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Comment by badpun | Hacker News Reader

Not a single word about shale oil and gas revolution, that started around 15 years ago? The US now has the one of the cheapest energy on earth, and probably the cheapest among the countries that matter. Pour all that cheap gas and oil onto an economy that was already a leader and you get lots of impressive growth.

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That's the gist of it, especially since the "IT revoluion" (for lack of a better word) seems to have cooled off in the early 2010-ish, i.e. exactly when the shale revolution started doing its thing (and, no, I don't count the recent AI hype as being worthy of getting called as "revolutionary"). That shale revolution has also come with big opportunity costs reductions, because the US didn't have to geo-strategically care about the Middle East and the oil there all that much, at least not as much as to send real feet on the ground there, with all the associated costs.

With that said, there's also the danger of the US following on Britain's steps from the 1980s up until the 2000s, i.e. to rely on this shale/oil bonanza and not care about (internal) structural reforms that are in dire need of being enacted. At some point the shale money will not be there anymore (the shale gas will have run out, the world's car-fleet turns to electric en masse etc), and if the Americans don't carry out the necessary reforms sooner rather than later then that future "no more shale-gas money" moment will come at a very, very bad time for them. I said it's similar to Britain's situation because things started going downhill there as soon as the North Sea oil&gas money started thinning out.

They did bring up energy -- "The US may have been less affected by the war in Ukraine than Europe, owing to its abundant domestic energy supplies"

It's not brought up because this is not the source of the growth whatsoever. It has only served to keep our gasoline and methane costs low compared to the rest of the world. That's nice for people but does not create massive economic growth in the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That is all coming from the tech sector. If you want to talk energy to power the server farms, the growth in energy is happening with renewables which are and far cheaper than any fossil fuels.

> That's nice for people but does not create massive economic growth in the 21st century of the kind being discussed. That is all coming from the tech sector.

Do you have the stats that back that up?

The price of a kilowatt hour of electricity is not determined by the cheapest power plant operating when you buy it, but by the most expensive. You buy the marginal kilowatt. And solar+wind continues to be a relatively small fraction of the US energy market. The DoE did a report when Biden took office in 2021 and the progressive wave was in full swing:

https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/economic-and-national-s...

>Eliminating [fracking]... a ripple effect of severe consequences to the Nation's economy, environment, and geopolitical standing.

Making energy cheaper and the dollar stronger helps all businesses which depend on energy or imports, particularly manufacturing, and US manufacturing output currently exceeds the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain combined. And all over the thread you'll find people arguing over nominal GDP versus PPP, but what's not in doubt is that the balance of nominal GDP versus PPP is related to the strength of the dollar. Imports are vital to US industry — we thrive on buying less processed inputs from cheaper countries and producing high-value outputs. All of this is affected by the US oil and gas industry.

Can't we consider the cost of energy as a general tax on the economy? If all economic output is N% cheaper in the US, we'd expect compounding effects.

All industrial sectors requires energy, and the prices here in the EU are obscene compared to the USA.

Renewables are actually making it worse. We now have the "problem" that renewables cause spikes and saturation of the grid, and instead of causing low prices, the energy companies penalizes their customers. Claims it's due to renewables driving up grid maintenance costs because it was not built to handle the amount.

After all, energy produced _must_ be used or it will inevitably cause damage somewhere. For instance, you can't leave solar panels in the sun while they are not connected. If you don't use the energy, it will be turned into heat.

It's getting to the point where you actually are penalized for having rooftop solar. Most solar installations in the EU doesn't have a home battery, so either you have to give back surplus energy (electricity providers in some countries will actually charge you for this), or you can disconnect your solar if you overproduce but that will slowly damage your installation. Even if you don't plan to give back any energy, you still have to notify your provider that you have rooftop solar, if you don't it's a breach of contract, and if you do, they will charge you an extra maintenance cost.

It's funny because the government are pushing rooftop solar, but the energy providers are quietly telling their customers to fuck off with it.

But still even though the grid is absolutely full of cheap energy, and you should in theory pay very little, you still have to pay double or triple what those in the USA would ever pay.

Renewables are great, but also a shitshow because while we're building solar and wind installations, we're not building nearly enough grid storage.

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