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Comment by amarant | Hacker News Reader

A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end:

This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.

Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.

No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.

Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.

View on HN

In January, the youtuber Technology Connections did a whole rant about how ridiculous it is that we're not rushing as quickly as possible to get off of non-renewable energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

It really is crazy that environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," and suddenly everyone started screaming "No, boo! We like the way things are!" I have a friend who has never used an induction range before that is dead set that he never wants one. I just don't get it.

When you realize that trillions have been spent on anti-renewables propaganda over the last half-century, it gets easier to understand. Many people have been indoctrinated into fighting tooth and nail for the right of oil companies to destroy the environment.

To be fair induction ranges aren't without issues, not due to the concept itself but failures in implementation.

Touch screen controls are rife and not only become impossible to use when, say, grease is splattered on them or your hands are wet/wearing gloves (common when cooking on a stove top), they can even be falsely activated by such things. Cold spots can also be a concern depending on your cookware.

Unfortunately a lot of promising technology has matured in a time of consumer product enshitification, and there is no established track record for people to be nostalgic for.

Again, I’m talking about someone who has never used one who has their mind made up.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with preferring gas. It has many superior use cases. My point is that “no, I like things this way and won’t ever consider trying the other thing, much less changing, even though the other thing ends up being effectively free in the long run” is silly, and almost certainly based in some kind of identity.

Where as I think most curious people would think "Oh, neat, a new cooking surface. I'd like to try that thing."

At least as recently as a few years ago, a lot of induction ranges on the market would tend to break and need expensive repairs. I've forgotten which part it is, I think it's the inverter or something. I've seen it happen once at somebody's house then I remember reading about that very same problem on reddit from a repair guy IIRC. I think some of the electrical equipment is somewhat under spec'd and can't handle the current. Repairs tend to be in the several hundred dollar range and can happen somewhat frequently, like annually. (This may not be a common problem anymore)

I have one from IKEA that they market as their own (it's made in partnership with someone, can't recall who). I've had it for 3 years now, never had a problem. Was this a specific model/brand or something?

To me this sounds a little like "I saw that fiats break down often, so I better not get a car" which is obviously silly

LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful.

> LG makes an induction range with knobs. I have one. It's wonderful.

It is encrapified with a bunch of intrusive "smart" features that nobody asked for?

Just don't connect it to the internet.

This is exactly it. If you don't connect it, it's a dumb stove like any other.

I was extremely dubious about connecting it, but I decided to do it anyway and see whether it's worth it. So far I've noticed two things:

* It sets the clock with NTP and follows daylight savings time. This actually might be worth it, I'm one of those people who otherwise just lives with clocks set an hour wrong for half the year. The odd thing though is that this isn't default behavior, I had to install an add-on in the mobile app.

* It gives me a mobile notification when the oven gets to temp. Not really compelling.

So depending on how you feel about clocks, feel free to skip the wifi setup.

> environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy,"

It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom.

If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy.

Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself.

I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else

> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars?

Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage.

I am massively pro renewables. But you have to ignore a lot to pretend it's without risk.

The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you.

This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.

There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:

1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.

2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.

3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.

If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.

The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.

If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.

> system already pays for itself

No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference.

> You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you

This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsense.

I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.

The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.

Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.

This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.

Do you have some more likely counter scenario?

> even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand

See Uruguay. Bet heavily on renewables [1]. Baked in a high cost [2].

If LNG becomes crazy cheap and you're stuck with expensive solar and battery, the countries with cheaper power will eat your industry. On a household level, you wasted money. The alternate you who didn't put money into the solar and battery set-up could have earned more from other investments and had cheaper power.

Put another way: if you remove the decommissioning costs, the same argument could be used for nuclear. Once you've built it, it's sort of "free." Except of course it's not. Building it took a lot of work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Uruguay#Electricity

[2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Uruguay/electricity_price...

Per your sources it looks like they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage:

Household electricity prices are 157% of average in SA, and 200% of industry prices. That's not a case of renewables backfiring, it's a case of strange policy resulting in weird pricing.

> they are subsidising industry use of electricity with household usage

Germany had to do the same thing when their power costs threatened de-industrialisation. The base cost of electricity in Uruguay is higher than its neighbors’ in an environmentally-wonderful but economically-problematic way.

