Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings | Hacker News Reader

Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

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128 pointsbelter258 comments

Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline?

Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and materials supply chains will be undergoing over time.

We're probably short of copper. Is anyone figuring out a way to use aluminum as a substitute in many applications? We can work around several of the other critical shortages(nickel, cobalt, not-so-rare rare earths, lithium) in time, either with alternatives or increased extraction, but copper seems like a tough one.

There is a lot of wishful thinking or naivete in the political class driving these transitions. I agree that we need to move rapidly to decarbonize but there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the actual work involved in the transition. There is also a parasite-class of folks whispering deceitful tales in the ears of politicians(ahem, hydrogen, ahem) which really only cares about getting their cut.

Politicians need to understand you don't just order solar panels and batteries off Amazon. Someone needs to make them, and that someone better be a country you're not in a proxy war or a hot war with. We need to invest in practical measures not just fairy tales that leave us in the dark for a decade or more while we figure out hard lessons.

The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.

Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year.

There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return).

You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.

Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching.

Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.

That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics.

The argument is that in order to extract oil, you need to spend energy, and, logically, the most easier oil to extract is extracted first.

That means that oil extraction is every year more expensive (energetically not financially). Because technology can make extraction more efficient but not indefinitely, at some point, in order to extract oil, it will be necessary to spend the same energy than burning it creates.

I suppose we could say that it's kind of an inversion of what's going on with fusion research.

Some commenters say that we already pass that point and that's the reason oil companies CaPex have fall in the last years.

I don't know if that's the case, but I can't avoid to ask myself about solar.

Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that?

I would like to see some numbers and expert discussion about that.

If you can read French, this guy https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici has published a lot of vulgarization on the topic - with numbers.

If my memory of reading one of his books serves, fracking now costs 50% of the energy it produces (in addition to non-energy environmental impact, which is pretty large), up from ~10% for the easy oil we had ~50 years ago. Current-tech solar panels are in the same order of magnitude (again, not counting non-energy environmental impact). Nuclear energy has the highest yield. I seem to remember that coal is the worst, unless it's burnt at the point of extraction.

That doesn't pass the smell test. A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years). If the embodied energy in the panel is half of the lifetime energy, that means that there is 22kWh of embodied energy in that W of solar panel, and they're selling that embodied energy for about 1 cent / kWh. And that assumes that there are no costs to the panel other than the embodied energy.

A rule of thumb is that embodied energy in a finished manufactured product sells for about $1/kWh. By that rule of thumb, the embodied energy in a solar panel is about 0.5% of the energy it will produce over its lifetime.

Interesting counterpoint, thanks.

> A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years).

I imagine that you're making assumptions on having sufficient luminosity all year round, right? So perhaps that depends on where on Earth you are.

According to Jancovici [1], in most of Europe, solar panels produce about 100 kWh/m²/year, assuming that they are oriented correctly (I don't know if e.g. the necessity of cleaning them up is factored in). From the same source, in terms of energy used to build the panel (is shipping included?), it takes 1 to 4 years to reimburse that energy but that's under the assumption that all the energy from the panel can be used. In practice, solar panel installations produce energy at a rhythm that depends on nature, which means that for many uses, the electricity needs to be stored somewhere if we want to actually use it at a different rhythm, e.g. when you're actually at home/in the office/etc.

Unfortunately, storing electricity at scale with current-tech is energy-expensive (both to build the batteries and because of energy loss during storage), e.g. storing it as hydrogen has a yield of ~30%, couldn't find the yield of other technologies of batteries including the energy cost of building/shipping/disposing of the battery. So, in the worst case, these 100 kWh/m2/year turn into ~30 kWh/m2/year, which means 3 to 12 years for recouping energy cost.

So, by this calculation, the worst hypothesis maps to the number I was quoting above and the best one is at least one order of magnitude better. My bad.

Now, there is the problem that current-tech battery often relies on metals (i.e. Lithium) that are only available in limited amounts.

[1] https://jancovici.com/transition-energetique/renouvelables/p...

The numbers in your linked article are from 2000. The price of solar panels per watt is about 5% of what it was in 2000. Most of that cost reduction was from reduced energy use, so you need to multiply Jancovici's numbers by 5%.

You're also assuming that you have to store 100% of the energy to get to a green grid. But in a grid with a good mix of different renewable sources, grid ties large enough to cover areas with different weather, substantial amount of nuclear, hydro and a large number of EVs that can charge while energy is cheap means that very little energy needs to be stored. So you also have to multiply your storage numbers by about 5%.

And since the edit window is gone, replace "multiply by 5%"with "divide by 20". Same thing, but much more clear.

Good point. Thanks for the insight.

The energy delivered by a solar panel is overwhelmingly more than needed to make it. The gain is enormous. There is simply no contest.

Consider that makers of solar panels, and of the materials that go into them, get no break on their power bills. Each and every kWh that goes into making the panel is paid for, and necessarily has its cost folded into the price of the panel. Otherwise they would be paying power out of their own pocket, to give it to you for free.

Furthermore, the fraction of the energy used in making the panel that comes from renewables goes up every year, as their share of the total generated increases.

The same argument applies to wind turbines, tidal turbines, wave engines, dams, and (in their way) storage media.

One could look for more direct sources, but the summary is that energy payback happens in 1-4 years out of current 25 year "life". And that 25 years is typically a warranty to 80% of original capacity. Year 26 of operation is not a sudden drop.

https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-panels-use-energy-manu...

Yes, panels at 80% have good resale value. If you have room, you just add 20% more. If not, you sell them and buy more.

Costs have dropped an order of magnitude since that study. Many of which scale with energy.

4 years is now a massive overestimate. Depending on how much you include (frames, inverter, grid tie in etc) 0.5-2 is more realistic.

Unless I'm mistaken, that's based on the assumption that you're in position to use 100% of the energy produced during the day, exactly when it's produced. I'm sure that there are scenarios in which that's true (e.g. keep the refrigerator on all day long, use some other energy source for the night) but if your main use for the energy is not correlated with the sun being up (e.g. power your computer when you're back home in the evening), you need to add the actual energy cost of storage, which is typically really bad.

This considerably increases the time to energy payback. Still probably worth it, though.

Panels are so cheap now that they pay even if you waste most of what they could have produced. A smallish battery that captures only some of the excess, and delivers it when you need it, suffices. Battery cost is still falling fast as new chemistries come online. Hydrogen synthesis and storage might displace batteries for domestic use, particularly if hydrogen-fueled cars succeed. (Advice: keep all that equipment outside!) If not, zinc/bromine battery tech looks strong.

Are you tokey of monetary cost or the total amount of energy needed to actually build/deliver/install/maintain/dispose of these technologies?

If the former, you are clearly right.

If the latter, I'm not so sure (with current tech).

Monetary cost, as already noted, reveals an exact upper bound on the amount of energy needed to build and deliver the goods: people doing those get no discount on their power bill. The price also includes labor, administrative and marketing costs, tariffs, taxes, and whatever profit was taken, less any public subsidy or loss-leader discount.

It’s pretty silly as we’ve discovered efficient synthesis routes since.

> That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics.

... that hasn't been the traditional argument behind peak oil, from its original adherents (checks notes) 70 years ago. The traditional theory is a pretty bare oil demand inevitably increases while fields run dry because we extract all the [usable] oil first--and one of the main points of the theory is to ask what you're going to do when you need oil and there is none left. It may be that newer adherents are arguing peak oil on the basis of energy-invested-on-energy-returned basis, but that's not the traditional argument for the theory.

While it is true that newer oil sources require more energy to extract, but that's not particularly relevant for a few reasons. For one, on current trends, it looks like demand for oil will peak well before economical supply of oil will be exhausted (which is the main point of the theory). But even being net-negative on energy production isn't necessarily a deal breaker, for there can well be cases where there's no realistic alternative to oil as an energy source due to its great energy density (see airplanes, for example).

> Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that?

This is such a thoroughly debunked line it's barely worth discussing.

Here's a sufficient proof.

The dirtiest cheapest coal is about $1-2/GJ at the mine front. A good brown coal power plant is about 50% efficient.

Current unsubsidized solar module cost (not whole project) for large scaleprojects is in the $0.2-0.3.

At 25% capacity factor a dollar of solar at $0.3 will produce 500MJ over 20 years and still be 80% productive.

Thus even if the only activity required to build a solar panel were burning brown coal as it comes out of the ground, it could not be profitable to burn more fossil fuels than the energy the panel released.

> we are not short of any of those materials

For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years.

Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of mines. We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.

If we only base our energy policy on how things will be in a decade we will delay the transition while inflicting maximum pain on the population(energy and food shortages, rampant inflation, lower standard of living, etc).

> We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years.

Well intentioned policy like this can have the reverse effect.

If you limit lithium usage you will limit demand, which can reduce the effort expended to build new mines.

Did I suggest that? I mean we should be realistic about Li availability and incentivize its usage appropriately.

In fact, we do not have "plenty" of lithium. There's not enough lithium in the world to put in all the batteries for all the EVs we'll need to replace ICE vehicles. This is entirely orthogonal to the fact that recycling lithium ion batteries is expensive, difficult, and potentially dangerous in the case of any type of mishap.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...

That article mentions "reserves" 5 times and cost/price not once. Same type of articles were written about peak oil and then the price of oil went up and magically reserves grew as it be came profitable to find and extract new sources of oil.

That's because reserves are what matters. I don't care if there's billions of tons of lithium at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nobody's ever going to go get it because it's too dangerous, difficult, and expensive. The same thing with space mining. Nobody's going to go mine asteroids because it's stupidly expensive. For all intents and purposes, if we can't get to it, it doesn't exist.

And let's not forget about all the problems that "innovative" methods of oil extraction such as fracking have created, over and above the fact that it's provided more oil to burn. Lithium mining itself is already an environmental disaster, and it seems highly unlikely that increased demand for the product is going to improve the environmental impact of extracting it. You know, tragedy of the commons and all. The fact that "peak oil" came and went is not a capitalist success story.

You seem not to understand what "reserves" actually means.

It does not exclude easily accessible material. It only excludes material not assessed yet because there has been no need to, as existing reserves will last more than long enough to perform further surveys.

Not at all. If there were billions of dollars worth of whatever on the bottom of the Mariana trench, people would build advanced technology to extract these billions, without any further incentives than the market demand.

A comparable case in point: commercial space launch companies. Arguably, commercial large-scale aviation, too.

Well, that brings us back to earlier in the thread.

It's not only about money-expensive. If it gets more energy-expensive to produce/store/route/... energy than the amount of energy we end up with in the end, the game is over.

