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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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

> 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 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.

> 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).

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.

> 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?

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.

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