Renewable Energy Boomed In 2020
statista.com
statista.com
This will be the opening sentence in the history books describing the decline of the western powers. US & EU really need to get their act together if they want to remain relevant.
Can the US do that? Or even the EU? It will cost more, it will take longer, and it will be smaller. This is, IMHO, why China tops all of the charts lately. The democratic, federal west simply cannot compete on scale.
There is opposition but where is it when $$$ are poured into unnecessary wars? When the taxes are increased? When scam happens?
It is, fundamentally, a choice. The UK has been cutting off megaproject funding since the APT (and before): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Passenger_Train
But it's not just a government choice, it's a choice of whole echelons of society. There are plenty of people who still get paid if the megaproject fails. We've seen a lot of that in the COVID response; pretty much every minister has been accused of routing hundreds of millions to their mates for items that were never delivered.
(To me, the unique thing about WW2 was that it forced the UK out of complacency and into employing diverse talent as a matter of raw necessity, because suddenly it was no longer possible to buy your way out of it as an individual. Suddenly the establishment would let a woman fix the Spitfires, a gay man break the codes, and nobody complained about all the Poles coming over here defending our country.)
This is very much a deliberate decision.
I'm all for more offshore wind, but onshore wind will have to play an important role for future energy.
The biggest roadblock is opposition from industries that profit from the past energy system. This combined with listening too much to vocal opposition to renewables, which is usually loud, but a minority (local exceptions exist).
Privatized taxes as in when the government needs to buy land for something it has to pay inflated prices inside a ginormous real estate bubble. Labor is expensive because laborers have to pay 50% of their wages as rents.
And this is why western nations should not allow China unilateral trade freedoms until it's government addresses the human rights of its own citizens. To do so, imperils the progress human rights (esp. workers' rights) within western nations. While China's ability to marshal it's resources in awe-inspiring, I'm certain no average worker/citizen in the west wants their freedoms to go retrograde... until it's too late and it's the only way to get a job.
If you live in the west, and you like your lifestyle, you ought to be worried about what's coming, and for the US, regression of workers' rights in the name of being globally competitive is already in full swing. If you had the option of being able to challenge your government in a democracy, or a centrally managed autocracy that might throw you in jail, which do you choose?
> if you can't open criticize a government, you have little recourse if it decides to put your interests last in the name of, say, moving some economic lever that profits people in wealth and power
> The western world has funnelled much of its money into a China, and this has given China the economic resources to uplift its own citizens out of poverty
We had "liberal democracy" in the last decades. This has lead to the outcome of outsourcing most of western manufacturing to China and handing them our trade secrets, because that was the game-theoretic optimum of the ideology of free trade, equality and universalism.
If liberal democracy means putting the people's interest first, why have the policies of the last 30 years actively worked against the interests of the average american employee, and benefitted mostly capital? Once you take the question serious, you will find some interesting hypotheses, some of which will be hard to empirically argue against. I will not go into those.
Note that this is not an endorsement of Chinese-style autocratism, but meant to challenge preconceived notions on what the current state of affairs is actually like.
I detest state overreach, centralism and the absence of liberty, and therefore I would detest Chinese-style government. But standing where we are, right now, it takes a lot of chuzpah to claim that our system is working as intended, meaning it is effective, just, leads to prosperity and has the interest of its people in mind.
The US and even other countries like Australia, UK, France etc. are willingly voting in governments that dismantle social policies and workers' rights for 'more jobs'. Without protectionist policies, there's no way to reconcile the increased labour costs in western nations, let alone personal liberties. If China is permitted to ascend without improving the rights of its people, that's the country we will have to match.
There is another angle to this, which is that China won't have to fight the red tape, regulation, NIMBYism, being stuck in local maxima and the general lack of vision, optimistic outlook on the future and belief in the system working that has befallen western countries. All we do is to pump ever more money into the markets and go deeper into debt. At one point, this will stop working. Some say this is already happening: is inflation real, or not?
China needs it's version of Chernobyl before people would be ready to risk their lives to change the government, the problem is that the new failure modes have global impact. And as we've seen with the spread of Covid, China has actually gained political capital from its mistakes, at least domestically, and also harmed the political situation of it's western competitors. Perhaps China will now wait long by the river while the rest of the world cannibalizes itself.
US HAS decided to lose leadership on ecology. HAS decided to underfund fusion and renewables research.
China's installed coal generation in 2020 is bigger than the rest of the world combined.
https://www.statista.com/chart/24544/world-electricity-gener...
This is simple math, China is NOT replacing carbon sources with renewable or nuclear. They are stacking them.
China is planning to open more coal plants in 2030 than the total coal plants that will be closed down in the rest of the world at this date.
The 200-300GW of capacity should translate to 200-600TWh/year of generated energy. That's a 5-10% growth of yearly generated renewable energy. If we can keep it at 5% yoy, it will take 112 years to replace that total energy consumption. At 10% it would take about 60 years.
I don't think it would be smart to bet on a linear-only growth. If course, a 100+ year exponential growth might be too optimistic. But I think we did not see the end of the hocky stick so far.
We also need to consider that we're talking about a global infrastructure project, so timescales of centuries are to be expected. Whoever thinks we could replace our global energy consumption completely within a couple of decades needs to reconsider.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth104/sites/www.e-educati...
It will take a long time because it will take a long time! So don’t even try!
No - it is entirely up to humans to decide how long it takes.