So, in practice, there are limits to reserves. There is, of course, the possibility that these limits can change with new technologies, which in turn depends on money-cost as you mention.

If you go to the source of that claim, you'll see that it's basically about proven reserves, using current tech and know how, basically how we did it for oil, when we were supposed to run out of oil in 1872, 1919, 1960, etc.

We've just started looking for the thing at the scales we need it now, prospecting and extracting and processing it will improve.

But we do have more than enough sodium, and sodium-ion batteries could be "good enough" for most applications with technology advancement.

Maybe, but I am skeptical. Do you know when lithium ion batteries were invented? Okay, truthfully, neither do I, because accounts vary, depending on what you mean by "invented" and "lithium ion battery," but it was definitely in the 1970s. The first prototypes were created in the mid 80s, and commercial introduction wasn't until 1991. This stuff is all up on Wikipedia, so you can just look it up if you doubt it.

Even if the research is being done, we've got decades before something commercially viable comes out. The need exists now. Anything that isn't essentially ready to go by 2030 probably isn't going to do squat to help us.

CATL (the biggest EV lithium-ion battery manufacturer in the world) has announced last year that it will bring sodium-ion batteries to market in 2023. We'll see. The technology is in many ways similar to lithium-ion, so more rapid advances are not surprising, especially considering the amount of investment being made compared to the 80s and 90s.

Lithium is 0.002% of the Earth's crust. The Earth's crust weighs 2.77 * 10^22 kg. Each car needs about 30kg of lithium. Therefore we have enough lithium for about 2*10^15 cars.

Yes, we're going to liquify the earth's crust and efficiently extract all the lithium...

Please do not post low-quality, shallow, dismissive remarks. If you have meaningful information to offer, post that instead. If not, don't.

Why not post this to Op instead, after they posted a comment full of irrelevant information? The actual amount of Li found in the crust is irrelevant.

The quantity of Li in the crust is directly relevant. It provides an overwhelmingly more meaningful measure than "reserves", which only identify how much is in the next place people will dig when their current seam is tapped out.

What the number shows is that there is no possibility of ever tapping out all available lithium, no matter how many batteries are manufactured. Once the world is saturated, used-up batteries will become the main source for materials to build new batteries from.

The more immediate limitation is rate of manufacture of batteries, because building battery factories takes a long time.

> We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively.

That's not reality but a dream. So far we still have to find a sustainable lithium recycling on scale, there are various startups with various solutions, who actually prove to be just like most startup: PR scam for money or childish dream of someone who sold the cat before capturing it.

It's not better in mining estimation: we have estimations of different kind but they are nothing than dream, we do not really know how much lithium is accessible on earth.

Locally, there are several mines that have been trying to open for years (copper and nickel, mostly) but the environmental crowd has been extremely determined in using the courts and bureaucracy to block them from opening.

The net result is the green wave will be driven largely by relying on dirty minerals from other countries.

Mining tech is essentially the same since ever, we just have transferred some physical efforts to machines, how a local mine is "green" and some in exotic places is different?

Consider a thing: all industry do not pollute because they are evil but because the tech produce pollution. Something was done, something can be done, to reduce it of course, but that's not always possible, not possible more than a certain extent and not for free.

A simple idea: can you pay a 8-years maximum lasting car 100k€? Even if you can, how many others needs cars and can't? Because that's relatively less heavy than the physical possibility of doing something, but it's not marginal at all. I have built a new home, with all actual tech to consume less and get a better life, but if such homes can only be made let's say by 10% of the western population, witch means roughly by 3% of the total human population what's the outcome? We are a society. Some can be richer than others, nothing wrong in that. BUT when the difference between the poorest and richest and so their numbers on total humans diverge too much the society fall apart anyway.

> how a local mine is "green" and some in exotic places is different?

https://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2016/finalwebsite/solutions/....

https://empoweringpumps.com/5-ways-to-make-mining-more-susta...

are both nice entry points for basic research. Mining tech has changed quite a bit since the early days- waste management is probably the biggest factor in whether a mine is relatively neutral or harmful to the environment.

The other major factor between countries is the extent to which regulations are in place to ensure that old mines are also managed- ensuring water runoff doesn't flow into and through them (picking up excess metal waste), etc.

A final note is many countries do not have the regulatory strength to catch all illegal mining operations, which may have no waste management or treatment in place at all.

Even with all of the regulations in place, it would still be economically feasible to mine here- otherwise, the mining companies wouldn't be spending decades trying to open these mines up in the first place.

Both are dreams, not very green by it's own, not really doable (like recycling water) and more important hyper costly witch means that the final product would be hyper-expensive. Are you ready to buy a small pot around 550€? Because that's the realist outcome of these starting point dreams.

In the end yes, mining companies have invested in various tech, accidentally not one really environmentally friendly for real, those green parts tend to be just scam business like CO₂ sequestration tech and nothing really used on scale. That's probably why we almost close all mines in the western world to transfer them far from people's and reporters eyes...

>Mining tech is essentially the same since ever, we just have transferred some physical efforts to machines

You could say that about literally anything

Not really: ICEs for instance have enormously reduced their pollution, sure they can't be "green" but a modern European diesel engine is an order of magnitude less pollutant than one from just 30 years ago.

Some energivore process in various industries have evolved to demand far less energy, cement is a good example using the EMC process [1] same others have not evolved, not because they are evil but because we do not found anything better to evolve; mining is one of them.

[1] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energetically_modified_cement

Some hedge funds may have lost billions, but frackers are printing money at current price levels.

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce.

This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.

In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right.

The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.

We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production and use as we ramp up manufacturing and deployment of the systems needed for clean energy production, and then see a tapering off of the current production methods as the new ones come online.

How did we get the first railroads built? By a combination of horses dragging materials so humans could lay the rail lines and then trains dragging materials as the initial lines were built. There was almost certainly an initial increase in horse power consumption, and then a decline as the new system came online. This isn't a new thing, this is how many replacement transitions that depend on the previous system play out.

> We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production

Right. But right now we're incentivizing the opposite. We're telling fossil fuel companies we don't need them anymore long before we've actually figured out a way to live without them. Do you see the problem yet?

The only signal that matters is the price signal. At $80/bbl, fossil fuel companies are getting a very strong signal that they're needed.

Sorry, no. $80/bbl is a temporary price and not sufficient to drive infrastructure investments which take upwards of 3 decades to pay back(i.e. refineries). You can't expect private companies to invest in these things when states like CA are talking about banning the sale of IC cars in a decade.

You contradict yourself. The high prices are temporary because there is still demand. As demand falls off, price falls, and wells too expensive to operate are abandoned. The remaining wells will produce enough.

CA is not banning sale of ICE cars. They are banning sale of new ICE cars.

I see what you're saying-- Bootstrapping a green economy does, almost by definition, require the use of fossil fuels.

I think the easier way to look at it, though, isn't the upfront cost of the transition, but the outcomes that are 10-20 years down the line. A big "spend" right now should result in less overall carbon emitted (according to most of the lifecycle analyses that I'm familiar with, anyway).

It's a really good point that we need to optimize this, of course. It would be ideal to manufacture solar panels in places with a favorable energy mix versus somewhere that's still 100% coal. But in a lot of cases, it's better just to get the things out the door as fast as possible using the technology we have.

What do you mean by 'big spend'? The federal reserve can't print oil or copper. Those supply chains need to be built out and that requires a market sufficient to pay back those investments or government essentially subsidizing(more that currently done) the profits of those endeavors. You can't get a private company to build a refinery if you simultaneously tell them there won't be a market for the product before they've paid off half of the investment. If you think that the government should spend the money to secure enough dirty energy to complete the transition then I'm 100% in agreement.

We should be bringing Si mfg back to the US where we have plenty of methane("natural" gas) needed to do so. We should build more fission. We should continue to buy solar panels, rare earths and Li from China, as long as they're willing to sell it to us. But none of this is an either/or decision. We need a realistic path to the green future or we risk screwing up the transition, ruining our economy and setting ourselves up to have regressive political revolutions.

Building fission instead of spending those dollars building solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce.

Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.

It matters if you disrupt the dirty energy pipeline well before you've secured enough green energy to self-sustain a green energy future.

Every way to secure green energy requires some use of dirty energy.

So the only choice is between dirty forever, and dirty decreasing. If the latter, the faster it decreases, the less dirty energy you use on the transition.

Dirty forever isn't an option. Dirty is not renewable.

We could decrease dirty energy usage to 0% right now. People would starve, quality of life would plummet, and we could direct our available green energy(hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, etc) to building out more green tech. Is that what you're advocating? I don't think so. So let us talk like engineers who need to make trade-offs to best achieve our goals. Cutting off dirty energy too soon hampers our green transition while needlessly killing people and lowering quality of life for those who don't starve or freeze to death.

You very, very evidently did not read what you replied to.

That appears to be a pattern. You could learn just by paying attention to what people took time out to explain to you. Go ahead, I can wait.

> You very, very evidently did not read what you replied to.

Strangely enough, I feel like saying the same thing here. I don't think our viewpoints are that far off. Unless you had a problem parsing my language in the last post, you might have seen that I wasn't strongly disagreeing with you. It appears to have triggered you emotionally however so I suppose this discussion has reached its endpoint.

Your worry appears to be that the trillions of tons of fossil fuels still being mined under continued massive government subsidy will prove insufficient to fuel construction of the renewable-energy generation equipment we need.

Nobody else is worried about this, for reasons. The much bigger problem is continued massive government subsidy of this mining, which thereby suppresses energy prices and sabotages access to capital to build out that equipment, and the factories to produce it, diverts cash flow to those mining and refining the materials, and accelerates climate disaster.

Its a circular argument. Any action requires energy, and the only energy you have avaliable is dirty energy, so you can accuse green tech or requiring dirty energy

It's perhaps naive and over-simplistic, but the s-curve is so well-established you can probably fit the production cost curve over time to the s-curve and get a useful prediction.

There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.

The s-curve has two important parameters, but looking at any amount of history before the first inflection you can only ever deduce one of them.

So, how exactly to you intent to fit the renewables (that are pre-inflection) production curves into it?

You are certainly right about renewables that are pre-inflection. I was thinking of solar and wind, which I understand are both in the steep part of the S curve.

> steep part of the S curve

What part again? Are you claiming that their growth is linear?

You are absolutely correct.

Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all.

For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon).

Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals.

The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil.

You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M

The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green.

Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.

Jesus it's nice to read an informed comment on here.

