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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> "Governments, companies and investors need to get behind clean energy transitions rather than hindering them," Mr Birol said.

Well, yes. There's a lot of investment that will become stranded in the transition, and that's going to try to stop it for as long as possible.

But thanks to other investment, solar cells have become incredibly cheap and we can get a lot of our energy from Big Photodiode.

The battery investment curve is happening as well. Not as fast as anything silicon-based, and you can safely ignore individual dramatic tech announcements, but the power of thousands of engineers each shaving off 0.1% of the cost year on year accumulates.

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>There's a lot of investment that will become stranded in the transition, and that's going to try to stop it for as long as possible.

I wish more people appreciated this. There's a lot of money available to push covert anti-renewable messages.

It gets pumped from think tanks into the media with messaging designed to make the reader feel smart about repeating their "skeptical" take.

It then works its way on hacker news with somebody quite honestly saying something like "I'm pro renewables but...", quite unaware of the money flows driving their beliefs.

Who, for example, will be paying for reworking the stock of old housing in a lot of European countries? Stranded assets are not just an issue for big investors and corporations.

You can pay for a house refit with future fuel savings and governments can add incentives paid for with lower health costs.

The timeline might be long enough that people, especially landlords who don't have to live in the drafty, cold building or pay the fuel costs, won't do it without various carrots and sticks but that's totally different from a stranded asset.

Some of the now paused ideas of needing to modernize buildings would have actually ruled out use of of buildings below certain standards from certain dates - so stranded assets are quite possible.

Payback: Maybe over 30-50 years, but not over 20 or so - so for a lot of older people this isn't an economically viable proposition. Lower health costs? Where does that come from?

That's a "stick", not a stranded asset. The NPV of compliance would need to negative for the asset to be stranded.

If the older people want to sell their home to someone else then they need to do the work. Again, unless that work costs more than their house, which to be clear, it doesn't, then it's not a stranded asset.

If you need a few hundred k to convert in order to still live in your place (not sell it), I'd say that is getting pretty close to stranded asset, because you need to find a lot of money to stay in there. If you don't have the money, it is a stranded asset and I am sure some aggressive investor will happily make you a bad offer.

I'm considering building right now; "a few hundred k" is demolish and redo from the ground up territory for normal housing around here.

The only way you're doing that for a mere renovation is if it's a historically significant building.

Something like 10k per square meter isn't a bad guesstimate for getting to a high energy standard. Then take a large house and you are there. Building and demolishing is way more expensive.

(1) Which currency are you talking in here?

(2) This 98m^2 detached house is listed at €104k to build: https://www.massa-haus.de/fertighaus/einfamilienhaus/lifesty...

This is the cheapest they do, yet a thing costing 10k/m^2 as you suggest would cost nearly a million.

Sorry, €1k per square meter.

You are looking at the cheapest thing to build. Not at all what a townhouse in a city would cost, for example. You cannot just remove all neighbouring walls etc., so really need to do quite extensive work when re-doing things. So, 300 sqm at 1k is a lot of money. When people bought the houses they were often cheap compared to today, so income hasn't grown with property value.

> So, 300 sqm at 1k is a lot of money.

300 sqm also an unusually large house, from what I'm seeing.

It is a fairly typical size for a townhouse build in the early 1900s, for example. Sometimes they are chopped up into apartments these days.

If you are looking in Germany, some cities have more of them, some less (bit dependent on bomb damages and industrial history, I'd say).

When properties are chopped up into n apartments, they should be counted as n separate properties.

I've just looked at the search results for immobilienscout24.de for Germany-wide "houses" for sale — scare-quotes because based on my other searches, quite a lot turned out to be apartments (individual or the whole building[1]) or hotels[2] — out of a total of 164,772 properties only 12,759 were at least 300 m^2, or 7.7%. Even eight percent cannot possibly be counted as "typical".

Of course, it is possible that the people entering info into immobilienscout24 are regularly not paying attention, as this "one room" property with "19 apartments" and "52 garages" suggests: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/146925779?referrer=R...

[1] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/143407389?referrer=R...

[2] https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/147035140?referrer=R...

It is typical for the kind of building I described and they tend not to be on the market much, so not sure how representative your search really is. Entire streets are full of them.

