas and 50% renewables, then you're just fine. Yes, when we get to the finish line this will be a big problem, but our deadline is not dictated by time, but by emissions. If we emit 100N emissions per year today and we reduce that down to 10N next year, then we have 10x longer before man-made emissions push us past whatever our goal is. As such, focusing on the last 10% is a terrible idea if it even slightly hinders our adoption for even the first 50%.

    Third up, energy vs electricity is a double-bind. For example, switching to renewables alone won't stop ICE car emissions, but a very common criticism of electric cars is "why bother, the electricity is just coming from coal anyway". These two criticisms demand mutually exclusive sets of priorities, and if you pick one then people will hit you with the other.

    The energy transition isn't, but we desperately need to discuss why instead of making assumptions.

  • by metabagel on 7/3/23, 1:54 AM

    $4.1 trillion spent globally over 18 years isn’t a staggering amount of money. Ballpark this is equivalent to about 1% of aggregate U.S. GDP over that period of time.