Yes, it's difficult to try to get these facts across to folks without them thinking you're a shill for big oil. It's especially sad/frustrating when people who claim to be engineers don't understand the engineering involved in the process of transitioning to green energy.

software engineer is not same as civil engineer. (i gues the capacity/abiltiy to learn is there, but still.. there is quite a difference)

+1000%

I'll admit to falling into the trap of thinking I'm smarter than everyone else, including domain experts outside my field of expertise, because I did well in a field very much devoid of actual, uh, engineering.

You’re seemingly unaware that petrochemicals can be synthesized with energy and simple organic feedstocks. The chemistry is pretty well established to bootstrap up from water and CO2 to complex hydrocarbons and from there of course the same petrochemical processes can be applied. Green energy is perfectly capable of this.

They can, but that takes energy. You have to have sufficient green energy to produce it and how do you get to the place where you have sufficient energy? Currently, that means you burn massive amounts of dirty energy to make the transition over, what, decades?

Your comment is well intended but it is the same sort of 'one day it will be perfect' thinking that glosses over the messy transition that actually needs to take place first.

Most uses of fossil fuels these days are for fuel, not petrochemicals. The energy needed to get to petrochemicals (and the fraction of carbon currently coming from fossil fuels to get to petrochemicals) are relatively modest.

Citation needed. Sorry but it takes, more or less, as much energy as that which is stored within the chemical bonds of a petrochemical to make that chemical from raw materials. Also, what? Your comment doesn't seem to fit into the context of our discussion. Where is the energy and raw materials to produce the green energy materials going to come from?

Maybe read more carefully.

When renewable energy is abundant, we will find it cheaper to synthesize the hydrocarbons we need than to pump them out of the ground, transport, refine, and transport them again.

In the meantime, the overwhelming majority of oil pumped is burned. In the nearer future, only oil that is the absolute cheapest to pump will be, mostly as feedstock for bulk chemistry, because it will not be worth the cost to refine it for fuel.

So where will energy to transition come from? Fossil fuels, which are today produced in the trillions of tons annually. As more renewables are built out, some of their output will go into producing new panels. Eventually, panels will be produced from 100% renewable energy.

You will not notice any change, except lower power bills.

The quantity of carbon in petrochemicals (rather than fuels) is small enough that it could be supplied with the carbon in waste biomass streams. This carbon is reduced; the energy cost of reducing CO2 has already been paid.

The cargo-cult religion is unfortunately back by science and years of study and agreement amongst scientists - human activity is causing climate change and global warming. You sound like you haven't accepted this fact based reality that we live in and are a part of.

Climate change is our fault, and we have to stop it, there is no other alternative that also includes life continuing on earth as we know it. This change is already happening, it's not hypothetical. Global systems are already being affected, extreme weather and drought more common. Global temperature change has to be kept as low as possible, or we risk crop failure, famine and mass immigration at a scale that has never been seen.

I understand there are huge logistical issues with shifting off fossil fuels, but we as humans have to. We can get to the moon, we can stop burning old dinosaurs & plants to make stuff work. Even without climate change, these resources are finite. Are you just going to accept waiting for all the oil to run out before making plastic tubes from something else? The clue is in the name fossil, they take millions of years to produce and are non-renewable.

You can think of me as a green psychopath all you like, but it doesn't change the cold hard facts. I hope my reply isn't high-intensity BS.

I missed the part where OP denied global warming.

You and I both want the same thing. Our shared goals do not negate the laws of chemistry or physics.

It's accurate but not complete. The long term (600k year) climatic history of this planet is sobering, and if only climate change was just our fault. Believe me, there is nothing humanity has so far achieved that comes close to matching what nature does to this planet on a pretty regular schedule. We don't know nearly enough about this by the way, and we especially don't know enough about conditions about the end of the last inter-glacial. For the last 20 odd years we can't even discuss it rationally, because to bring up the non-anthromorphic aspects just gets some innocent scientist labelled a denier.

That volcano that went off in the pacific this January appears to have increased the amount of water vapour in the entire atmosphere by 10%. Sit back and contemplate that for a moment, because it is pretty awesome, and also the satellite pictures were quite something, and then take another look at what's happened in Pakistan and Italy. All our fault? We can wish.

There is so much more to this than shifting away from fossil fuels - that's the easy one, get rid of your car, and get a bicycle.

(Added) I have to feel the mindless downvoting on this and similar comments is just proving my point. Link for the volcano, impacts still being assessed...

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/03/1115378385/tonga-volcano-stra...

https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2022/egusphere-20...

Correct insofar as we are not completely sure that the ongoing precipitous rise won't tip us over an edge into an ice age.

Yes, that's the joker in the pack. Did you see the papers about the evidence for the ice pack on Greenland having completely melted before? It left me wondering about how much we can trust the ice core readings from there.

Obviously it has all melted off before. Many, many times.

That does not mean anything is wrong with the current ice cores. It only means they go back only as far as they go, and there may be gaps where partial melting happened before accumulation resumed.

Tipping over into a new ice age would not be a better outcome than where we seem headed without that.

Agreed... far worse in fact.

the issue in particular with the ice core melting is how much we can trust the peak readings for things like methane and co2.... what we consistently see in the cores is that these things increase steadily until they suddenly drop. If we are missing the top part of that information, it could be quite important.

> Basically a dark age.

That's the real enormous issue. Beyond the Green New Deal, witch is green in the sense of dollars main color for very few, chemical/radioactive stereotypical waste leaking from abandoned rusty barrels green while being sold as grass green, we have a real issue: oil is consumed FAR faster than natural regeneration and that since many decades so far, witch means that a day perhaps not that far away it will be more and more scarce and finally unavailable. NOT ONLY for fuel, but also for plastic witch happen to be needed for electrical insulation, hydraulic and air insulation, anti-vibration stuff etc etc etc and we do not know how to replace it on scale.

So far no other feasible on scale energy solution exists. Nuclear fission and mountain pumped hydro are the most stable and powerful solution we have, but can't work on scale alone and nothing else is there.

Without energy no matter climate change or something else: any civilization collapse anyway.

You can make steel with just electric heating - Swedish steel companies are making a lot of progress here https://www.reutersevents.com/renewables/renewables/sweden-l...

Oil and petrochemicals have many uses and they will be with us for decades but at some point this century we will get the vast majority of our energy needs from fusion (the sun), hydro, wind and nuclear. It will likely take longer than we think and but might as well start now than keep running a dangerous experiment on the planet

however bad we will handle it, thee planet will be just fine.

global warming is problem not for the planet or nature, but for humans.

if all humans will die, and 99% of species die, planet will still be ok the nature will still live on.

just that our last record of existence for anybody else to find will be "we were stupid".

> PVs have finite lifespan

And your car doesn't? What kind of argument is this?

My panels have 25 year warranty, whats the warranty on a diesel generator?

> questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished.

Petromechicals have no relevance to Climate change and CO2 emissions. You can keep using single-use bags and straws and throwing them into landfill untill you use up all the oil on earth.

They have relevance to our health, i.e. microplastics, but thats a separate problem.

> It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse.

You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime?

Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce

In theory, bootstrapping will eventually be complete.

The stronger statement is true: as green energy becomes increasingly cheaper than dirty, industries will transition to clean wherever they can. New industry will start out using cheaper green, and green generation capacity is almost all new.

Saying things like "Eventually" and "In 10 to 20 years" bypasses the important question of how to manage the transition while minimizing suffering, whether via starvation, economic disruptions, or continued negative climate effects.

Personally, I'm not doubting that we will achieve a decarbonized and sustainable energy infrastructure. But that's not the point. The point is how will we get there, and are we being realistic about the challenges and requirements to effectively make the transition? Are we being realistic about the energy and materials needed to build our sustainable power generation and delivery network?

This is the approach that all the other forecasters have fallen into and that this article is trying to address. Just as many people thought the irrepressible growth of Internet data, processing power and memory would slow or cease, so is the case that continued investment into renewable power will continue to reduce costs. We don’t have to be the ones that say what technology or materials will be used, just to say that that industry, like ours, has it covered.

The argument that this cannot work is making the argument that NO storage technologies will be good enough, not that just Li-ion batteries won't be good enough.

There are thousands of different battery chemistries. It's an extremely strong claim that all will fail. And there are approaches beyond batteries that use only very common materials. For example, pumped thermal storage, where a reversible heat engine is used to separate heat and cold, then regenerate the work consumed by running off that temperature difference.

> We're probably short of copper.

While copper water pipes still have a market, I don't think we can claim to be short of copper.

Copper prices are actually down quite a bit right now, but that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets(see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-18/tycoon-ru...).

There are quite a lot of analysts claiming we will be short on copper once the green revolution gets under way(remember, you're talking billions of new EVs, generators, increases in electrical distribution, etc). Think about it this way: all the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels(more or less, due to some efficiency gains) will need to be delivered by the electrical network. We're also busy giving improved living standards to the half of the earth that still lives in less-than-modern conditions. We're going to need to use more aluminum(4th most common element in the crust?) or we're going to run out of copper.

If copper price is down, that means we have too much copper, not too little.

reading the post is essential. here is the bit adressing this:

> that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets

If you look at the copper futures chart the current price is below a few peaks but it is still quite high, historically speaking. That is in the face of a real estate crash in China and impending global economic slowdown(a significant portion of which is due to energy malinvestment).

On a related note, the majority of new home construction does not use copper these days(both for cost reasons and performance reasons).

Green energy requires massive amounts of energy to produce. The more we electrify vehicles and the more green energy in the grid, the greener it becomes to produce green energy.

I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce.

The energy payback time for photovoltaics is 1.2 years in north and less than 1 year in the south with such systems typically lasting longer than 20 years. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

That is in line with energy return on investment of fossil fuels.

I'd argue there are multiple concurrent paths to decarbonization, and the combination of continuing research plus market dynamics could lead us to different energy mix than this study attempts to estimate. Besides, I think the world is waking up to the importance of domestic supply chains.

The U.S. blends a lot of ethanol into gasoline, but where does that feedstock go as the ongoing EV transition cuts away traditional consumption? Lot of energy potential there that can be used to synthesize carbon neutral fuels including kerosene, natural gas, and gasoline. Corn->carbon neutral natural gas seems like a reasonably agreeable process with the distribution network and consumers already in place.

Meanwhile, solar thermal / concentrated solar is out of the limelight while research continues. Lots of interesting options when you can generate supercritical steam and provide battery-less storage, especially from materials that are essentially domestically sourced. State of that research: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating...

Baseload from natural gas derived from feedstock + PV + solar thermal with 12h storage + wind + massive transmission investment + corn->gasoline. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat.

Access to power / energy is what wealth is all about today, and has been for over 100 years.

