The energy transition will be cheaper than our current infrastructure.
The challenges are not technological nor economical, the challenge is prevent entrenched interests from preventing the best, cheapest, and most environmentally friendly system from taking its rightful place.
If it is truly cheaper, surely the regions least able to afford development would choose renewables every time?
I know there’s lots of measures that show renewables are cheaper, but I suspect a lot of these estimates ignore the huge cost of storage in most places. Most countries don’t have things like fjords to make energy storage cheap.
Renewable energy and battery storage are on tech curves like semiconductors or DNA sequencing. Fossil fuels are not.
There will be no competition within a decade.
Add to that that batteries have been around for centuries, but renewables are decades old, so it makes sense that they are improving in cost so quickly: they are a newer tech.
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy
Batteries are completely on a similar curve, continuously improving at an exponential rate, and as they get scaled up to TWh/year production there is a chance of acceleration of this trend. There is a proliferation of new chemistry and tech in all parts of the battery. We are just at the very beginning.
Of course stuff like Lithium batteries are accelerating, but these aren’t economical for utility scale batteries yet. There’s a good chance they will never be.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/02/us-will-see-more-new...
Based on the latest projects such as this one in Australia [0], building a grid-scale system will result in energy prices increasing by many multiples. Of course it will get cheaper, but I don't see it being cheap enough that it won't have massive impact on costs (I hope I'm wrong btw).
[0] https://reneweconomy.com.au/engie-and-macquarie-to-fund-150m...
There is a lot of fossil fuel development going on that doesn't make sense if renewables are cheaper. Especially in China where panels are actually made. I'm open to an alternative explanation, but I don't think it's inertia. Most industries switch to cheaper tech pretty soon after it becomes available.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-says-it-wil...
China is starting to move in the right direction, but there's a ton of planning lag. China is by far the largest single consumer of solar panels. It also deploys more wind turbines than any other country.
Two limiting factors are China's insatiable need for ever greater power generating capacity of any kind, and the surprisingly rapid uptake of renewables globally which has constrained new production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
and for the fun of it
> Nuclear $6,695-7,547
regarding you question: In large scale projects there is a lot of inertia, especially in less developed areas. Many of these places have just build a conventional grid, and are in no situation to upgrade to renewables.
That being said: some non-industrial countries are actually moving fast towards adopting renewables (compared to developed countries). e.g. Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Brazil.
>The first German Offshore Wind Park Alpha Ventus Offshore Wind Farm with a nameplate capacity of 60 MW cost €250 million (after an initial estimate of €190 million).[21] In 2012 it produced 268 Gigawatt-hours of electricity, achieving a capacity factor of just over 50%.[22] If the overnight cost is calculated for the nameplate capacity, it works out to €4167 per Kilowatt whereas if one takes into account the capacity factor, the figure needs to be roughly doubled.
It also ignores fuel costs, maintenance, external costs of pollution etc.
On a mixed grid this is fine because you just ask your gas plants to up their load contribution and they can do it because they can overbuild fairly cheaply - they just increase their moment to the moment fuel burn. On a theoretical grid which is carbon neutral, you've got a real problem answering that question (in fact on any grid with >30% intermittent renewables you've got a big problem). Storage doesn't save you here either - i.e. the cheapest, largest storage you can build is pumped hydro, but pumped hydro can only be "charged" at about half the rate it discharges. Catching up when you have an outage is not trivial (i.e. you have to overbuild by an enormous amount).
You start adding all those problems together, and solar and wind stop looking "cheap" - they get away with being cheap because very much like coal, oil and gas, they avoid pricing in their own externalities (and no, you can't just ignore power grid outages - you lose the grid you lose water and sanitation in cities, and they "die" within a week).
Which means you get to add that cost onto the cost of whatever renewables you're building - both capital, maintenance, and support infrastructure - which you can't offset. Basically just a flat set of costs on top of whatever building your renewables cost, and not insignificant ones (can't run a gas a plant you don't use without gas, therefore you also need gas infrastructure...)
Cost estimates of attaining net zero are on the order of 100-200% of global GDP. To get this done by 2050 we would need to spend 3-6% of global GDP on the energy transition. This includes all these contingency costs.
The only way to stop gas plants from running would be to ban them from doing so, or charge them a carbon price which means they can't. But, in both cases, the owners then have no reason to hold onto that infrastructure - that's all capital they can't make money off of anymore.
So you are talking about an expensive nationalization of a huge amount of existing infrastructure...or a pretty serious correction to the price of power in the national markets to make it plausible to run these plants in "mostly shutdown" condition while still being ready to go.
