Is it because of the interests of fossil fuel companies and their lobbying, or am I missing some economic factor?
It will take a long time before the fossil fuel capacity we've already built gets phased out, and of course certain developing nations are still adding dirtier fuel sources, but renewables getting cheap is working.
I'd look at this from a more nuanced viewpoint of certain nations still adding sovereign fuel sources.
Read: India / China and coal
India is further behind but improving rapidly. Its entire grid is still on track to be 42% renewable by 2030. The US is 42% today and expected to be 58% by the same time.
Developing countries use the cheapest source of energy, period. Today that's solar.
We can switch to hydrogen for lots of stuff that requires carrying your fuel on your back, but some things get tougher because the density is just not the same as a hydrocarbon.
These are all surmountable (biodiesel, carbon capture->fuel cycles, bioreactors, etc), but they take time and money.
In the end, what will push us to get there are economic shocks. We're getting there, it's just painful.
Fuel density is logistically important and the US geographical position means that density is more important to the US than other nations. In other words, if we forecast that we'll be fighting foreign wars, fuel transport is an logistical problem that optimises for density.
Edit: I found them :D
Wars of the future will make heavy use of drones. They don't run on hydrocarbons.
1. https://insideevs.com/news/784805/abrams-m1e3-hybrid-tank-vi...
"It's called Megawatt charging because it delivers 1,000 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,000 volts, which is twice as powerful as the fastest chargers we have here in the United States."
That makes fast, long-range travel quite practical in an electric vehicle.
While this model greatly improves the charging speed, other electric cars introduced this year use sodium-ion batteries, which are heavier than lithium-ion batteries, but they have the advantage that in cold climates they do not lose either capacity or charging speed down to temperatures as low as minus 40 Celsius degrees, removing other limitation of electric cars.
So hydrocarbon fuels are likely to remain non-replaceable only in aircraft and spacecraft, where weight really matters.
However, hydrocarbon fuels can be synthesized from water and carbon dioxide, passing through syngas, by using solar energy, just not at a price competitive with fossil fuel.
The US grid is still 57% coal and gas.
For our use-case, 95% of our trips are to the shops, to various kids sports, to school, to the bus/train station, visiting (local) family, and all are very short trips easily within the relatively short range of the Leaf: ~100km. We still have our existing cars, they just get used less in favour of the cheapest option for the job at hand.
Even with our son being newly able to drive independently (so essentially needing to have three cars, rather than two, on the go at any one time), over the 18 months of owning the Leaf we've saved about 25% of the purchase price of the Leaf in spending less on petrol (including the electricity cost to charge the Leaf - which gets charged using the solar panels during the day, but more commonly using cheaper grid electricity non-peak overnight - yes, likely primarily off fossil fuels but from what I've read is more energy efficient than using petrol to power the car).
My point being, analogous to the "right answer" being to only using energy-dense fuels when necessary, we use the cheaper electric vehicle option when applicable, and only burn the expensive stuff when the better option is unavailable.
P.S. Looking at buying a newer EV with longer range, so there are additional and more flexible "better options", plus coming up to having a daughter who is also able to drive unaccompanied (four cars? :grimacing face:)
Humans really do not like change, the problems you have now are swept under the rug but tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones.
This is definitely part of it. My personal opinion is that 'mechanical intelligence' is so intertwined with, cough, masculinity that EVs are a threat to these kinds of men at the very core of their being. There's so much 'identity' that people associate with the car they drive, the noise it makes, that they can take it apart and put it back together again despite its complexity.
The simplicity of the electric motor and the minimal servicing required of an electric car is potentially anathema to (toxic) masculinity. As is enforcing 'stopping driving for a rest and (literal) recharge'.
It's a super old school way of thinking, but aren't we in the midst of seeing exactly that bubbling up to the surface as far more entrenched in society than we thought it could be?
(May be overthinking this a bit, but the illogic from otherwise logical family members around EVs really twisted my mind into knots that I had to spend the time undoing)
> tiny new problems are made into massive, insurmountable ones
This is just cope. Clutching at the thinnest branches because that's the only thing on offer. It's the rationalisation of all of what I've mentioned above.
It's definitely not this, since that hasn't been true since ~2010 CAFE standards required ECUs + their array of feeder sensors, all usually factory-locked.
An EV dropped my transportation fuel bills by 90% but even i will admit that an EV is a hassle. On any trip that exceeds the range of the car, we must identify EV chargers, then determine whether they are working and only then can we start counting the additional minutes.
In the winter, seeing the range of you car drop by 26% and not knowing where the next working charger is, is the #1 reason why we still have two cars. If i could eliminate one with access to better transit, it would be the EV, not the combustion car.
The reality is that operating an EV is a hassle unless you can deal with the hassle or have sufficient privilege (e.g. live in a detached home) to be able to offset some of the hassle.
How that gets turned into "yeah but EVs can't drive for 500km on one charge, so they're a hassle", I don't know.