However rapidly a "green energy transition" could possibly happen, if it means reducing access to power / energy, then it means a drop in standards of living. In some parts of the world that means more than merely tightening the belt -- it can mean real hunger, while in many others it might mean a return to poverty, though perhaps not hunger. Moreover, people will probably not accept a permanent (or permanent-seeming) reduction in standards of living.

I'm not sold that this would happen. It seems to me the plan in the US is to add green energy, and then slowly replace the dirty energy with more green. I admit I am ignorant of the plans of other nations, but from where I am sitting I don't see any reason to believe there will ever be a reduction in available energy.

Well, that can't be "rapid". TFA is about a "rapid" transition.

I'm saying that's just politically infeasible unless you define "rapid" as "as fast as we can without impoverishing people" or unless you define it as "damn the consequences, just do it". That's pretty obviously true. If you take the first alternative, however, you have to consider how long these touted savings will take to materialize and the opportunity cost of the investment needed to get there.

For example if you install grid-tied solar panels for your house it will take some number of years for that investment (and upkeep) to pay for itself -- if the lifetime of the installation is 30 years and it pays for itself in 10, it might be worth it, but whether it is worth it will depend not just on the 20 years' worth of savings you'll get, but also on the opportunity cost of the capital needed to fund that solar installation.

Opportunity costs are often hard to gauge, so it's easy to con people with analyses that fail to take opportunity costs into account. The opportunity cost of an investment that will yield "trillions" in savings must be substantial because the investment itself must be substantial (if it was free, we'd have done it already, so it must be substantial!).

Also, all these savings have to be premised on "climate change will cost something comparable", but so far all we have is models that encode the scare function and whose predictions have been consistently failing since their inception. I.e., the savings are probably not real, but the costs of the transition needed to obtain those savings are real.

My understanding is that the predictions have been reasonably accurate. It's just that they have been saying for 50 years that things will be a disaster for us in 50-100 years and people who did not notice any problem after 20 years have declared that all the predictions were false.

But recent scientific papers that do a meta-analysis of past scientific papers have found that the original predictions got pretty good by about 1970, accurately predicting the change we have subsequently observed.

See here: "Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming" https://www.science.org/content/article/even-50-year-old-cli...

They have have not been accurate in the least. I remember when they predicted ridiculous warming of like 7C/century. I remember when they failed to predict the Pause.

According to the article, of the 17 scientific papers they studied from 1970 to 2001, 10 of them were completely accurate and the other 7 were only slightly off, but that error was due to the fact that human emissions did not follow the predicted patterns - when correcting for actual emissions using the original calculations, those models were accurate too.

Are you remembering scientific research papers? Or TV news reporting that claims to cover what the scientists are saying? Because the news often lies about science, but that’s not the scientists fault.

I'm referring to the various IPCC reports from the 00s and teens. They have wildly wrong models.

Hmm. I’d love to see which IPCC reports have been found to be wildly wrong if you’ve got any links. Otherwise this just kinda sounds like hearsay to me.

It is hearsay. The IPCC reports predicted a range of possible outcomes, depending on what we did. We did the things that implied the results they predicted and we got.

Yeah. It sounds like they’ve misunderstood the worst case scenario presented in the reports as a single prediction of fact.

Sigh. It is extremely discouraging that people continue to misunderstand even basic concepts around climate change.

I have come to doubt that they misunderstand, but rather they choose to misrepresent. To lie.

Why people want to lie about an existential threat to civilization is another matter. We know that many who do, via millions of sock puppet accounts on twitter and fb, are paid to do it, but that only defers the question to whoever is paying them. Surely the corporations paying them do not expect to benefit from worldwide collapse.

But I doubt many are paid to sock-puppet HN.

Energy is just one factor, that played a huge role because we come from a world where lack of energy was limiting a lot of things.

The easiest counterpoint is energy efficiency. Often it reduces energy use while even increasing wealth.

The real issues of transition lie in processes that are relatively efficient with fossil fuels and relatively inefficient with electricity (H2 and NH3 production, hydrocarbon production, airplane fuel production)

One thing I've not seen a decent discussion of is what industries benefit from enormous amounts of almost free electricity? Other than the manufacturers of wind, solar, etc systems, how does this effect the economy?

Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?

Aluminium production, desalination, and more

Eventually synthetic fuel will become economically viable.

Eventually is right now.

Hydrogen and ammonia electrolyzers are being built by the tens of megawatts as we speak. Presently for chemical synthesis, but use in fuel cells or turbines is not far behind.

Simple synthetic hydrocarbons follow soon after that.

Hydrogen is still cheaper to get from methane. And synthetic hydrocarbons are still expensive.

But we are moving towards economic viability.

The desired point to get to is to have fossil fuel extraction unprofitable, economically nonviable. At that point even the most ardent deniers of climate change will have to give up fossil fuels or face bankruptcy.

Once you include the risk profile any government which is actually governing (I know this is getting rarer) will want a fair bit of synthetic production capacity to reduce the impact of price shocks.

The costs of ammonia and urea shortages to a country are much higher than the sticker price when trucking and agriculture depend on them.

This strategic capacity investment is sufficient to set off economies of scale which will see the baseline prices start to look less appealing -- even with the current state of massively subsidized fossil fuels.

The hard part is getting neoliberal governments to do the thing that is actually the only economically sane option when they've all got massive conflicts of interest.

Aluminum production is a bit problematic, since aluminum pots cannot be turned off too long without failing (either freezing up or overheating the walls).

This is simple and not that costly to change.

There are retrofit systems that allow a factor of 2 or 3 variability in electricity consumption, and even the ability to completely switch off for a few hours can smooth demand if it's planned rather than last resort.

This allows a country like Australia to turn on or off 3-5% of its total electricity demand which is a decent chunk of the duck curve.

it looks like most cities in the world -- excessive, 24-hour, advertising and safety with electricity.. the external costs of everything fossil-fuel are not at all inline with the reality of what is happening with Climate now

In the UK it already means all the electric car drivers program their cars to charge when it gets really windy (or did).

Once grids implement a sane variable pricing system and manage transmission capacity properly electricity prices are unlikely to go zero or negative.

EVs alone will probably soak up excess demand (& contribute back when pumped storage starts running dry).

I think it will be important as we transition to EVs to have more energy available.

In Ontario, the typical family home uses something like 750 kWh/month on average. If you estimate 5km/kWh (roughly right?), and presume a car is driving something like 1000 km/month, that's an extra 200 kWh/month needed, about a 25% increase.

But in the less developed parts of the world, a car might just be a much larger component of personal energy use- perhaps most of it.

Hydro is very hourly. During peak times, we use about 2x the electricity used at night. The grid is built for the peak.

Thus, as long as people don't charge during the absolute peak (about 2hrs a day) there's no capacity issue at all.

Ultimately, any industry using process heat will benefit, by using resistively heated thermal stores when power is cheap.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/could-storing-electricity-in-white...

https://rondo.com/

Desalination might be the best use for excess generating capacity, after the local storage is all charged up.

(Desalination costs >140x less energy than extraction by current dehumidification methods, although a recent advance in the latter may vut this to just 60x.)

Then, pump the desalinated water up to high-altitude reservoirs.

In some places (e.g. Northern California) that could be as simple as vaporizing the water and letting the wind carry it to the mountains, to be rained into reservoirs.

Desalination might then amount to pumping seawater through greenhouses and exhausting the humid air, much more cheaply than forcing it through membranes. There is no need to get every last water molecule out, as there is a plenty of seawater. The only cost is pumping. Outgoing effluent may be used both to pre-warm incoming water, and assist pumping via directly coupled turbines.

Less-concentrated, cooler effluent is better for ecosystems it drains into. It could also be be made to capture and carry away atmospheric CO2, on its way out, with enough lime added to maintain pH. Cement makers might operate these systems to avoid carbon taxes.

Only for solar/wind/pumped storage/biomass though.

Not for nuclear power:

>We constructed an additional scenario in which nuclear plays a dominant role in replacing fossil fuels, but this is much more expensive than the other scenarios. For example, using a 1.4% discount rate, the expected NPC is about $25 trillion more than for the No Transition scenario.

I'm willing to let the EU place their bet on this, and be the 2nd mover instead of the first one.

Early bird may get the worm, but the 2nd mouse gets the cheese.

Can we really build batteries at the scale needed for this? I’m a bit skeptical.

Why? The materials needed for LiFePO4 batteries are very common, and we only need a few dozen large factories and refineries.

Compared to the size of the fossil fuel extraction industry, it's tiny.

The only question is how quickly we can build up to the scale needed, not if we can.

Phosphorus is essential to growing food and shortages have already begun.

There's no shortage of phosphorus. As prices go up extraction from human waste becomes profitable and all municipalities just do it. We invest in closed loop systems we stop having to think about energy and agricultural inputs as extractive, there is minimal possibility of "shortage" it's just a closed-loop system that occasionally needs to be topped off a bit.

You don't "just do" anything on that scale.

But you do them.

We have a shortage of refined Lithium and Phosphate. We have no shortage of the unrefined elements in profitable concentrations.

I mean, that's what this study is about. There is extensive discussion of the cost, production, and technology trends of batteries in the full text.

Recently I saw on HN that Australia has a path to >98% renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro) with only 5 hours of battery storage. That’s a lot of value for less battery backup than I would have thought.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32567994

Do you believe it? Solar+wind has had several notable failures so far when overcast skies combined with windless conditions. Hydro probably helps to a great degree though.

Rare dark/calm periods can be countered by storage technologies other than batteries. These technologies typically have lower efficiency than batteries, but that doesn't matter when they're only rarely called on. For these technologies, low per-energy-stored capital cost is much more important than high efficiency. As an example: hydrogen can be stored in solution-mined salt caverns for as little as $1/kWh of storage capacity.

Context my friend. Read what OP and I are talking about and note how your post has nothing to do with it.

We're certainly not discussing things which are currently in the realm of unrealized dreams.

Please do not post shallow, dismissive, uninformed remarks. When you have nothing to offer, as here, you need not post at all.

I was giving a solution to the obstacle you pointed out. It doesn't get more relevant than that.

Sorry for my tone.

Op mentioned someone doing a simulation that claimed that scaled up solar+wind+hydro generation with only 5 hours of storage capacity would be sufficient to meet the needs of Australia. That seems odd given that cloudy, windless conditions can last for days in many cases. You would at least need sufficient storage+hydro capacity to cover several days worth of shortfalls from wind+solar.

Battery systems are great. Pumped hydro storage is great. But I'm unaware of such systems coming anywhere close to the capacities required in the near term.

At this point, the hydrogen infrastructure is years away. It looks like hydrogen storage underground is sufficiently proven to be feasible, but there are a host of other issues in the hydrogen energy chain that need to be addressed, most notably green generation at scale.

