No miracle tech needed: How to switch to renewables now and lower costs doing it | Hacker News Reader

No miracle tech needed: How to switch to renewables now and lower costs doing it

thehill.com

I find that very hard to believe. It has a real "have your cake and eat it too feel". I kinda imagine that people in 2072 are going to dig this paper out, look at the flooded skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline and wondering what kind of political perversity kept this dream from coming true.

We are seeing a lot of papers today pushing renewables that sound like the "too cheap to meter" hype for nuclear energy back in the '50s.

Granted they are building some really big solar energy farms in places like China, India and the United Arab Emirates. It looks like there is a solar revolution in the third world right now but who knows if it can be replicated in temperate middle-to-low-corruption democracies. (When it comes to pumped storage China is in a class by itself but when it comes to nuclear China is in a class with Russia.)

There are quite a few miracles explicitly mentioned in this paper: affordable grid-scale storage, massive switch to district heat, large-scale concentrator solar power plants, etc. They also handwave away other miracles such as a free transmission grid that has sufficient capacity to move power around.

> I kinda imagine that people in 2072 are going to dig this paper out, look at the flooded skyscrapers in the Manhattan skyline and wondering what kind of political perversity kept this dream from coming true.

I don't feel like that question would be hard to answer at all, it's the same as "Who funded climate denial for decades?" - largely the fossil fuel industries (1)

Is it "political perversity"? Yes, for sure, and increasingly blatant, given studies like the one reported on above.

1) https://www.campaigncc.org/climate_change/sceptics/funders

https://www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-ma...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/20/the-big-business-of-climate-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62225696

That's half of it but I have been watching the energy situation for a long time, in fact I was a professional activist for about two years circa 2001 and it astonishes me how much the energy literature is like a stopped clock.

For instance circa 2001 people were still citing papers from the 1970s about pyrolysis systems for biofuels and quoting the exact same cost numbers despite 30 years of inflation and other changes. (To be fair, advocates for new nuclear reactor types are pulling 50-year old research out of mothballs now.)

Amory Lovins had a vision similar to the paper above in the 1980s which was very slow to arrive. I remember in the 1980s it was the nukes in Germany who were pushing heat pumps, Lovins was pushing combined heat-and-power fueled by natural gas. The immediate consequence of "the soft energy path" was that there was a lot of talk about solar and wind but a lot of gas turbines got installed.

Today PV and wind generation have arrived and certainly the economics of storage have improved but it's not clear they are going to get good enough.

What was annoying about Lovins though was that he always said that the soft energy path was going to be easy because it would save money and he was always facing this problem of: "Technology A that saves energy should pay back the investment in a short time, why don't people adopt technology A?"

In some cases technology A just sucked. People always hated those compact fluorescent bulbs, it's a very different story from the LED bulbs that took over the world quickly.

The book

https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/lester-c-thurow/the-zero-s...

tells a compelling story of capital investment in an obsolete technology (steelmaking with the open hearth furnace) leading to lobbying, corruption and protectionism to prevent the US from switching to the superior basic oxygen furnace and thus damaging it's own economic competitiveness (expensive and low quality steel is an ingredient for expensive and low quality cars)

One might make the case the fossil fuel industry is doing the same to preserve its capital investment but the scale is much larger and politics have certainly turned away from the kind of intervention that happened with steel.

"We found that the overall upfront cost to replace all energy in the 145 countries, which emit 99.7 percent of world carbon dioxide, is about $62 trillion."

"Finally, our findings contend that a transition to 100 percent clean, renewable energy in each country should occur ideally by 2035, and no later than 2050, with an 80 percent transition by 2030."

The benefits sound great, but the cost is extremely high.

You could argue that the consequences of inaction would be more costly, but some people do not believe that the consequences of inaction are coming.

What can be done now that does not cost so much?

Converting all energy to electricity alone is a huge and expensive undertaking. Some of the technology the article touts is expertimental at best and does not have widespread production use that I am aware of.

> Converting all energy to electricity alone is a huge and expensive undertaking. Some of the technology the article touts is expertimental at best

You seem to be contradicting their headline finding that this lowers costs and does not require "miracle tech".

What do you know that they don't?

Of cause such articles are first, advocating for something, therefore per-definition, skewed and non-objective by very design. By that I mean that 1) it focuses on a goal rather than actual process, 2) there is no trade-off analysis.

Without any need to go into details such estimate(s) are 100% wrong easily several orders of magnitude underestimating (as per point 1,2 above). Just imagine running a semi-complex industrial or technological project estimated in a similar fashion. I work on government-funded space-projects and could tell stories about overruns 2-3 orders of magnitude and schedule delay of factor 5-10. I am aware, that in business it is basically the same, and extending this to multiple-governments, as this article pre-supposes, linked through geo-politics and many other real-world constraints, is on the side of "stupid" if to be taken seriously.

Is this just for activists to chat about something? It certainly has nothing to offer as actual plan to prosper for the said states, or address realistically and meaningfully environmental pressures societies create.

What makes you think that "there is no trade-off analysis" ?

I find the assertions of "overruns" to be mere hand-waving. Likewise the repeated invocation of "activists".

Certainly there is a cost in transmitting information, especially in short kind of paragraphs which involve abstracting away the working model of reality. I cannot turn this into unsolicited lecture on the 'iron triangle', activists, government, intellectuals. Neither can I detail Mr. Jacobson past follies published and debunked. Abstractions are opinionated by definition, so some gaps and perception of 'handwaving' is inevitable, that is the nature. I drew, in my previous post, an analogy that many might be familiar with, and that is that the more complex a problem, the most likely it will be over-run in costs and schedule. To make it even worse, throw into government management of such issue within its legal and societal dimension, and then still further, add international relationships.

Now to the point. Mr. Jacobson is known very well to produce utopian sounding headlines (and studies) [google may help with that]. He has been on this message for some time, and is being debunked by his colleagues continuously. My point of criticism is that it is stupid to even start discussing any project over short paper when it is claimed that 62 trillion is all it would costs spread over 150 nations. At best, this is a fancy back-of-the-envelope calculations, however, which I do not see to have any real-world value. If you disagree, give me a step one (if you accept 100% correctness of this estimate), that any one such nation should do right now. (rhetorical, of cause you or anyone else does not have a 'step-one' it is not how it works).

The issue is so complex on correlated across vast societal domains that to attack it head on and conclude something as naive as:

"By electrifying all energy sectors; producing electricity from clean, renewable sources; creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity; storing electricity, heat, cold and the hydrogen; expanding transmission; and shifting the time of some electricity use, we can create safe, cheap and reliable energy everywhere."

would be simply impossible. And to the degree attempted, it would be ridiculous. This conclusion has no connection to the reality, period. The authors, as usually, assume 'unconstrained choices', which cannot be remedied since they have no knowledge of the political, legal, societal and other dimensions.

>> You seem to be contradicting their headline finding that this lowers costs and does not require "miracle tech".

My biggest concern is how to pay for the $62 trillion up-front cost.

Lowering costs is great, but how will the up-front cost be paid?

The article states: "By electrifying all energy sectors; producing electricity from clean, renewable sources; creating heat, cold, and hydrogen from such electricity; storing electricity, heat, cold and the hydrogen"

Electifying ALL energy sectors is the big miracle. Electric cars are doing pretty good, but what about electric trucks, trains, and aircraft? The tech is not there yet.

> My biggest concern is how to pay for the $62 trillion up-front cost .. but how will the up-front cost be paid?

There are certain subject (social spending) where this question is always asked. There are certain subject (military / police spending) where it almost never is.

Funny that.

I also don't think that it's all "up-front" in the the same fiscal year.

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