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Comment by lumost | Hacker News Reader

Electricity decarbonization won't occur in the amount required prior to 2060. We're still building net-new coal plants, and existing coal plants will be allowed to continue operating. The baseline load/peak load problem of renewables has yet to be solved (but progress is being made).

I can see a world where globally the typical transit is a BEV for heavy equipment, transit, and some shipping all charged by renewables sometime in 2070-2080. However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. We are unlikely to force early retirement of that infrastructure at a global scale within the next 20 years.

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Unfortunately, you're both right.

Decarbonization is the best thing to do by a large margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact sense. It's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of electricity and then spend many multiples of $X just to remove a tiny fraction of the carbon.

But you're also right that decarbonization won't occur in the amount required by 2060.

Which, quite frankly and plainly, just means we're fucked. Not even going into positive feedback loops of natural methane emissions due to warming arctic and tropics.

Yeah when Obama said we're the first generation to feel the effects and the last one able to do anything about it, he was right. One way or another we're locked in now.

Of course there are still options to avoid the worst but they'd require such an immediate turnaround and international collaboration at a time when geopolitical polarization and tensions are ultra high. I just don't see it happening.

> We're still building net-new coal plants

I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables.

(Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.)

Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them.

> However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years.

Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change.

If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.

I'm thinking the Coal plants will be built in newly industrializing economies, as it's the cheapest way to provide constant cheap power. China is still building Coal Power plants and so is India. The US hasn't built one in a decade and is closing existing ones.

Renewables are cheaper than coal ?

It's complicated. But Coal can not survive in a market where both renewables and natural gas exist. The same applies to nuclear.

When they are producing energy, renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than coal (and falling).

China is building a lot for strategic reasons as they don't have much oil and gas and want to be able to keep going if say there is a war over Taiwan and sanctions block imports.

However having been the world's worst offender in terms of rising CO2 output, it seems to be peaking and going into decline. See "China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy" for example https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to...

That sounds pessimistic give the exponential growth in solar (3 year doubling) and the like and that "Renewable capacity will meet 35% of global power generation by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)."

The existence of coal plants doesn't mean you have to run them most of the time.

We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have the clear economic advantage over coal gas ice. Production is semi scaled. And yet it is slow as molasses.

Yet the carbon capture people think a cost line item no advantage except regulatory requirement will scale out faster? Yeah, ok.

Carbon capture and hydrogen cats, science and engineering aside,Val ways trace back to oil and gas media and lobbying. Its just fud at the policy level.

> We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have the clear economic advantage over coal gas ice.

I don't think this is true unless you assume some imminent improvement on grid scale power storage.

News reports about how cheap wind and solar are with supporting data based on levelized cost of energy (LCOE) completely miss the fact that intermittent power sources are not substitutes for base load generation. To approach true substitution you have to include overbuilding the intermittent sources or spending money on very expensive storage systems (that may not even exist yet). In either case the cost goes up considerably.

IMHO:

    * don't turn off nuclear plants
    * invest in more cost effective nuclear power
    * invest in more effective energy storage
    * invest in more effective solar/wind
    * don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence

* don't turn off nuclear plants

--- I agree

* invest in more cost effective nuclear power

--- I could diatribe about this a long time, but basically I think solid fuel is a dead end in nuclear plant economics, but the entire industry is focused on solid fuel rod huge pressurized dome. I think truly effective nuclear will take a lot of government investment and novel thinking. Or materials breakthroughs that make LFTR/MSRs cheap.

* invest in more effective energy storage

-- EVs will take care of this, probably sulfur batteries

* don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence

-- it can be subsidized effectively though. See: china.

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