Green storage at scale does not exist yet because the equipment to do it has not been built yet.

The equipment has not been built yet because the factories to build it are still under construction, and because money is still overwhelmingly better spent building out renewable generating capacity needed to charge it from. Storage you cannot fill up is wasted money.

People responsible for keeping the grid operating are not at all worried about their ability to continue, using renewables and storage that will be built.

In places and times where renewable generation falls short for longer than local storage can cover, energy will be imported from places with an excess, via transmission lines or shipments of synthetic fuel, most likely liquified anhydrous ammonia. Until that is available in sufficient quantity, they will burn NG during those shortfalls. The amount burnt will be much, much less than is today.

Producing and then storing hydrogen underground takes very little of "hydrogen infrastructure". H2 may be generated, stored, and drawn down all within a single facility built over or near the underground storage cavity. The power involved may be moved in or out by transmission lines.

I thought the other poster's comment was relevant, so I didn't answer (I posted an earlier comment being replied to). FWIW, I instead would have suggested that natural gas could cover any shortages, since this type of power is easy to turn on and off, and fits more with the theme of "this is potentially possible today".

The simulation over produced energy from green source. Looking at the chart - looks like the wind power alone was enough to satisfy the grid if available. Given that, I do think it's possible that a mere 5 hours of backup can keep the grid 98% renewable, turning to hydro when solar + wind is not enough. Also solar / wind may be somewhat inversely correlated and north / south Australia also may have different weather patterns.

Given a large enough sampling of the world, I'd imagine it would be easier to find the wind / solar power you want, although politics could potentially make that harder.

Natural gas could well be cheaper, if it's available and the CO2 charges aren't extremely high. Hydrogen is there as a rebuttal to claims that RE can't reach 100% of the grid. It can, and the evidence indicates it will do so more cheaply than a solution involving new nuclear power plants, unless the cost of the latter can be radically reduced.

the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it seems to be highly dependent on solar mass adoption

You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.

yes and no - each day it is game rules plus the ability to negotiate; elected officials come in all flavors

Isn't it too late for that now that the power imbalance afforded to Capital owners is so disproportionate?

I think that's what transpired from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"

History is long, and capitalism as we know it is only a couple centuries old (and that's being generous). It's easy to forget that there was a before because it's very common to frame even old economic systems in modern terms, but things changing is the only real constant. There'll be an after too.

How do you define capitalism, I’m curious, in this context? What was it 200 years ago that made it different from 400 years ago?

The industrial revolution and the beginnings of a global liberal trade order pretty substantially changed the shape of the world's economic system, even if sometimes people call predecessor systems like mercantilism a kind of capitalism.

But if you want to extend the time horizon to 400 years (ie. to the beginning of the end of feudalism) that's still not that long in the grand scheme of things.

That said I don't really know if I buy that we're in that system anymore either; I think history books will probably eventually recognize a shift starting around the collapse of Breton Woods and that we're currently in a long and increasingly painful transitionary period that we're in denial about to something we can't yet describe.

But I Am Not An Economist (nor do I want to be one), so who knows.

Mercantilism definitely is NOT a kind of capitalism. Adam Smith and other thinkers during the Scottish Enlightenment were specifically arguing against mercantilism. The Cron Laws in England were even successfully repealed by on of Smith's students.

I mean, I agree with you (I just said sometimes people call it that, not that it is that) but I don't think anything you said really contradicts it being a kind of capitalism. After all Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky disagreed literally violently with each other but Soviet Communism is still a label that contains all their efforts and systems.

Right but they were fighting over the direction of a type of political economy that predated all of them. Smith and other original thinkers that framed capitalism did so in opposition to mercantilism. Capitalism was a reaction to. And in many ways criticism of mercantilism.

Did Adam Smith invent capitalism? Did he advocate for capitalism? I still don’t really understand what we mean by capitalism

He is often called the "Father of Capitalism", based on his two surviving works The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). He is also often referred to as a founder of modern economics.

In this case what we mean by capitalism loosely is a system of private property, free/open trade, market based pricing mechanisms, economic decisions being made by individual actors, etc.

Right, he burned his other work.

So, private property was certainly there before Smith, as were individual economic decisions. But, there was a lot more price standardization and government planned trade.

So, is capitalism the same as a market economy? I feel like there are endless debates about capitalism and socialism but they are tribalized notions without clear definitions. Eg, are market regulations anticapitalist if they are government imposed or are they procapitalist if they support greater market health?

> So, is capitalism the same as a market economy?

Not exactly, but that is a necessary condition. I think another necessary condition is that prices are set by the market and that the state isn't deeply involved in trade. Obviously there are grey areas, but it seems pretty clear that the export focused state trade policies of mercantilism were not capitalism.

You can buy stock in those companies and get your share of the profits.

On the one hand, the ability to usefully interact with the stock market is very limited for the majority of people, as they do not have the extra income to invest. It's very much a system in which the lower class do not get to meaningfully benefit from most the time.

On the other hand, the companies will be made of people, expand by hiring new people, and pay these people with those profits, so much of the money will make it to people.

Companies making lots of money is not a problem. Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. I really hope Apple and Google's massive saving are stored by being reinvested in some way and aren't just entirely removed from the economy, because that would be a shame. I suppose even if they were just stored in a bank that would be used as capital for loans, so maybe it's not that bad.

> Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy.

Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Even money in a checking account is invested. (The banks invest it, that's why they offer free checking accounts. They're not a charity.)

The majority of people do invest in the stock market.

> the lower class

is not the majority. Even so, brokers like Robinhood have made it easy for anyone with a phone to invest.

> Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it.

Russian oligarchs invested vast amounts of money into super yahts and luzury London real estate, which sits empty 360 days a year.

Is that productive investment?

I bet you own some toys you don't use, too.

A yacht and a luxury apartment ain't worth spit in the context of the global economy. Besides, they might be good investments.

The original question was - is the money in corporate warchests being used productively or is it lost to the economy.

Noone has demobstrated it is beong used productively. O am illustrating that some investments are terrible for the economy.

> Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.

Why do I feel like you're reading half my comments and responding to that?

> The majority of people do invest in the stock market.

You're right. A slight majority, at less than 60%, based on sourced I found.

Is that where we're at now? As long as you're part of that almost 60% then it's all good?

> brokers like Robinhood have made it easy for anyone with a phone to invest.

And my point is that many people don't have enough extra income to be able to usefully benefit from this, regardless of how much easier it's become.

Someone that can only afford $100 a month to invest will see far less benefit than someone that can afford to invest $1000 a month, yet the person than can afford $1000 a month is likely not making 10x the income.

Expecting everyone to be able to benefit equally from stock market gains is ridiculous, yet suggesting people buy stock if they are worried about too much profit being directed towards companies is suggesting the problem is solved by by that, and is thus itself ridiculous.

> Expecting everyone to be able to benefit equally from stock market gains is ridiculous

That's your strawman.

> many people don't have enough extra income

And yet people find the income to buy lottery tickets, go to the movies, go to the bar, etc. Investing does mean giving up some of this spending.

> Someone that can only afford $100 a month to invest will see far less benefit

Of course. But they are also seeing far more benefit than not investing.

Remember that Gamestop stock craze a year ago? Many people playing that game were very low income people, including kids. Somehow they did have money to invest, when they thought it was worthwhile.

> That's your strawman.

If it's a strawman than your original statement was a non-sequitur, as I cover below.

> Of course. But they are also seeing far more benefit than not investing.

I believe your statement was that people can invest in the stock of these companies that would theoretically be getting most the profit to get "your share" of the profits, as opposed to it being slurped up by the wealthy.

This isn't about benefiting in some small way, it's about the benefit not ending up disproportionately in the hands of those that already have it. That was the context in which your statement of how you can just buy stock to get your share was made, because that's what this thread of the conversation was about.

> Remember that Gamestop stock craze a year ago? Many people playing that game were very low income people, including kids. Somehow they did have money to invest, when they thought it was worthwhile.

You mean the bunches of young people that took out loans to invest, or took their saving from living at home with their parents that they could have used to actually become independent? Is that what we're encouraging now? Because that was my take on that situation. A bunch of desperate people taking a risky gamble that happened to pay off, at least for some.

> disproportionately

You get the benefits in exact proportion to how much you invest in it.

> You mean the

Yes. And if they used the money unwisely, they're responsible for the results. The point is, they got the money, and were able to invest it.

The same thing happens to wealthier people - if they invest the money unwisely, they lose it.

> You get the benefits in exact proportion to how much you invest in it.

So if you started off poor, you have nothing to invest and you will be poor forever. Nice.

Are you even arguing in good faith? Do you think this encourages hard work?

You know what you are encouraging? Crime. Or a revolt.

Because thats what people do when they realise that playing fair won't let them get ahead.

I would rather the value be sucked up by those who contribute towards creating it.

I hope many companies get filthy rich transitioning the US to a carbon-free economy. I hope we mint a ton of greedy billionaires in the process.

That sounds like a great deal for everyone!

I would say that's a pretty optimistic prediction. The cynical prediction is that this rapid energy transition simply doesn't happen.

> will just become profits for the companies ... greed

Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.

Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.

A free market doesn't have to be a perfect free market in order to work well.

Right: it has to be carefully regulated to work well. The word "free" here is carrying more than it is rated for.

You need regulation to make a free market, otherwise they trend toward monopoly/duopoly/fixed markets.

You misunderstand the meaning of "free" in the phrase "free market".

Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that Adam Smith was a vociferous advocate of regulation. Because "free" was not "unregulated" in the original conception, it was rather "open to any participant, such that they have the opportunity to benefit", which as we have noted over the past 300 years of economic history requires regulation and enforcement mechanisms (funded by taxes).

I guess there are varying definitions of "free market". I was going off of Wikipedia:

> In economics, a free market is an idealized cognitive model of an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority.

Adam Smith is mentioned later on in the article though:

> For classical economists such as Adam Smith, the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. They say this implies that economic rents, which they describe as profits generated from a lack of perfect competition, must be reduced or eliminated as much as possible through free competition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

Also much more consistent and predictable energy prices which will be huge.

One of the authors, Doyne Farmer, was among those who invented chaos theory, noted in "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick, back when (1987, if you can believe it, 35 years ago).

I am just curious about manufacturing capacity of these green energy gadgets in Western World. When I look at the parts for my solar installation everything is made in Asia. My system is rather simple: 4-6 panels each ~400 Wp and stupid single phase inverter. That battery production isn’t a thing in the West is already well known fact. In my eyes this green energy transition totally depends on factories in Asia. And builds strong dependence since nothing can be made domestically (at least no mainstream solar panels/electronics in Germany).