Anyway, even a smaller place clocking in at "only" 100k to get to a higher energy efficiency is a lot of money for some retired person, for example (and lending guidelines don't favor old people).

If the category members don't go on the market in the first place, it was already a stranded asset, this state isn't being newly set due to hypothetical future regulations.

Sorry, no, this things sell well, but usually not much over platforms. They would become tough for some in case of regulation.

It's besides the point anyway, as I was talking about forcing people into difficult to finance things, give up on the place, or distressed selling. Whether that is 100k or 50k or 500k that causes that doesn't really matter at that point.

> Sorry, no, this things sell well, but usually not much over platforms. They would become tough for some in case of regulation.

Ok, I can see that as a possibility, though not one I could either confirm or refute so I'm still uncomfortable with it.

> It's besides the point anyway, as I was talking about forcing people into difficult to finance things, give up on the place, or distressed selling. Whether that is 100k or 50k or 500k that causes that doesn't really matter at that point.

Echt?

To my understanding, a stranded asset is one that cannot be sold for a positive number.

Surely if the cost is significantly smaller than the thing — and I'd expect that if you've got a building that could be mistaken for the apartment building I'm in due to its size, it's valuation is in the millions of euros — then it's still not stranded.

For example, if it costs 300k to fix the whole building, but the whole building is valued at 3M — why wouldn't banks be willing to loan that for the improvements to allow it to be sold?

Roof insulation had a payback (for me) of 3 months last winter - it might have been 2 years at the old gas / electricty prices.

Then you had a great starting point. Replacing a gas heater with a heat pump at sub 1000 euro annual heating costs will not pay back fast, for example.

Most of the UK has the same if not worse starting point. Somehow the culture war decided that loft insulation is proof of the "woke mind virus".

Most of the UK absolutely does not. In order to get payback numbers like that, you basically have to have no loft insulation at all, and previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/sep/27/energy.loft.in...

For a while after that, the government funded insulation top-ups in order to get an impressive sounding number of installs they could brag about, but those had much worse return on investment and that program was killed off a few years later. The thing is that we have an election coming up and a lot of the British press want the party that was in power back then and still is to lose, so they've pushed the narrative that cancelled insulation program would've achieved a lot more than it could've in reality and that people would've been saved from high energy bills if the government hadn't cancelled it for being too woke. There's been similar nonsense about other things like onshore wind for the same reason.

Anyway, at least in the UK the problem is that almost all of the easy, high-return on investment insulation upgrades have been done, and the only way to have a substantial impact is through ones that have payback times in the decades. If the era of zero interest rates is over permanently, that's basically equivalent to saying they'll never pay back the cost in many cases.

> previous government insulation schemes were so sucessful that there were already very few homes left with no loft insulation by 2008

The UK government thinks that by 2020, there were still 8 million homes with lofts and no loft insulation:

> At the end of 2020, 14.3 million properties had cavity wall insulation (70 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 16.6 million had loft insulation (66 per cent of properties with a loft) and 772,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls).

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

edit: updated stats from 2022

> At the end of 2022, it is estimated that 14.8 million properties had cavity wall insulation (71 per cent of properties with a cavity wall), 17.0 million had loft insulation (67 per cent of properties with a loft) and 805,000 had solid wall insulation (nine per cent of properties with solid walls)

Ah. Those government stats only count homes as having loft insulation if they have more than 125mm of it (this is actually documented in the PDF you linked but it's all the way on page 24 so if you just read the summary you probably missed that). In practice there are a lot of UK homes out there with loft insulation that falls short of that because there's rapidly diminishing returns from adding more and it's a lot of extra hassle to put insulation in that's deeper than the joists. Those homes have much, much worse return on investment on adding loft insulation than a house which genuinely didn't have any.

Gas heating is heavily subsidized in most European countries:

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eus-energy-taxa...

When the subsidies are gone - and they will be after Russia's invasion of Ukraine - reality will catch up fast.

Not really, even if the total costs doubles the payback period will be quite long. And that differential taxation needs to change first anyway - blowing up people's heating costs can easily turn into a non-starter.

"There's a lot of money available to push covert anti-renewable messages."

There is also a lot of money to be made pushing pro-renewable messages. There are huge amounts of money to be made from complete replacement of existing products and infrastructure.

You are promoting a mixture of conspiracy theory and a straw man argument.