Germany made the worst possible mistake. They decided to decommission all their nuclear power in one year "for the environment"

Then they started importing all their energy from neighbouring countries including:

Nuclear power from France

Coal (!) power from Poland

Hydro from Sweden

Etc,etc.

The anti nuclear crowd in Germany fucked the environment to sate their delusional beliefs.

Electricity prices in Sweden tripled because of that and still haven't returned to normal.

Worst decision in the history of the German nation! (This statement is true, but only on a technicality: the current nation of Germany is young!)

I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return.

Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a blackout, and having the option of getting an EV in the future.

I think most sensible people who are even moderately risk-averse would think that's a fairly winning deal when we're only talking about a small amount of up front capital.

I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.

It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.

For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.

Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.

Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.

For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.

But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.

> Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free

One could even say it is risk-negative. It decreases the risk one runs of future oil price hikes.

If you buy solar cells, you buy futures on energy delivery at a guaranteed price.

To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders.

That’s just not true, there are plenty of places where the math works easily without subsidies.

Every place I've lived other than CA has had >3x cheaper electricity. If the max break-even period in CA is 20yrs, that's 60yrs in those other places, which is both longer than I practically care about (not that I'm not a fan of non-renewables for other reasons, but we're in a thread talking about costs) and also far beyond the useful life of any of the renewable tech involved, meaning I wouldn't achieve a full 60yrs of benefits in the first place, even if I let the system run for an indefinite period of time.

I know there are other places with high energy costs, but for the majority of the US (both by land area and population count) solar doesn't make economic sense without additional incentives.

And even that analysis assumes that you're forced to use electricity. Many home appliances are vastly more efficient dollar-wise when powered by various petroleum products.

...What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy?

Some people (myself included) are quite attached to cooking with gas. Induction seems to be the best alternative and doesn't require non-renewable fuel.

Resistive electric stoves aren't super popular for cooking on. Gas stove use gas which can't be powered by traditional renewables. Induction cooking is competitive with gas cooking and can be powered by renewables.

> What does induction cooking have to do with renewable energy?

Gas stoves aren't renewable. For most countries, they're dependent on volatile exports.

See, when I initially wrote that comment, it legitimately did not occur to me that there was even such a thing as a "gas stove" until I walked away from the computer. In my world they're a strange novelty.

Seriously, people are going to downvote me for not automatically thinking of gas stoves, when I haven't even seen one in like over a decade?

Self-sufficiency is a myth. Even if you wanted to try and be energy independent, for the short and medium term (and maybe longer, who knows?) you will be dependent on China and all the baggage that they bring because of their dominance of rare earth mineral processing. Need a new solar panel? Don't make a certain country mad (whether that's your local Ayatollah or CCP official).

And that's just energy. What about pharmaceuticals? Financial markets? Who protects your shipping lanes? Who builds your semiconductors? Where do those factories get their energy from?

I support the diversity of energy sources because they all have strengths and weaknesses. We've got to figure out climate change. But we also can't have, even if you want to somehow "move off of oil" a single country run by lunatics who can decide whenever they don't get their way that they get to seize 20% of the global oil supply. We can't have China dominating rare earth processing either. For some others it may be a reliance on American military technology.

There is a huge difference between buying a solar panel once and having it generate energy for the next 30 years vs. buying a barrel of oil now and consuming it by next week.

It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord, or buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years vs. renting a SaaS subscription that provides a different product next month.

> buying a piece of shrink-wrapped software and using it for the next 18 years

I'm wondering how that works. I have written software that was still being used, 25 years later, but it was pretty much a "Ship of Theseus," by then.

Old hardware or emulation of old operating systems on new hardware.

Quite common on old industrial machinery and other capital equipment like lab equipment. San Francisco BART for example has to scrounge eBay for old motherboards that still allow DMA to parallel ports via southbridge because it’s too expensive to validate a new design for controllers.

I have a G5 with a bunch of old boxed software that runs as well as it did the day I bought it. And an Xbox 360 with the same. Not everything has to keep up with the times.

I remember visiting a doctor, about ten years ago (so well into the 21st Century). His laptop was an old one, running NT.

