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Comment by snewman | Hacker News Reader

Have you run the numbers on this, or are you just imagining? In the 70s, solar and (to a lesser but still substantial extent) wind were still extremely expensive, impractical for large scale use. As were the batteries that are needed to smooth out periods of low renewable generation.

I'm an absolute supporter of renewables, and I'd love to see support for fossil fuels phased out, but it's been a long climb to reach the point where that's feasible.

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The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s. It's not really clear what the result would have been. To really answer this you'd need to unpack the past two decades' worth of cost decreases in (e.g.,) PV and see how many of them would have been possible with late-20th century technology.

My uneducated guess is that we could have moved the timelines forward at least a decade, and that matters a lot when you're dealing with exponential cost/deployment curves (not to mention possible climate feedbacks.)

> The appropriate counterfactual here is if we'd made investments into renewables back in the 70s/80s/90s of a scale similar to those we made in the 00s/10s/20s.

I'm not really sure it would have gone faster instead of just having been a very large waste of money. A lot of the reason that renewables are cheaper now has to do with 30 years of advancements in electronics and power storage and semiconductors and solid state materials etc etc etc that just _took that long to invent_. It's not like people decided a few years ago that 'oh it's time to invent better batteries'. There's always been motivation to build better batteries and people have been working on that non-stop since electricity was discovered.

That counterfactual is like: What if we had invested more in building neural networks in 1970, where would we be today. Well, the problem is we didn't have cheap powerful GPUs back then, so it probably wouldn't have mattered?

We sort of got cheap renewable energy "for free" from a lot of technologies that we invested in for other reasons.

That is one opinion, and I'm curious if there's a stronger (more expert) case to be made for it anywhere. It's true that many necessary advancements happened recently, but it's also true that some of these developments occurred due to massive research and commercial investments (many of which are still under the radar to people who didn't notice they were occurring.)

The advances of renewables are definitely dependent on strong compute and widespread global (or at least widespread local) networking. Smart grids need all of the different tools from different manufacturers to talk to each other, which an agreed-upon networking protocol like IP on top of an existing internet backbone makes very easy to ipmlement. On-demand energy storage and providing from battery banks - or even hydroelectric storage or (as mentioned in the article) gas-powered backup turbines need the analytics power to study and predict load variations on all of the collected data, which existing data centers for search or even apps makes trivial to acquire.

Now, there could have been technical solutions for these issues found in the 80s or 90s, but more probably than not the engineers back then would not have thought about this beyond the obvious corporate aspects - after all, it's much more "practical" to focus on connecting the big power plants together and just vaguely estimate the required consumption.

It's probable that, if you sat at a design meeting in the 80s and proposed, as "an energy-efficient solution", to have a small computer in every consumer's breaker box that monitors the incoming electricity, sends the info through a combination of radio and country-spanning wires to a central server, and then do analytics on it to predict when the power is needed, you'd have been laughed out of the room. And yet, that's how smart grids work nowadays and it is the correct solution to this problem.

The improvements in energy storage and solar/wind renewables would have started decades earlier, sure, and that would have mattered. But I don't think anybody would have been able to use them the way we can use them today if it was done twenty or thirty years ago, and the technology might have died down instead. It's hard to know for sure, but it's a very plausible outcome.

This seems like a fallacious argument. If investing earlier leads to earlier results, why aren't you complaining that we didn't start investing in renewables research in Roman antiquity?

Premature investment doesn't lead to early results, just wasted money. There is an optimum time for such, and it's almost certainly true that this time wasn't in the 1970s, the technology simply wasn't possible.

The 1970s do not represent a point in time in which investment/research became feasible, they represent a point in time at which it became obvious to everyone that the-then current energy technology was disappointing for a variety of reasons.

The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project. My (non-expert) guess is that a decade might have been possible. Your view is that -2000 years probably wasn’t possible. I don’t think we’re in any major disagreement on those points, so the interesting question is about values in between.

> The question I’m asking is how much faster we could have pulled forward widespread renewables deployment with an earlier commitment to the project.

I don't think you could have gotten much of a head start. Maybe 1-2 years. I don't see you getting an extra 10 out of it, even in the best possible circumstances. Half of what makes it possible now simply didn't exist. Changes in global logistics, materials science, manufacturing capacity, and a hundred other things.

If time travel were possible, and you could go back with all the knowledge and plans from today, even then 10 years is about all you could hope for. Some things can't be rushed. Sure, you've eliminated all the false paths, the bad decisions and backtracking, but booting up this part or that part of the supply chain is a slow process.

Just imagining. The thing is, there’s so much subsidy involved in oil to keep it cheap that the price of oil without subsidy would have greatly encouraged earlier development of renewables. The price on renewables then would have fallen. The primary issue facing anything competing with oil is precisely the subsidy factor. If prices are not allowed to rise naturally as oil becomes increasingly expensive to extract, any competitor is not only attempting to assail the infrastructure already built for oil, but also the artificial price of oil. Today, many are motivated by doing “the right thing” but many more haven’t the money to do “the right thing”. Telling those people to abandon oil and use something more expensive might actually mean death for those people. This all could have been avoided had the petrodollar and the subsidies that came with it never happened.

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