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Comment by adventureful | Hacker News Reader

Stephan Reimelt, CEO of GE Energy Germany: "Germany is forcing itself toward innovation. What this generates is a large industrial laboratory at a size which has never been done before. We will have to try a lot of different technologies to get there."

It has been done before, at far greater scale. WW1 and WW2. Some of the best innovations or inventions are derived out of a person or a nation having their back to the wall. Hence the famous saying: "necessity, who is the mother of invention" (dating back a mere 2400 years or so, and it's probably older as a known premise).

I would anticipate very impressive industrial breakthroughs in renewable energy coming from the German experiment.

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I also wonder how much benefit is to be had by not paying other countries for your energy compared to paying yourself...

In the case of the US, a shockingly massive benefit. We import between $350b and $500b per year worth of petroleum products (depending on the price of oil).

There is, however, the rule of comparative advantage, which means that it is better to import energy than to produce the same amount domestically, if the import is cheaper. How that is balanced against the benefit for domestic producers, I wouldn't know...

Only if the calculation includes the vast benefits of domestic energy production, properly sourced, and not just the basic price of energy.

Such as keeping First Solar and SunPower in business (FSLR has lost 95% of its value).

The jobs created through installation, maintainence, R&D, manufacturing, and so on.

For example: let's say your import cost is $250 billion, but your domestic cost is $300 billion. I'd argue that you're radically better off spending the $300 billion domestically, than losing the jobs likely involved and exporting $250 billion off shore to benefit some other nation/s. There's no doubt some inflection point on that benefit, but I think it's a wide margin.

For solar, sure, but domestic oil and coal production can have far-reaching environmental consequences that aren't easy to calculate.

That doesn't make economic sense. That $250B isn't being vaporized: it's going to foreign consumers who are going to spend some fraction of it buying imported goods. Your goods are likely to be more competitive if an extra $50B worth of energy costs weren't spent making them. This is basic comparative advantage stuff.

Actually the $250Bn never existed - you printed the dollars and gave the Saudis pieces of paper for the oil.

They essentially loaned you the oil - and if they ask fro the money back you can just democratize them.

There's also a geopolitical advantage to producing it at home. Doing so provides less reason to interfere in the internal politics of foreign producer states.

How much (in $) refined product do we then export? Crude is not gasoline or plastic.

Some misc data on that:

"America is still the world's largest importer of crude oil. From January to October, the country imported 2.7 billion barrels of oil worth roughly $280 billion."

"Fuel exports, worth an estimated $88 billion in 2011 ..."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/story/2011-1...

From what I could find, we export around $30x billion worth of plastic per year, and import around $12 to $15 billion worth of plastics.

The only way the amount of petroleum we import matter is compared to how much we would have to spend to get the same energy with out importing anything. If the cost of stopping importing oil was that we had to spend $1000b a year on synthesizing oil from corn (for example), then the amount we spend on foreign oil is actually a good deal.

It does matter quite a lot to the oil market price. Third world farmers pay the same price for oil as the "I'd rather drive the SUV" suburbanites.

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