The software they would buy, cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they couldn’t afford to keep upgrading (or the original vendor went belly-up).

Not all software can be sufficiently insulated from external changes, but almost all software I care about can be. My normal update cadence is every 2-3 years, and that's only because of a quirk in my package manager making it annoying for shiny new tools to coexist with tools requiring old dependencies. The most important software I use hasn't changed in a decade (i.e., those updates were no-ops), save for me updating some configurations and user scripts once in awhile. I imagine that if I were older the 18yr effective-update-cycle would happen naturally as well.

My gut reaction is that the software you're describing relies heavily on external integrations. Is that correct?

The software that I wrote was a device communication SDK, written in C. It abstracted the hardware/link stuff, and presented a common API.

Basically, a driver. Pretty involved one.

There's someone who posted on HN yesterday about running Kubuntu on the same PC for 18 years:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47502310

He had upgrades, but I was running Kubuntu about 20 years ago, still have a bunch of Red Hat and Mandrake ISOs from the early 2000s, and can confirm they still work.

Beside, on the rate earth materials, it just happen that China is able to exploit it cheaply but other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.

> other countries also have access to them and could very well exploit.

only in your wet day dreams.

let's just look at Gallium which is arguably one of the most critical for defence. to produce 100 tons of Gallium, which counts for 10% of the global supply each year, you have to have 200 million tons of Alumina capabilities. "other countries" won't be able to do it, as they don't have affordable electricity and skilled workers to make the Alumina business itself profitable. how they are going to use or sell those Alumina? to absorb loss of 2 million tons of Alumina for each 1 ton produced Gallium, "other countries" will have to lift their Gallium prices to stupid level.

that is assuming Chinese choose not to fight back on the Alumina front - they control 60% of Alumina production worldwide, they can just flood the global market with cheap Alumina to bankrupt your Gallium production.

remember - 2 million tons of Alumina for 1 ton of Gallium.

Well I am referring about rare materials for battery, energy storage, solar panel because the discussion was about that.

I don't know about defense needs, could be true, but I guess they are much less important in volume that the other. You may be able to store them in case of disruption.

Gallium is of course crucial for modern solar panels, it is also becoming increasingly important in batteries as well.

Well in the case of gallium, I see that we have extremely efficient recycling capabilities. Around 90% recovery.

It doesn’t solve the production issue, but there are ways to counter that dépendance over china.

>It's the same difference as buying a house now and owning it until it collapses vs. renting a house and being at the mercy of your landlord,

I always take issue with the expression "buying a house now" when you actually mean "pay a mortgage for a house now". With a mortgage, you are at the mercy of the bank and whatever contract you signed. With a rent tenancy, you are at the mercy of the landlord and whatever contract you signed. A landlord will wake up tomorrow and tell you to leave, you have some notice period. Your fixed period deal ends and you can only get a deal that triples your rate.

It's like when people say that self-employed people have no boss, your customer becomes your boss. And you always have one. Everyone that exchanges services/products for money has one.

For some people "buying a house now" actually does mean "buying a house now, with cash". My mom bought her last house with cash - she just rolled over the money from the sale of my childhood home, which they paid off in the 80s. I needed a mortgage for mine, but now that I have it I'm clinging to my 2.75% rate, it's less than I can make with basically every other investment. In Silicon Valley it's not uncommon for people to buy houses (even $4-6M ones) with cash because they're sitting on an 8-figure exit.

Even besides that, there is a dramatic difference between a typical (U.S.) mortgage that locks your payments for 30 years, and a month-to-month rental where your rent can go up next month. It's the same difference as buying a solar panel that fixes your costs for 30 years vs. paying whatever electricity rates the local utility charges this month.

(And there is also a dramatic difference between having 1 boss vs. 10 clients vs. 1000 customers vs. 3 billion users. The amount you can ignore any one of them goes up exponentially, and the risk that they will all stop paying you goes down correspondingly.)

"For some people", yes nowadays, it's for wealthy people only unless it's a house in the middle of nowhere.