Who paid for you to write this?

Edit: You're right. There probably wasn't a money flow driving parent's writing. Stupid idea.

Speaking as a greasy capitalist; if I can invest in renewables and make money or resist renewables and make money, why resist?

The issue historically has been people have been claiming that renewables are cheap which were transparent lies. The German Energiewende stands as a stark monument to what happened to anyone silly enough to believe the greens in the 2010s. Even now there is reason to be suspect. But if the situation changes then what people do will change too.

Energiewende, even with its various flaws, has been a good investment for Germany.

If they'd been a bit more aggressive about EVs, home heating and offshore wind they'd probably be even better off but that all got derailed by complaints about costs fanned by climate change deniers and leveraged by opportunist politicians.

Without the cheap renewables subsidising their bills germans would be paying even more for their electricity. If they had maintained their nuclear generating capacity + their current (and ever increasing) renewable capacity - electricity in germany would be on the brink of being free and unlimited.

There is no such thing as a cheap renewable when you need to have coal plant running 24/7 as a backup.

Its cheaper than running everything on coal.

Well that coal runs anyway even if you are not consuming electricity from it.

The coal doesn't run anyway. Look at how UK coal burning fell off a cliff in recent years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_coal-fired_powe...

Conversely, the sun does shine even if you don't put up a solar panel.

It does run anyway. You think that you can switch coal plant on/off like it is a light bulb? It takes a week to heat up a coal plant and it takes a week to wind it down. Do it faster, and you will damage it.

> Coal supplied 1.6% of UK electricity in 2020,[13] down from 30% in 2014.[14] In 2020, coal produced 4.4 TWh of electricity and Britain went 5,202 hours free from coal electricity generation, up from 3,665 hours in 2019 and 1,856 in 2018.[15]

QED your claim is falsified.

I don't care enough to figure out where exactly your mistake is, but the facts prove you wrong: the coal does, as a point of fact, get switched off.

You have completely missed the point. Sorry. I am talking about fact, that coal plant is running 24/7 because it can't be easily switched on/off, which is important for countries like Germany which are using fossil plants as a backup for intermittent renewables. Try to read whole thread.

I'm outright saying you are wrong and your point is false, this is not "missing" the point, it's falsifying it.

That power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, actually does get switched off.

It really, genuinely, does not get kept on 24/7 the way you keep saying it does.

Whenever it does get switched back on, this is considered newsworthy and announced in the media as it "getting warmed up".

If you want to change my mind, don't tell me to re-read your own previous words on this topic, come up with an actual link to a document that says how much coal it uses each day.

Such a source would have to also explain why the following record shows both Annual Output (MWh) and CO2 Emissions (Tonnes) both fell by a factor of about x8 between 2018 and 2020: https://osuked.github.io/Power-Station-Dictionary/objects/10...

UK coal burning fell off a cliff in recent years because there's been a huge push to switch to natural gas, which can be switched on and off much faster and so doesn't have this problem when used as a backup to intermittent renewables. (After Russia invaded Ukraine and natural gas prices skyrocketed, there were actually articles in publications like the Guardian attacking the British government for how dependent this made us on gas compared to Germany.)

That is, basically the only way for the coal not to run anyway is if you switch it off permanently and replace it with non-coal-based fossil fuel plants at great expense, which also requires a bunch of ongoing development of non-coal fossil fuel reserves and production to feed it, something green groups are opposed to. Whilst there's enough already-known fossil fuel reserves to blow past CO2 emissions targets and environmental groups always use this to argue against further exploration and development, those known reserves contain far too much coal and too little natural gas.

Gas may well be better than coal in this regard (and of course gas inherently falsifies TheLoafOfBread's previous implicit claim that renewables must be backed by coal specifically[0]) but coal still can be, and does actually get, switched off.

A quick Google for news about the (singular remaining coal plant in the UK) Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station, suggests that the thing has at least one intermediate state when there is a forecast of excess demand soon-ish.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999558

>Speaking as a greasy capitalist; if I can invest in renewables and make money or resist renewables and make money, why resist?

Because, hypothetically speaking, as a greasy capitalist you already piled billions into coal fired power stations and oil companies years ago.

The capitalists who aren't invested in those things won't resist of course.

