Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

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RepowerEU plan is precisely what it takes to completely switch away from fossil fuels in less than one generation while still supporting healthy economic growth.

Granted, it's not like we are starting from zero - in 2021, renewables amounted to 22% of all total final consumption of all kinds of energy in EU (not just electricity, that is), up from 8.5% in 2005. It only puts forward already existing plans, accelerating development through 2030 (45% renewables) and 2050 (75% renewables), while increasing energy consumption and yes, electrifying everything.

And no it doesn't require any terrible effort or funding amounts anyone will even notice.

It doesn't require any batteries.

Panic is simply not justified. U.S. shouldn't worry because it has more than plenty of fossil fuels for the next 50-70 years even with no technology improvements, and by then, renewables will be so cheap they will fill in the market by themselves, Europe will go through RepowerEU, and China, well, the worse for them, the better for us (although with their level of industrial capacity and skill of doing things on scale, i'm sure they will be fine too).

According to the EU website's : "REPowerEU is the European Commission’s plan to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

and "In the short-term, we need alternative supplies of gas, oil and coal as quickly as possible"...

So it's about a third of the EU consumption and it may include just changing supplier, not reducing oil...

I think that's implicit with the quoted timelines:

> 2030 (45% renewables) and 2050 (75% renewables)

It's not going to happen, the production costs alone don't permit that.

Main cost driver is the price of green hydrogen. It is already cheaper than the natural gas prices we are paying now (equivalent of about $1700 per 1000cm of natural gas equivalent vs about $2500 we pay), by 2030 it should be down to $500 per 1000cm natural gas equivalent and that's about 2019 price.

Production costs are easily low enough to go further and faster than that. Logistics and economics may slow things down, but it’s not a cost problem right now.

Yes and no. For raw energy production, it is dirt cheap. Storage and transformation is a bitch though, and so far costs are quite high there although they are getting better. Given that we will need to increase green hydrogen production by 400x in 9 years and further 4x in next 20 years, prices will of course drop.

Hydrogen is the easy one. If you want battery storage I agree we need to get it cheaper (the effective cost of battery storage was close to nuclear last I checked, which isn't cheap enough, though my numbers may be out of date), but hydrogen is something I first made when I was single-digit years old.

Russian sources of energy gave 22% of European consumption in 2021 and renewables, another 22%. So 45% goal by 2030 seems to be yes, "bring market back to equilibrium with 2021-level prices, but without Russian energy, by 2030".

Of course, we will not be using any Russian energy long before 2030. About half of it is gone already (all coal, about 40% of oil and 60% of gas), and at least 80% will be gone by February next year. It's just that we will see elevated prices on most energy for a few years after 2024 or so when Russian supplies will zero out for all countries apart from Hungary.

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