Which seems unlikely: if I can make money selling renewable energy, why would I leave cash locked up in an asset which I can't?
Rather, the price to keep those power plants available as a contingency reserve will have to be negotiated and the price will be somewhere which is more than the cost of keeping them operational but less than building new plants and keeping them operational. I guess it is a good way for existing operators to squeeze some little bit from a doomed tech but it won't cost society very much.
Oh and you know... They're a lot cheaper per reliable kWh then any other option (green methane would require solar power to be an order of magnitude cheaper then it currently is - not impossible but it also hasn't happened yet and may not).
If you don't have regularly operating gas power stations any more, then the cost for underproduction protection is going to be a lot higher - because rather then running an extra turbine or increasing fuel burn, you have to justify the whole powerplant and it's sort infrastructure existing.
One good book regarding napkin math was the following (in German unfortunately): https://www.amazon.de/Erneuerbare-Energien-zum-Verstehen-Mit...
I'm interested what you mean about the 'conventional grid' preventing upgrades to renewables?
The more confident an online commenter is of their assertion, the lower the chances it is true.
> On average the levelized cost of electricity from utility scale solar power and onshore wind power is less than from coal and gas-fired power stations,[1]: TS-25 but this varies a lot depending on location.
sorry, I should've said "conventional power generation". I mean it like "using old school tech, like coal and oil".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_developing...
> Renewable energy technology was once seen as unaffordable for developing countries. However, since 2015, investment in non-hydro renewable energy has been higher in developing countries than in developed countries, and comprised 54% of global renewable energy investment in 2019. The International Energy Agency forecasts that renewable energy will provide the majority of energy supply growth through 2030 in Africa and Central and South America, and 42% of supply growth in China.
There's lots of gas plant construction, even in poor countries https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/boom-and-bust-gas-202...
Intermittent generators does not mean an intermittent grid, and in fact by having fewer single points of failure, and ensuring that grid operators are used to dynamic dispatch from intermittent generators, grids like Germany's have become more reliable with the addition of intermittent generators.
It's like ~10 years ago when web apps went from large architectures with a few boxes to cloud-scale operators where random failure was expected. By planning for lots of small, less reliable components, overall reliability increased.
Is it not just because they get backup from French nuclear and they have turned their coal plants back on? I.e. renewables have made things worse?
> The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of “System Average Interruption Duration Index” (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany — where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity — boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours) — both far more reliant on nuclear power — did worse, for various reasons.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
Nuclear is typically not a good thing for reliability. They are big single points of failure, and France was less reliable than Germany. Similarly, Texas relied on nuclear during their massive cold snaps and that foolishness killed people. It takes better planning than "nuclear is baseload" to build a reliable grid.
It's a moot point anyway, since renewables don't stabilize Germany's grid: coal and gas power plants (and imported electricity) do. Renewables are cheap if they are a small proportion of sources or the grid is stabilized by another source. If you need storage the cost simply explodes.
E.g. how many billions of euros were collected within a week after the Notre Dame burned? At the risk of offending a lot of french I will say that the Notre Dame is just a building. In the big scheme of things it is not important. Nobody will starve if it is not re-built.
The problem is 'mental inertia', convenience and (perceived) risk aversion.
If rich countries open sourced all tech related to renewables and made -publicly avable designs for solar panels, batteries, wind turbines and factories that produce them, then it would be a valid question.
Oh, also provide loans because renewables have higher cap-ex and lower op-ex. This factor alone can account for massive difference, as -or countries don’t have cash on hand and can’t access credit.
Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
And a lot of these poorer countries don't have the industrial capacity to build all this stuff even if it was open sourced.
>Instead US tells them not to take loans from China but offers no alternative
Well it depends why. The west tried this and it just ended up bankrupting multiple countries. Eg for hydro, which is also high cap ex, low op ex.
World war two, the example raised the most often, required only increased output. It had no limits on how to get there. This requires both. I really don't think it's like anything we've ever tried to do before.
In particular it wouldn't be this hard to...replace everything eventually when it makes sense. In order to maximally dampen climate change we would need to do this as quickly as possible.
Edit: I also want to add that any project that needs 100-300% of global GDP certainly qualifies as "one to two orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have done." Wikipedia puts the 1940 world GDP at 3,000 billion USD[1]. The manhatten project cost ~$2bn (0.06%). The whole war was estimated to cost the US ~$288bn (9.6%)[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
[2](unreliable but fine for a ballpark) https://www.whatitcosts.com/world-war-ii-cost-united-states-...