Battery production capacity is becoming more decentralized, as countries with large production capabilities stay somewhat stagnant but other countries build factories. China's percentage of world battery production is expected to drop over the next few years while most other countries are expected to increase production capacity.[1] See Tesla's investment in the gigafactory or Panasonic's investment in battery manufacturing in Kansas for examples of this happening. Germany specifically, since you mention it, is expected to surge quite a bit in the global battery market.

1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1249871/share-of-the-glo...

P.S. I suggest opening the statista link in a private tab, I just noticed the second time you visit it you are paywall blocked.

yeah that and pretty much every computer in the world

But the machines that make "computers" are designed and produced in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

If you know how to make the tool, you probably know how to make the product.

Only theoretically. In practice, it takes a lot of know-how unseen by the public to make a product in a manner that is price-competitive against other players in the market.

Europe is obviously technologically capable of building chips and assembling functioning laptops that are ready for consumption, since as you pointed out they are capable of making the machines that make the chips; but that's still a long way from saying that they can start churning out Macbook Airs.

> That battery production isn’t a thing in the West is already well known fact.

Er, no. 13 large new battery factories are expected to come online in the US in the next 3 years.[1] General Motors is building four. Ford is building three. SK Innovations is building two. Stellantis (Fiat, Chrysler, etc.) is building two. Volkswagen and Toyota are building one each. This doesn't include Tesla, which isn't saying. China's ambassador to the United States is now complaining about the US cutting China out of the battery supply chain.[2]

[1] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Ramps-Up-Batte... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-15/china-s-e...

The EV components’ raw materials (battery materials and rare earths) are largely controlled by China [1][2]. They may not control the chain end to end, but they have a strangle hold specifically on raw material processing/refinement.

Many of the EU/U.S. battery factories will import lithium chemicals from China, at least for this decade.

[1]IEA 2022 report, see page 5 on battery materials supply chain share by country: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-supply-chains-of-ev-batte...

[2]WSJ article on China’s monopoly on rare earths: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-set-to-create-new-state-o...

The big rare earths mine at Mountain Pass, CA is back online.[1]

The MP Materials magnet plant in Texas is supposed to start delivering to GM in 2023.[2] Although Google Earth shows a vacant lot at the announced location. Groundbreaking was a few months ago.

Australia is the largest producer of lithium ore. Over 50% of world production. China is down around 6%.

Lithium Americas finally got approval this year to build an open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass, Nevada. Supposedly construction should be starting about now.[3]

Things are moving forward in this area.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Pass_mine

[2] https://mpmaterials.com/articles/mp-materials-begins-constru...

[3] https://www.lithiumamericas.com/usa/thacker-pass/

My point wasn’t about the sourcing of natural resource.

It’s about the steps within supply chain, most of Australia’s lithium is refined/processed in China[1].

It will take roughly a decade for other countries to ramp and move back down the learning curve for refining/processing capacity at market cost. China’s control over this bottleneck step won’t change for this decade, as they continue to consolidate state investments.

Yes countries are catching up in sourcing natural resources, but the processing into chemicals and then components are still mostly done in China. For example, most battery cathode materials are made in East Asia, and battery factories import them.

[1] “Most Australian lithium is exported to China, accounting for over 85% of total value in each month of 2021 and over 94% in each month of 2022 (year to date). In June 2022, $1,128m worth of lithium was exported to China, accounting for 97% of the total lithium exports for that month (Figure 4).” https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/insights-australian-exports-...

Lithium refining technology suppliers:

- Metso:Outotech (Finland) - mostly does dry source minerals.

- SaltWorks (Canada) - mostly does wet source (brines) minerals. They claim a near closed-cycle process for water, rather than needing vast amounts of fresh water.

US Plants under construction or proposed.

- Silver Peak, NV [1]

- Proposed Tesla lithium plant in Texas.[2]

- Miner Piedmont plant in Tennessee,[3]

China currently has about 80% of world lithium refining capacity, but that's rapidly changing. China is a net lithium importer. The big mining countries are Australia and Chile. China is under 10% in lithium ores. New refining plants are being built in Australia, too. Pilbara Minerals in Australia claims to have the largest single lithium mine in the world. They are expanding into refining.[4] The Kermerton plant in Australia, which cut production in half in 2020 due to low lithium prices, is going back to full production and looking at expansion.[5]

The price of lithium has gone up about 8x in the last few years. So everybody in the industry is now expanding. Expect a capacity glut 3-4 years out.

[1] https://archive.ph/2DDdw/again?url=https://www.reuters.com/b...

[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/tesla-proposes-texas-lithi...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/miner-piedmont-unveils-plans...

[4] https://www.miningmagazine.com/plant/news/1409915/lithium-re...

[5] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-16/lithium-expansion-aga...

[6] https://www.dailymetalprice.com/metalpricecharts.php?c=li&u=...

How do you make cement and steel?

Iron ore is reduced with hydrogen. Some carbon needs to be added to make steel from direct reduced iron, but that carbon doesn't need to come from fossil fuels.

Cement needs heat, but it doesn't need heat from fossil fuels. And cement will need CO2 capture in any case -- even today, half the CO2 emission from cement is the CO2 released by decomposing limestone, not from combustion.

Interesting who funded this study: Institute for New Economic Thinking was founded with an initial pledge of $50 million from businessman and philanthropist George Soros . I'm sure researchers try extra hard to not be influenced by the funders and pursue real science. Let's hope they did in this case.

If anyone is curious about the full list of funders:

> This work was supported by funding from Partners for a New Economy (R.W. and J.D.F.); Baillie Gifford (J.D.F.); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 730427 (COP21 RIPPLES) (R.W.); and the Oxford Martin School , through the Institute of New Economic Thinking and the Post-Carbon Transition programme ( LDR00530 ) (M.C.I. and P.M.). This research was also funded by the Economics of Energy Innovation and System Transition project ( EEIST ), which is jointly funded through UK Aid by the UK Government Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation ( CIFF ) (R.W. and M.C.I.).

It would be truly extraordinary if George Soros was able to use his indirect connection to one of eight funders of this study to influence its findings, but I suppose we'll never know for sure.

He founded the lead author’s employer. Am I misreading that?

You are. George Soros co-founded (with two other founders) one of the lead author's three employers 13 years ago. He does not hold any present position in the organization.

Interesting that you plucked George Soros out in particular. Is this /pol/?

I'm aware of how Soros is the Boogeyman for some people but I'm curious as to what exactly you are insinuating? What's the narrative?

The idea is that Soros only gives away money with strings attached.

He expects you/your group to further his political goals in order to continue to receive funding.

Right, but what strings are attached here?

Obviously he only grants money where he wants things to happen.

Peter Thiel and his posse grant money to try to delay those things to get more money into their pockets.

I have stood here before, inside the pouring rain (of trillions)

Complete BS.

Green Energy has radically lower thermodynamic efficiency and energy density than ANY other currently used energy source (especially fossil and nuclear). These two qualities of an energy source have a direct relationship to economic efficiency and utility. Economics and Energy are 1:1 causal - economic growth ONLY occurs with energy growth. Lowering the quality of energy means lowering economic productivity, efficiency and activity.

When they say it will result in "trillions of net savings", this is PRECISELY the same as saying that you can increase profits by driving all costs to zero. It's either fraud or ignorance to claim such a thing.

The thermodynamics and energy density is irrelevant. The external costs of fossil fuels in a scenario without a green transition is so enormous that it can literally crash the current civilization. That means the net savings could also in the worst case scenario be the entire world economy plus all future growth for thousands or even more years.

No. Fossil fuels may be more energy dense But they need to be extracted, refined, transported and warehoused. The costs of greenhouse gas emissions through their environmental side effects are not even part of that calculation.

In the meantime, a wind turbine keeps generating energy as long a there is wind. We can't deplete wind or ocean waves as a resource.

The more we invest in renewable energy, the more efficient per follar speny it becomes.

I downvoted because the first paragraph is dead wrong and needs correcting.

Carbon accounting for fossil fuels absolutely includes extraction, refinement, and transportation costs. Saying that it doesn't undermines everything else you say, because this is easily checked.

Ah, the energy density canard. It's becoming a dog whistle for identifying people who don't know what they're talking about.

Energy density doesn't matter; cost does. It's possible to have a high energy density and a high cost -- for example, nuclear fission.

The sun has lower energy density than a sandwich :P I guess it's useless!

The sun has lower power density than a compost pile. But the energy density of the sun is pretty high. In the Sun's core, the thermal energy of a cubic meter is about the same as the yield of a 5 megaton bomb. The energy that could be liberated by complete fusion of the hydrogen in that cubic meter is even larger.

Please do not post falsehoods seeking to mislead readers. You have been corrected on this point several times before.

> Lowering the quality of energy means lowering economic productivity, efficiency and activity

So you have single glased windows, no insulation and a hole im your roof?

After all, reducing the amount of energy you waste makes you poorer.

If not, the building to passivehouse dtandard would save billions

Critiqued at https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-9-16-cost-of-t... .

'[H]ere are what I believe to be the main problems with the work:

The principal driver of the whole thing is a forecast of rapid and continuous declines in the cost of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The assumption is that costs of these things will continue to decline exponentially without limit indefinitely into the future. From the “Results” section: “We know of no empirical evidence supporting floor costs and do not impose them . . . “ Of the three technologies at issue (wind, solar, and batteries), the one I know the most about is batteries. Here is the Way, et al., chart of price history of batteries and the projection they use for the future:

...

As to continuing rapid declines in the prices of wind turbines and solar panels, I’ll believe it when I see it. Yes there have been substantial declines to date. But at this point these strike me as mature technologies. The main issues in getting them built and operational are mining and processing huge quantities of metals and minerals, forming the metals and minerals into the devices, transporting the (very large and heavy) devices to their sites, and installing them. How are those things going to get cheaper by any substantial amount, let alone another order of magnitude?

The treatment of the energy storage problem in this paper is wholly inadequate, and bordering on the fantastical. The cost fantasies as to short-term storage are discussed above. As to longer term storage, from the Supplemental Information, pages 38-45, it appears that the proposed solution is almost entirely hydrogen, supposedly to be produced by electrolysis from water. (Here, they mostly.call the proposed storage medium “P2X fuels,” somehow implying that it might be something other than hydrogen, much like with New York and its “DEFR” fantasy.). There is currently essentially no existing prototype or demonstration project of this so-called “green hydrogen” anywhere in the world from which realistic cost projections can be derived. (From the 2022 JP Morgan Asset Management Annual Energy Paper, page 39: “Current green hydrogen production is negligible. . . .”). Way, et al., do cite some costs of existing electrolyzers, but I can find no discussion in the paper of the issue that producing hydrogen on a scale sufficient to back up the entire world electricity system is going to require electrolyzing the ocean. And the millions of tons of toxic chlorine gas thereby produced are going to go — where? The problems of dealing with enormous amounts of hydrogen — like explosiveness, embrittlement of pipelines, and the like — are dealt with with a wave of the hand. The creation of a massive green hydrogen infrastructure as the backup for wind and sun hasn’t even been begun by the most fanatical of the green energy crazies like Germany, California or New York. They take one look at the real costs and balk.'