Would it be cheaper to keep the EV and rent a car for when you need to do longer trips? (also taking into account the additional hassle of renting a petrol/diesel car)
Only speaking for myself, I'd seriously consider renting a (combustion) car for an interstate driving holiday if it's a rare occurrence, like once a year or once every two years. It will become an exercise in accounting[0].
My silly-ish analogy is: I don't own a plane because I fly rarely enough that it's not worth buying a plane to allow me to fly wherever, whenever I want.
I did the maths on my situation and it did not work out. It is currently cheaper to pay the $120 / month or so on insurance and maintenance for the second car as opposed to renting a car for the once a month that we actually use the second car.
The trouble is that renting a car is expensive and public transit is an even bigger hassle.
We had an emissions trading scheme[0] in 2012 meant to help in a transition to clean energy sources that was aggressively lobbied against by Australia's largest polluters and lasted only 2 years before being repealed by the incoming government by labeling it a "tax" that citizens would pay for. This led to a decade of policy stagnation[1] where we could've been transitioning away from fossil fuels.
So while energy density is definitely a factor, political lobbying is absolutely a factor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Pollution_Reduction_Sch...
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/0a453f5c-e859-4300-9355-46822c451...
Are the quotes here implying there wasn't a cost imposed on the public to artificially speed up a transition to green energy? Might as well be honest about it and say it's a "temporary sacrifice for the greater good" or something. Otherwise it's just another form of political spin.
The "tax" was to be paid by the largest polluters, hence their lobbying against it. It wasn't something the citizens had to pay for unless the largest polluters decided to raise their prices as a result of this "tax".
Asking polluters to decrease their profits, as it becomes increasingly obvious that their profits are based on making life worse for the entire planet for the future, I think, is not too grand an ask. "That's how it has always been" is not a reason not to act to improve "how it could be".
The only reason a politician would come up with a complex carbon scheme like that is if they knew a tax would be unpopular with the public. Which mostly translates to a lack of good communication or a disregard for the public's intelligence.
And the way the events unfolded show that indeed, a tax would be unpopular with the public.
The political opposition continuously spun it as a "tax", in an attempt to stir outrage and win the next election, which they succeeded in[1]. The incoming government was and still is largely funded by fossil fuel companies, so they repealed the scheme.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emission_trading
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Australian_federal_electi...
It’s probably the hardest thing to replace but if we can’t we will be okay.
Long haul trucking and shipping and remote site power are probably the next hardest things, and maybe coal for metallurgy, but these are also small compared to emissions from electricity generation and routine car transit. The big sources can be completely converted.
I mean, you could probably almost run a jet turbine on bacon grease if you kept it warm to keep it from solidifying. Some military stuff is intentionally made to be as “flex fuel” as possible in case you are cut off from official supply lines and have to do something like gas up a plane with road diesel of unknown quality.
You wouldn’t just do things like that with a million dollar plane since it might be bad for the engine but if the engine were tuned for it it’d be fine.
And in the U.S., Republicans have done everything they can to hamstring the transition and destroy the billions of dollars invested by automakers into EVs prior to 2025. But even that can only postpone the transition.
These fit an energy niche that can't be replaced with any one thing. China is just now investing in an electric military, for instance. Shipping will remain difficult to electrify entirely (which is surmountable, but certainly not in production). Coal and natural gas plants provide on-demand power that is not straightforward to guarantee with renewable sources. And there are many (likely almost all) grids that are simply not up to the task of transmitting energy that used to be transmitted by physically moving fossil fuels. Air flight has no renewable alternative as of today—though, I suppose we technically do have renewable forms of jet fuel, it's extremely expensive.
& of course we will need byproducts for the forseeable future for fertilizer, materials, chip production, etc etc.
It'll take a couple generations. Of course we should be paying poor countries to not use fossil fuels, but instead we're trying to force switching back to fossil fuels ourselves for no explicable reason (as an american obv).
Global politics.
Switching to renewables is seen as capitulation to China because of their lead in tech in this area, especially when you consider that renewables generally introduce battery dependence.
They don't even try to hide this anymore. Watch US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick at the WEF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY0t0h1gXzk
Explicitly stated: Don't be subservient to China.
Not vocalized, but the obvious alternative: Instead be subservient to the USA and various allied Persian Gulf (and hijacked Latin American) countries who will keep pushing the petrol alternative until it literally runs dry, even if they have to do it at gunpoint.
$150/barrel, much higher prices everywhere, less fertilizer, and less oil available could spur a faster turnover.
I ordered some plumbing parts from a well known German manufacturer in February and am still waiting, the retailer can't give me an exact date yet.
Same thing happened a few months ago when I tried to order a network switch, after a month and a half I cancelled the order.
I've just ordered appliances, that I won't need for a few months, just because I don't know how long they will actually take, and maybe on a month the price will have shot up.
Something like skin in the game. US (low), EU(moderate), China (high), Global South (high with caveats to leapfrog but financing crunch always there)
Renewables need front loaded funding compared to Oil & Gas which are the incumbents that make them sticky.
Otherwise is a lot of US consumers were rational and only price minded they would've run TCO calculators on EV vs ICE for day to day use even without subsidies
There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.
Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.
It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.
It's always far cheaper to keep status quo X than move to new thing Y. Until it isn't. Especially if you don't take into account externalities. Increased instances of flooding, cyclones, and wildfires gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. Losing ground to competitors can be fatally expensive in the long term.
Such things require the ability and will to think and prepare long-term, and it feels as if humanity has been migrating in the opposite direction since the 70's.
Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.
Because it's in the corporate interests of many multi-billion dollar companies that lobby politicians
The bureaucracy was moving the right direction - towards renewables - until the conservatives in this country deliberately changed strategy to emphasize fossil fuels again.
You can draw your own conclusions about motive, but this isn’t an accident.
The west does not yet understand just how much was lost through financialization of our economies and the loss of our manufacturing industries, we are no longer competitive and cannot remain competitive long term. Not only can we not take on solar production but we can’t even maintain vehicle manufacturing in Germany. The US is about to lose its edge in military manufacturing and in many ways already has. We still maintain an edge in aerospace and software but we’re likely to eventually lose that battle as well.
Also ignores how captured government funding is, I was offered many millions in research grants so long as I kicked back 80% to the big 4 firm that administered the scheme. Their pitch, sure they get 80% but I still get 20% of free money. I think people really underestimate how much corruption has rotted out the west and how much of our perceived wealth is lie I am highly confident I will outlive.
Corruption is of course deplorable, but a tiny quantum of solace is that it also allows adversaries to underestimate a nation state or block: when push comes to shove, a controlled level of corruption can be suspended and suddenly true productivity is observable...
There is the anti-fragility idea that when something is attacked it becomes stronger - the attack creates a true signal for information which is now capable of aligning internal interests. The problem is if the adversary is intelligent and avoids attacking for this very reason. This is what I believe China is doing, they keep threatening to attack to promote the various grifters, without actually attacking which would inspire effective collaboration. It was a trap and we are firmly caught in it and I know of no way out of it.
"We shouldn't want to use the energy in that way" doesn't really seem like anything.
We might always need some for various materials and industrial process, but wasting it on ground transportation is beyond absurd at this point.
That's the big mystery. We're told wind+solar are super cheap. Cheaper than everything. Cheap, cheap, cheap. You'd think, renewables being so cheap, it would rapidly displace all the expensive stuff.
But it does not. All sources of energy grow simultaneously, despite the plentiful anecdotes about limited regional shifts in specific markets.
So that creates doubt about the "cheap" claims. Such doubts, however, aren't generally welcome, and it's best to keep these thoughts to yourself, should they emerge. Carefully asking questions, as you've done, is the least damaging approach to coping with this apparent contradiction. I don't recommend ascribing it to nefarious conspiracies: that creates poor mental habits that don't end well.
In the meantime, there are concepts such as LCOE+ that deal with the real economics of energy supply and demand that can inform you on the matter. You'll want to be careful here, however. You'll encounter ideas that don't align well with preferred narratives and, if you're not careful with such knowledge, you might inadvertently peg yourself as being aligned with counter-narrative forces. And that's never good for kudos.
Do you have a source for that? What I can find points to the opposite:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67005
And globally:
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/breakdown-of-...
Electricity is only a subset of the matter. The energy issues created by the most recent Iran drama, for example, are mostly about oil: not a primary electricity generation fuel.
Here is a broader view. Global consumption, not limited to electricity. Everything, with the exception of biomass which has merely leveled off (for now,) is growing:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
I would encourage anyone to look into what fossil fuels are actually used for because energy is only part of it. Some energy is for fuel (eg ships, planes) for which we currently have no substitute. A big chunk is electricity generation but there are so many other non-energy uses of fossil fuels eg fertilizers, construction, roads, plastics and other industrial uses.
China has undergone a decades long project to get to the point where they are the world leader (and almost sole supplier) of renewable energy tech. The plunging cost of solar happened because of China. This is a national project for them and no other country that I can think of has the willpower, organization and commitment for the deacdes-long quest to wean oneself off of fossil fuels.
Just between the rollout of EVs and power generation, you need a massive amount of infrastructure associated with it. Upgraded power lines, chargers, etc. Plus all the vehicles. Plus all the materials for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, etc. Those supply chains are completely dominated by China.
Just look at the LA to SF HSR project. This will likely take 20+ years and cost $100-200B, if it ever even happens. 20 years ago, China had a single HSR line in Shanghai to the airport. Now it has a 30,000+ mile network that carries 4M+ passengers a day and I've seen estimates that the entire network cost less than $1T. California HSR is 10-20% of that budget. For one line.
They reformed every level of government for this project. There is no expensive and corrupt procurement process for every city, every region, every line. They use the same rolling stock everywhere. Permitting for building the tracks and stations is streamlined. They make their own trains.
My point with this example is twofold:
1. EVs and electricity are only a fraction of the fossil fuel picture; and
2. Weaning ourselves off of that is a decades-long project in countries that have no track record or political will to pull that off.
Plastic ain't going anywhere, anytime soon (although many people wish it would).
If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.
It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.