Energy generation is a huge industry. Emphasis on industry. And no wishful thinking from some climate-justice-hardliners will change that. There are literally the lives of billions of human beings depending on the availability of useful energy. Engineering and hard science has brought us to the point of cheap, renewable energy. Now we have to build up that capacity, but that takes time.
Your statement reads like a Maoist decree, putting ideological wants over practical realities. You read like you wish for hard, radical measures (that, of course, will only hurt the "class enemy") while you cannot be bothered with the details of how a solar panel or a wind turbine even works, let alone how it is produced and installed at scale.
So let me put that straight for you: It is not entirely up to humans to decide how long decarbonization takes. This is NOT some capitalist conspiracy. Building factories takes time and there is a limit of how many PV factories and offshore wind plants we can build today. Especially, when you want to do it in some environmentally friendly manner. We can of course accelerate the buildup for the next decade, and I would bet money on the fact that we already do exactly that.
Thermodynamic efficiencies mean that you need to have 2-3x less primary energy to get the same amount of final energy when your primary energy is already electric generation.
The UK went from 2% to 42% electrical generation from renewable sources (not including nuclear) and almost half of that increase happened between 2015 and 2020. That's only electricity, of course, but a good chunk of transportation is going to come off of fossil fuels in the next 10 years as well.
Most likely transitions will take a logistic curve, slow ramp-up, followed by a fast phase, followed by a slowing as the hardest problems are tackled.
What matters is the useful part and not the wasted part (released as mostly unwanted heat) in the transition to renewable.
For example electric cars uses one quarter of the energy of a fossil car for the same service (moving around).
Heat pump use one third or less of the energy to heat up water or air vs burning fossil fuels.
Etc...
Are you sure? Transport alone consumes around 40% of oil output. Replacing even a chunk of that with electric vehicles will cause electric demand to skyrocket. You'll be able to power around three to four times as many cars with the same amount of energy but primary energy is absolutely relevant because that energy is currently coming from oil.
>Heat pump use one third or less of the energy to heat up water or air vs burning fossil fuels.
Are you sure? My Furnace is 95% efficient and burns natural gas. My water heater is 75% efficient and also burns natural gas. Both devices are middle of the road and much more efficient options are available.
Even more than that, since charging EVs usually happens at night. And it's pretty easy to incentive EV users to do that.
Thermodynamically speaking this is an accounting trick, much like counting the cost of opening a curtain as an alternative to the energy cost of a lightbulb. But it’s a useful measure for consumers.
(Source - from our own procurement at www.de.energy)
1. Green energy is getting cheaper year on year and in some cases it's now cheaper than fossil fuel alternatives.
2. At some point in time the younger generation will revolt against their 'climate change denying governments' and just vote them out.
When that happens a price will be put on carbon and that will wipe out the remaining fossil fuel participants.
However, while I'm too old to worry about the effects of climate change, I still have to apologize to the younger generation.
In the next 10 years very little action will be taken on climate change and when that action finally comes, I fear it will come too late.
Even though we have had many decades of warnings we ignored all the signs.
So the sad reality is, while we had a chance to tackle the issue, we just ignored the problem and absolved our responsibility to future generations.
The reality is my generation, my older generation have let you down, only because we don't give a shit about your future.
That is both depressing and disappointing.
I'm sorry the adults, my generation, were left wanting :(
Edit: some commenters seem to think I'm trying to blame scientists. I'm trying not to blame anyone, because things just take time and that's what it is. What I'm trying to say is that reasoning in terms of guilt is pointless and counterproductive, because it just antagonises people.
Moreover, it sure does seem like we have passed a tipping point. Whether it is the tipping point remains to be seen.
From a societal point of view, I think it is not a good idea to communicate "we're too late to fix anything" as it seems clear that this will lead to a total abandonment of any effort.
The best moment to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best moment is "now".
My sadness is the outright denial of the problem at hand.
Why I'm depressed for the future is I live in a country where for the last 15 years we've been debating if climate change is actually real.
In those missed 15 years we've seen massive environmental impacts to the country, all of which look a lot like climate change.
However, as a country and a government we remain blissfully unaware of the problems at hand.
So it will take another 10 years of denial before the reality bites, but that will have been 25 wasted years.
> There is absolutely no point in reasoning in terms of guilt and apologies.
My country and my government still don't believe the issue is real.
I'm apologizing for that 'national' ignorance.
My life will not be impacted by climate change, but those living 50 years from now will be asking what went wrong?
I wish. Unfortunately this is not how change happens. Women got voting rights not because men suddenly voted their sexists governments out. Women got their voting rights because they fought for it. The only thing that gives me any kind of hope is movements like Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion. If they don't succeed, we're all doomed.
More optimistically, I also don’t think such protest actions are necessary.
Renewables are now cheaper than everything else in good conditions, and still cheaper than coal and the equal of oil when you have to add batteries to them. And both the batteries and the power supplies themselves look like they’re going to continue to get cheaper for a while yet.
I’m still concerned about biodiversity, antibiotics, and phosphorous — just not CO2.
So there are only about 1.5M buses in operation world-wide? Germany operates around 80k. If that is somewhat representative for the EU as a whole, and I have no reason to doubt it, there should be around 400-500k buses here alone. This would leave only 500k buses for the rest of the world, which I find hard to believe.
On the other hand it might not be off by some orders of magnitude...