I see his comments section had to explain what pumped hydro was to him.

That's a very poor critique, as the URL, the title and the first sentence would suggest. Bad even by the low standards of these things generally.

edit: Turns out the author runs a climate change denial think tank:

https://www.desmog.com/global-warming-policy-foundation/

and has been talking nonsense on this topic for over a decade:

> During a question and answer period following the debate, a question from the audience nearly left Menton stammering. What plausible alternative explanations, he was asked, account for the obvious warming trend shown in actual temperature measurements since the nineteenth century? Menton’s initial response was ridiculous, consisting of but one word: “Clouds.” After an uncomfortable silence ensued, Menton continued: “Cosmic rays. Nobody knows what’s causing it.”

https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/climate-science-on-t...

further edit: topical bit of info about one of the billionaires anonymously funding this "charity":

> Hintze is also chairman of the board of trustees for the Prince's Foundation for Building Community , to which he has donated £683,954 in recent years. In 2009, Hintze received The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy from Prince Charles, who has been a vocal critic of climate sceptics.

> In 2010 during a speech at St James' Palace, the prince said climate sceptics were peddling "pseudo science". In a speech at the European Parliament a year ago , the prince said climate sceptics were having a "corrosive effect" on public opinion and were playing a "reckless game of roulette" with the future of the planet. Last December, Hintze replaced Hylton as his charity adviser with Major William Mackinlay, Prince Charles's former equerry.

Worth noting that the Hylton fellow mentioned was ousted as part of a political scandal mentioned further up this article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150817181047/http://www.thegua...

OK. But what about the idea that renewable energy costs have no floor?

That’s not the claim in the article.

From the article:

> For example, as shown in Figure 3B, past floor costs used in IAMs have already repeatedly been violated. We know of no empirical evidence supporting floor costs and do not impose them (see Document S1 section “The use of floor costs in endogenous technological learning models”).

So there is no claim that there will not be a floor. Just that the floor costs have been wrong for decades, and imposing them has led to extremely wrong predictions. So including them in an analysis is likely to again mislead rather than help.

Also, there’s a whole bunch of discussion about not using floor costs. So the “critique” is not much of a critique since it does not engage with the actual claims being made and the detailed explanations justifying those choices.

I'm not seeing this as a distinction that makes any difference in the criticism.

So you think it’s better to include a factor that is unknowable and whose inclusion has consistently led to wrong analysis when the exclusion of that factor would have historically led to better results?

I think it's better to make an estimate than to assume the decrease will continue indefinitely, yes. I do think that.

If we assume historical experience curves continue, that means there is no floor, except in the sense that costs are still nonzero when renewables reach 100% of the world energy supply.

In that vein, expanding solar to supply the entire world will (on the historical experience curve) reduce module prices by another factor of ~4. Costs will continue to decline after that as modules are replaced, but that's an ever decelerating process that approaches, but never reaches, zero.

storage (and grid stability in general) is always the crucial achilles heel to renewables and it's always handwaved away with fantastical arguments positioned squarely against nuclear (here, springing up a whole global hydrogen economy out of nowhere). it's frustrating to see so much needless internecine fighting when nuclear plus renewables is the most viable answer we have right now to a fossil fuel free future. we need to be laser-focused on removing coal from our energy present, let alone our energy future.

coal is still nearly 30% of the electricity generation in the US (and 11% of total energy consumption). if we'd just kept building nuclear like we had between the 70s-90s, we'd be coal-free right now (other than that the bit used by industry, which is about 10% of the total coal use, and 1% of total energy consumption).

Not to mention, most of the big problems facing us now can be reduced to an energy problem, given low enough energy costs. From desalination, to carbon sequestration, to cement, to production of hydrogen and carbon-neutral liquid fuels, to ammonia production, to even peak phosphorus, at some kWh price point all of these just become "throw electricity at it". Excess energy can always be used (in theory). Renewables plus storage still means cost per kWh increase at certain times or conditions.

We need every fossil fuel plant around the world offline yesterday, and every coal plant offline 50 years ago. The anti-nuclear sentiment really is a shame.

Building nukes would bring climate catastrophe nearer.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-california-ke... we are already getting gigawatts from batteries.

And what do you make of the argument that nuclear takes too long to ramp up construction? I mean Biden’s infra legislation does include support for nuclear and California just decided to keep open its last plant, but the solar/batteries combo is so cheap, easy, safe and decentralized (which a lot of the California libertarians like) that nuclear can’t compete really.

Right, all the existing nukes will be mothballed as unable to pay for their own operations, except where tax- or ratepayers are forced to subsidize it.

Then, the actual cost of every kWh they ever delivered will jump up as the enormous capital cost is suddenly amortized over many fewer kWh.

The phrase "Achilles Heel" implies it's a fatal, unsolvable problem. But the cost of dealing with intermittency of renewables is looking like it's not bad, especially if one takes into account all the ways it could be dealt with (like thermal/cold storage out at the edge of the grid.)

“could” being the operative word. so much could happen, but what’s currently realistic is more sobering. currently, we have no way of realistically storing the magnitude of grid-stabilizing power required by intermittent renewables. even all the car batteries in the world are not anywhere close to enough, and that’s after 2+ decades of mining and manufacturing. pumped hydro is similarly limited. molten salt storage? decades. kinetics? decades.

but no one is saying we stop renewables. what we need to be saying is that we resume nuclear (primarily a mediopolitical problem) and do away with coal as fast as possible while we sort the storage issue out over the coming decades.

At some point caution becomes excessive and obstructive, dismissing a possibility you don't like until after it's been rolled out and solved the problem. A reasonable assessment should look at the technologies and judge how likely they are to work.

All the technologies are now subject to ever-increasing economic incentive to make them work. There are trillions of dollars riding on this. The world could spend a quadrillion dollars on energy over the next century. It doesn't get much bigger than that.

If there is anything retarding any of these technologies, it's competition from others. In the end, you'll see most of them failing to come out on top. But that will just be a sign there were better options, not a sign that these failures couldn't have also done the job.

Molten salt storage, btw, isn't IMO terribly reasonable; there are much cheaper media in which to store heat, like sand.

Factories to make storage media are under construction today, as we speak.

Do you imagine they will not be operated? Or, that what they build has not already been shown to work before they got investment to build?

We don't have much storage because we have not built storage yet. After we build it, we will have it. Is this hard to understand?

At the moment, spending on storage would be foolish, because there is nothing to charge it from. But we will need those factories ready to operate when we do begin to need storage.

> producing hydrogen on a scale sufficient to back up the entire world electricity system is going to require electrolyzing the ocean

This statement seems false unless you take it to somewhat tautologically mean that electrolysis could use seawater as an input. The quantity of water in the ocean is vast, we could remove enough hydrogen to store 5 years of world energy usage and that would still be a tiny fraction of the water in the ocean. Less than 0.0001%, probably less than that.

* Liquid water in the ocean 1.37e21 kg * Roughly 1.37e20kg of hydrogen * Roughly 120 MJ of hydrogen/kg * Annual energy usage is 5.387e14 MJ * So we require roughly 4.489e12 kg of hydrogen, or 0.00000003% of the hydrogen in the ocean.

I feel like most of the "real costs" of green hydrogen are overstated. There don't seem to be any actual impediments. It's true that current prices are high but hydrogen electrolysis presently costs maybe 5-7x what natural gas does for unit energy. This is expensive but economies of scale have to at least cut that in half if we did it at scale and it's very much within reach. (And it seems plausible that economies of scale cut it down even further.) Yes, people are balking but that's why we need to just subsidize it until costs come down.

I'm honestly tired about PR positions written or referring some beancounters ideas of the world, regularly completely detached from the real world.

Personally, smelling rodent early enough I've built a new home, airtight as needed/possible, well insulated, with a (still rare these days) heat-pump VMC, other heat-pumps for heating (water-water) and hot sanitary water (air-water), a small p.v. plant with lithium storage enough to being fully autonomous when heating is not needed and partially autonomous in winters months: the result is simple autonomy is not achievable, nor real economy to pay back the huge investment.

I mean, I do not invest to earn in money but to guarantee comfort of life in "bad water" expecting unreliability and high services prices, but in monetary terms it's a TOTAL FAIL. Heat pumps can potentially last around 10 years, lithium battery being used very little (daily 15% authorized DOD + eventual blackouts) perhaps the same. Inverters probably can last more, so solar panels, but they'll probably be not much interesting to keep after that amount of time. Long story short ~60k€ for just 10 years of usage. Even with ARTIFICIALLY skyrocketed prices (which is a crime against humanity than in Democracy demand justice, like life-long sentences, outside Democracy demand simple brutal revenge) economically is a total fail.

If I add a BEV to the mix is even worse: so far NOTHING is really designed to work on p.v. so even being a WFH worker, so able to recharge a car at home when the Sun shine witch might be most of the time, NO DAMN VEHICLE on sale offer a standard data port to talk to a p.v. invert and get ONLY available power from the Sun like stationary BMS/batteries do (so something we already have at commercial level of evolution), equally almost no vehicle can act as a battery to the home, very few offer a 240V AC inverter with 3kW maximum but NOTHING really integrated nor integrable. Similarly the same happen for hot water where only few systems offer modbus PARTIAL control of the system from a central energy management device witch is normally something home-made since on sale there is again essentially ZERO to really try the self-consumption route. Why such route? Because is the only meaningful choice technically speaking.

Yes, you are reading correctly: keeping a national grid stable with big p.v. plants it's simply IMPOSSIBLE until we get superconductive global grid (and I'm not sure if it's possible in that case either). AC national grids are designed to sustain a slowly changing mean load, when the load change fast controlling the grid frequency is a nightmare. That's why the big push to BEV dreaming an surrealist scenario of soooo many connected batteries on wheel that keep regulating the network frequency or offload such tremendous costs to individuals.

Those who really think we can run NOW/in a decade the world on renewable can be classified in two categories: dreamers completely outside the real world, not much different than children dreaming Star Trek or CRIMINALS who try a hyper-big scam fully know the outcome. You do not have to believe but to know, so since we are on HN just try to design/outline such renewable economy being honest.