In a tenancy, your rent can go up but most decent countries have legal restrictions in regards to how many increases you can do in a period of time and by how much you can increase it at any given time, and gives tenants legal tools to contest it if needed. And you still get the freedom to move to a different city without losing money. Here, most people don't do anywhere near 30 year mortgages so maybe that's more of a US thing.

In an ideal world, businesses would have customers that are all equally valuable. But in the real world, many businesses have a few customers that account for most of the revenue and the rest of the customers. Those few customers become your boss and they indirectly dictate significant parts of your business because an average customer not spending as much will be ok but a major customer not spending as much will get you sweating and looking at your cashflow.

The oil products are needed by many industrial processes.

My secret suspicion is that Trump knew of Israel's attack on the Qatar/Iran natural gas in advance.

If the Persian Gulf is closed for a long period, shale oil in North America will do very well.

Israel also has new natural gas reserves that will be in high demand.

Is the loss of market share of the Persian Gulf nations an unintended side effect?

Full solarization will not eliminate our need for fossil fuels. But it would reduce it so dramatically as to render our current market unrecognizable.

> Self-sufficiency is a myth

Self sufficiency exists on a spectrum. On the idiot end is autarky, which only works to keep a small group in power at the cost of national weakness. On the other end is a lack of stockpiles and domestic production that essentially negates sovereighty.

A country running a solar grid with EVs can withstand more economic shocks for longer than one importing oil. And while mining metals is geographically limited, making solar panels and batteries and cars is not.

> Need a new solar panel?

Recycle one of your old ones. You don't burn solar panels to make energy.*

I think people are still stuck in the fossil fuel mindset. I've started calling it gas brain.

* What happens if China stops selling you panels while you embark on electrification? Nothing. You already have enough electricity from your existing sources (presumably) so you just pause the PV rollout until they wise up. And other countries are starting to get into PV manufacturing. Exhibit A: https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f... So you can always just buy from someone else.

I don't think they said it will give you self-sufficiency, rather that it removes one (important) dimension of dependency.

It doesn't though, it's the illusion of removing of a dependency which is rather dangerous. You're not only swapping one dependency for another in this specific case, but you're ignoring the rest of the global economy and its own dependencies and how they affect you.

You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.

When Russia invades Ukraine or Iran cuts the straight of Ormuz energy prize go up instantly, chocking the entire world economy in the course of a few weeks. Even if China stops exporting rare earths, it would take years before it affects the energy market.

It's absolutely incomparable.

Cuba is a good example by the way: a country can survive for decades while being cut from most technology import due to sanctions, but if you cut its access to oil, it becomes dirty real quick. And because Cuba has been stuck in the middle of the 20th century, it's actually much less dependent on energy than most developed or even developing countries.

> You're swapping a dependency which hits very quickly if disturbed, for one that would take a much longer time to manifest.

That's not the entire point. You still rely on global supply chains. Those semiconductors in your MacBook Pro are made in Taiwan - many steps (perhaps most) in that supply chain to go from raw material to MacBook Pro, or EV, or fresh produce rely on oil. When Iran holds 20% of the world's oil supply hostage then prices go up for you too. Even if you are 100% renewables you are still dependent on oil for your economy.

Even the renewable power grid relies on fossil fuels for maintenance and service, many parts and components are built using materials made from oil (hello plastic), &c.

Nobody said that a modern economy can be completely independent, but that doesn't mean all levels and types of dependency are equal.

Right: My body will never be able to survive without taking in elements from the outside, but I'd rather have an interrupted supply of calcium than an interrupted supply of oxygen!

A country that goes all in renewable is in a stronger positon. UK power grid doesn't give a fuck about this war.

Sure China. But unless they send in an army to retreive previously sold panels, or block the sun they can only harm future increases to supply.

> A country that goes all in renewable is in a stronger position.

Depends on the country.

> UK power grid doesn't give a fuck about this war.

Power grid =/= economy. You're missing the point. Rising prices affect the United Kingdom economy even if it was fully run on renewables. The ships bringing products to the country don't run on renewables, the cars mostly don't, your fighter jets don't, your fertilizer doesn't. &c.

It's important to not be dogmatic and be practical about this stuff. Every country on the planet needs and utilizes oil and gas and that will remain true for the foreseeable future because of globalized supply chains.