If your sense of self as a greasy capitalist relies on a rejection of everything "socialist", then it's easy to choose to resist renewables just because it's something that progressives want.

You may not be able to figure out precisely how they're going to establish one-world-government by replacing ICEs with electric cars, but if you take it as axiomatic, you don't have to worry about that.

That sounds like an attitude that would lead to poverty. I recommend investing in things that make money.

"but what about tire particles?" is one meme that feels like it is right at the intersection of these forces.

Bird strikes from wind turbines is another. Does the person making that argument know or care about other major sources of bird death - cats, window collisions, habitat loss, pollutants etc? Usually not, it's just a convenient one to bring up to discredit the unknown.

Cats and window collisions do kill way more birds than wind turbines, but they are largely birds that are abundant.

Wind turbines are often built in places where much less abundant birds, such as eagles and various other raptors, hunt.

Wind turbines are particularly treacherous to those birds because they have a ridge over their eyes that blocks forward and upward vision (to keep the sun out of their eyes) when they are looking down to spot prey, so even though they have remarkable vision (hence the phrase "Eagle eyed") they can fly right into a turbine in broad daylight.

With cats, vehicles and buildings it's something like 100 million annually while wind turbines it's like 100-400k.

So, not just way more but 200-500x more.

With eagles the numbers killed are in order of hundreds.

Newer wind turbine designs also reduce the number of bird deaths considerably.

The scale of the problem is clearly small, relatively speaking. It would be ignored under normal circumstances, just like the #1 and #2 deaths for eagles currently are, but the carbon industries gave this story some great PR.

Anytime anyone says that, you can respond with this

https://www.bts.gov/content/estimated-national-average-vehic...

Also worth pointing out the weight penalty for EV's has been decreasing steadily over time. One would assume tire emissions would thsu also decrease. Doesn't say tire emissions aren't a problem[1] but it's suspicious people care about it when it's an EV and don't care when it's a 5500lb truck.

[1] Particles from exhaust, brakes, and tires aren't the same[2].

[2] 6PPD-quinone from tires is killing salmon in the pacific northwest.

> But thanks to other investment, solar cells have become incredibly cheap and we can get a lot of our energy from Big Photodiode.

Solar cells have become incredibly cheap because the Chinese government is heavily subsidizing their producers, both financially and in terms of lax environment and worker protection regulation.

In the end they're running the typical VC playbook: use price dumping to destroy the competition and when no one is left (or the political opportunity is needed), squeeze the locked-in customers for all they have.

Chinese subsidies are fairly small compared to the American ones brought in recently.

How is anyone locked in?

People are locked in when they have a roof full of solar panels and dont have to worry or pay an electriciy bill for the next 40 years (and make a little every day shipping the excess back to the grid) - oh those poor locked in people.

Factories elsewhere have been shutting down because they can't compete, which locks us in to buying from China since no-one else will have the ability to produce solar panels in meaningful quantities.

US should do the same. So should f’ing Australia. I dream of the solar farms you could build in the outback here.

You could have end to end mining, production and installation of solar power plants and start exporting. Imagine then sending that energy over to europe to power their night too!

You can't lock a consumer to commodity. Especially when cost of switching is zero.

The problem is, the cost is not zero. If China cuts us off tomorrow, we can kiss any and all aims of renewable, sustainable electricity good-bye - they have 75% of the world's production capacity, only Vietnam has 6.8%, the rest languishes at < 4% [1].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu...

> solar cells have become incredibly cheap and we can get a lot of our energy from Big Photodiode.

Hasn't the cost of solar cells gone up by 30% or so during the last couple of years?

Even with that blip, they're still incredibly cheap:

> Although their costs continue to exceed pre Covid-19 levels, solar PV and onshore wind remain the cheapest option for new electricity generation in most countries.

...

> power contracts for the end of 2023 and into 2024 in the European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia and India all indicate wholesale electricity prices two to three times above 2020 averages, increasing the economic attractiveness of wind and solar PV.

From another IEA report:

https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

> Even with that blip, they're still incredibly cheap

Indeed. In the last (boat) solar installations I’ve done, the panels generally have been the cheapest component. The brackets to hold them, and the charge controllers tend to be the more expensive part.

No, they went temporarily up some time ago when supply couldn't keep up with demand, but this lasted for a few months. Since then it's continued to go down.

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