People who insist things cannot be done get in the way of the people out there working very hard doing them.

If you cannot help, at least stay out of the way.

All of the stuff you say you will replace in 10 years will be much cheaper by then.

Ah sure, since I've invested more than half a million euros in the "green tech" studying it and draw my conclusions and they are far different from the current propaganda I have to shut my mouth.

I can help actually, those who want that help, for instance suggesting to ARREST for crime against humanity top neoliberals in chiefs from G8/T20 to "World Government" [1] to top companies CEOs from pharma to energy stating clear to their subjects that they can do their best to cooperate building a new Democratic society or face a fierce revenge by an angry crowd who will not likely recognize humans rights on those that never recognize them.

In the meantime start debating/planning a MASSIVE de-urbanization since that's the sole way I see to evolve cities to something sustainable, targeting a vast riviera without much hubs except few districts who need to be dense for specific needs, from schools to automotive. Targeting the same evolution of IT from big mainframes to clusters of small machines.

Clearly state that ALL critical sectors like health, weapons, energy, TLCs, roads and water of a country can't NEVER ever anymore be private nor a mix of private and public bodies and trying that from the public is high treason, from the private is an attempted coup.

Creating PUBLIC ONLY research centers with funds and religious separation from the private sector to craft the evolution of the humanity not just the one of a very small cohort of oppressors.

Proposing a military service following the classic Swiss model: both sex from 18 to 28 one PAID month per year of guerrilla like training with weapon and ammo at home only AFTER being trained and check, so in case of attempted gov. coup protests would know what to do and since both parties are armed and trained both party remain peaceful fully knowing that being violent means ending in a bloodbath with no winners.

Because yes, the green new deal is not about ecology nor pollution but a new society designed like adolf hitler dreams who are now Klaus Schwab & friends dreams.

Of course veeeeery few seems to agree with that so the society keep going in it's suicidal way. My equipment's in 10 years will be probably irreplaceable due to a deep social collapse that demand at least 30 years to recover and in any case will cost more and more because their target is not a "green" revolution but pushing people to poverty to steer them better.

[1] https://www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/

Will be much cheaper by then provided society does not collapse first. If it does, replacing them will be among the least of your problems.

Roving bands of supersonic aluminum Nazi hell zombies from beneath the hollow Earth may figure prominently among the latter. (Maybe they do already?) But securing dietary calories would probably present more frequent difficulty.

So your theory is "let's try and HOPE we will be able before the society collapse to make the new deal works"? If so consider a thing: that's a CRIMINAL act even in case of desperation. A society MUST never act without basis.

A company can, and individual can because there is a society around to help, the whole society can't because if something goes wrong there is exactly no one around to help.

In desperate cases desperate measures are meant to still reach a probable, defined outcome, like deciding to leave many alone, facing unrest etc BUT never hoping for something new to arrive in time: science and industry do not work like that and in general do work only when there are comfort condition for a long period of time.

Personally in case of a society collapse, knowing well we can't live in nature anymore, more than dietary calories I would seek revenge in the meat of those I consider guilty, the topmost figure I can reach with the most inhuman and fierce sentiment BTW...

Apart of that my point is simple: we have something that work, but is not sustainable since we consume resources more than natural reintegration rates. We DO NOT have alternatives so far. The answer must be try to discover them NOT try to push something we know can't scale nor work on scale nor reproduce itself.

With oil you can re-create oil industry. With nuclear you can't but at least you can made tools needed to re-create it. With p.v. and wind power you can't and you can't also create tools needed to re-create panels, inverters etc.

So far we know that we do not have nor we can't have in time a global superconductive hypothetical mega-grid to get stable enough energy supply because on enough part of the world Sun always shining and wind always blows. We do not have no viable solution for energy storage except for small scale needs for limited applications. Let's say we probably even can't have enough batteries to power modern homes for even a small fraction of the total population.

So the theory is: well, at least we can reduce energy consumption. YES, we can, with p.v. (wind provide too little and too inconstant power) BUT we can't connect it to the grid keeping the grid stable without a big and hyper-fast backup (lithium) and that's why originally BEVs was designed: to be always connected in large enough batches to compensate p.v. oscillations quick enough. UNFORTUNATELY so far:

- BEVs on sale have NO integration features for such use case, even for a personal scale like a domestic p.v. + the car as an extra battery talking to home inverters sucking power when the Sun shine, offering power when it's needed;

- nothing is even designed for a nation-wide smart grid;

- no electric appliance on sale is designed to be smart for p.v. integration, even those who actually claim the contrary.

So far we have NO smart-car battery chargers who talk a common and open protocol (let's say via canbus) allowing a human at home or in the car to state:

- charge car battery at {maximum,minimum} SOC {ONLY from p.v,also from grid to reach a minimum SOC at $TIME}

- car, do provide high voltage standard DC power to the home battery-charger/p.v. inverter as demanded not going below $SOC except in case of outage mode where the minimum SOC descend to near-zero.

Nothing is even debated about how to use privately owned cars to backup the grid providing relevant compensation for the service to their owner (please do not cite Tesla, they made proprietary stuff, innovative in general but of a so crappy quality that's a crime asking more than their production costs on sale).

So far no home appliance embed a standard protocol to be centrally controllable by a home server/solar inverter to do the ONLY current reasonable thing: p.v. self-consumption as much as possible.

Essentially anything on sale, sold as a commercial product, is more a dumb prototype made by some who do not even have clear ideas about it's usage. And you thing that's a "tremendous effort the humanity actually made for a better future"? Are you kidding? Let's start outline a real, resonate high-level overview plan instead.

It pleases you to pretend we don't know how to store energy.

But we do. You may fly off on tangents assuming we don't, but do not expect people to go with you.

OK, can you indicate some of such tech? Personally I have a classic LiFeP battery (casually from a Chinese company, like 99% of those on sale) who can actually power my home without heating for a day, can last potentially ten years (6000 recharge "guaranteed"). Nothing that can scale more, behind pumped hydro who demand mountains and water to be done do better, and actually you can't sustainably power a factory from lithium batteries. We do not even know if we can produce enough of them to power just common cars. Oh, and we need planes, trucks, ships etc.

Assuming nothing exists except what you already know about gets you reliably wrong answers.

In fact there are a lot of hills. Few places are very far away from any, even in Nebraska. Any hill may serve for pumped hydro, although those over 2000 ft (600m) and have a natural depression are best. A simple earthen levee suffices, otherwise, with a penstock extending down.

But we also can compress air, for "CAES". And we can liquify air. Both of these are extremely mature technology. Compressed air is cheaply and safely kept deep underground or underwater, and released through a turbine to recover power put in. Liquified air is vaporized with heat from ambient air.

We can electrolyse water and keep the resulting hydrogen in underground cavities, under increasing pressure; both the hydrogen and its pressure store energy. We can synthesize ammonia, to tank and transport, and burn it for fuel in ships and existing combined-cycle gas turbines.

Ammonia synthesized in the tropics or where wind is reliable may be shipped anywhere in the world to fill in for shortfalls of local storage. So, nobody needs much local storage.

Aviation will soon transition to liquid hydrogen because the value proposition is so great. Anybody lagging will find themselves wholly unable to compete. LH2 will be made and banked on-site at major airports, from power delivered via transmission line.

Another simple storage method uses buoyancy, drawing floats down toward the sea floor. Another, raising and lowering a heavy weight in a disused mineshaft. The mineshaft may also contain compressed hydrogen.

Your off-grid domestic batteries are the most expensive way to store energy. But they probably will last you longer than 10 years, just as your refrigerator will probably last longer than 3. In the near future you might come to bank hydrogen instead, and put excess in your car. Your electrolyser will last more than 10 years. The compressor might wear out in time, but is cheap.

Reading your post I can only conclude that no such storage tech usable on scale exists. You talk about potential tech, so far used only experimentally at little scale with many issues.

Hydrogen is a dream and nothing really seems to arrive, beside the obscene complexity and high costs of all existing prototypes. Pumped hydro with small fall and unfavorable orography it's formally still working but practically useless since it cost much and produce very little energy: we basically need a hill for a single home.

grid-connected domestic lithium batteries are the sole effective tech, only at that small scale, with a high but still a bit sustainable cost, actually available commercially. If you want a domestic or city-side compressed-air storage good luck, you'll have to design it as an artisanal prototype. Hydrogen is the very same and so on.

Consider a thing: we need energy NOW and in 10, 20+ etc years. Stating that we have some potential tech that might work at a certain scale in a future is stating that IF we survive without food for a decade well... Perhaps at the end of it we will be able to source some food. Is just a scam, not a plan nor something we can do. In the meantime our national grids falter DUE to the amount of connected renewables that makes the grid load vary too quickly of significant amounts for big power plants to compensate quickly enough. Actually the theory of the new deal is that with a smart-grid (that do not exists so far, while p.v., eolic etc do) and a large private BEV connected (because on average many are connected to the grid at the same time) we can compensate high and low demand peaks allowing classic power plant to keep the network up. So far we have much p.v. because grid connected p.v. works enough (roughly 50% cut in electricity fees, relatively quick break even, not so high initial capex) and wind power have many incentives BUT number of BEV on roads are very modest and none of them is "smart grid ready" with power connection and proper inverter/meter to follow the frequency sucking or pumping energy from/to the grid instant by instant with correct billing as an extra bonus. In most countries it's not even legal inject power from batteries to the grid.

Please tell me with something valid on scale today, something that exists currently, that we can store energy and keep the network up with massive renewables if you know it. I do not. I tried, I follow news etc and see nothing but the offload of many costs to the public, pretending that's a good thing, and an uneven new deal implementation whose results will be a very deep big mess.

All presented with classic PR fanaticism, not much different than nazi propaganda of a new bright future no one feel or foresee in tangible manners. A bit like classic meddle-age church rhetoric that you have to suffer the whole life for a promise of a paradise no one can prove it exists. Again not different than URSS propaganda for a future worker paradise no one see.

Just try to figure out a thing: how much thermal energy you need for your own home. How much electricity and equipment costs you need to heat with electricity. Then extend such computation to the mean citizens try to find how many can afford such investments and if yes how much extra power we need from the grid. This normally suffice without adding industry needs. Because it's already clear that if you live in inner lands (cold nights) or sufficiently at northern/southern latitudes (depending on the hemisphere) most people simply can't choose to go electric without rebuilding the home from scratch and most of them can't rebuild the home.

I see that you are not earnest and mean only to waste my time. Good day.

If you want your model to output a certain result, just make the right assumptions.

If you can suffer the french accent, I believe Jean-Marc Jancovici is making some good points about this issue : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA

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