> Sure China. But unless they send in an army to retreive previously sold panels, or block the sun they can only harm future increases to supply.

Which, in the case of a war with the US would be true because the UK will be involved and sided with the US and/or certainly assumed to be by China. (This is indisputable). So sure you build up those panels, but then you see a war and now you lose access to those materials and if it isn't solved in the near term you have to switch all of your energy back to fossil fuels. No new EVs during the war, for example.

It is a sliding scale though. Having more renewables in the mix seems better than fewer. But indeed no one is immune to global trade and higher global prices.

Or wait 20 years for the panels to degrade...

Two things

1. It’s closer to 50 years, and even a partially degraded panel will work, just with less output

2. Even if we say 20 years, that means that you only need to buy panels once every 20 years! Not continuously. A complete and total interruption of solar panel production lasting 4 years will only mildly interrupt current output. How long can we last with a total disruption to oil supply chains?

The long operating life of a solar panel compared to a barrel of oil is a selling point when it comes to self-sufficiency. With 20 years of warning, any country that pretends to be a globally-relevant power can get itself to the point of producing acceptable solar panels if its survival depends on it.

More than enough time to stand up a domestic PV industry.

Swiss measurement of 30 year old panels showed 20% degradation.

All of the material in those panels is still there. You can break them down and build new panels out of their parts.

Eh, an operational dependency that immediately raises costs across your entire economy, across all geographies, all industries, within a couple days of disruption is very different from these more strategic dependencies.

The key would be to simply not ignore all the other dimensions of dependency.

Oil is disposable, solar panels are not. If you have solar, and then piss off the CCP to the point where they attempt to stop you from acquiring more of it, you don't lose the solar you already have. Those solar panels will continue generating energy for years, if not decades, afterwards.

It's also important to note that the US also produces oil[0]. There are some quirks of the market and refineries that make it difficult to consume our own oil, but we could potentially build more domestic processing. The real problem is that pesky global market that puts costs on the state's ambitions for power. To put it bluntly, American oil is expensive. We can survive an oil crisis iff we are willing to pay astronomical prices at the pump; but if we are doing this assuming we can just enjoy cheap gas while the world burns, we are going to get a rude awakening.

Think about it this way: buying your energy in the form of oil is like exclusively using streaming services for your entertainment needs. It's cheap, easy, convenient - until the plug gets pulled and it suddenly stops being those things. Buying solar is like buying physical media - you have to pay up front and it's more of a hassle to get started, but it can't be turned off on a whim.

[0] It also used to produce rare earths, too. The mines closed down because they were too expensive to operate - not because rare earths are actually rare.

I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.

It's a complicated picture. Some Americans did not like the advice to "turn down the thermostat, and wear a sweater", and the next president removed the solar panels from the White House. It may be amusing to learn the country some of those panels ended up at, and the propaganda value in having such. Other Americans have improved water conservation ("Cadillac Desert" is a short and relevant read here) and those horrid land whales now leak far less oil; it used to be every parking spot had huge stains of oil beneath them. And the leaded gasoline, yum! Still other Americans howl about the toilets that use less water, and hoard inefficient light bulbs that do not last too long. So there are folks moving both towards and against reneable energy and conservation. Granted maybe there has not been as much movement as should have happened between now and when "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here" (1973) got published, but that's not saying nothing has happened. Trends may help rule out some of the noise, or one might try to model things like the "Limits to Growth" study did, though other folks really did not like that report, and so these things go on and around.

I think a lot of people simply want to be contrarian to their perceived opponents: People in the other political clan like X so I have to hate X. No matter how much X might help them or how much better it is, they have to oppose it.

Economics will always win in the end. At the rate that costs are dropping for solar, it should just be a matter of time.

Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.

> Economics will always win in the end.

This may have been true in the past but the economics of today is "whether this is good for 1% of the population" and not in general, yes? If I can buy cheap solar panels from China (or say for the sake of argument someone "friendlier" like Germany) but that gets slapped with tariffs or other means the "administration" (bought by the 1% crowd) has at their disposal to prevent this from happening. If we lived in a free market this would be true for sure but we don't (by we I mean USA :) )

The remaining oil companies will profit tremendously from the high oil prices. I am sure they will have no problem allocating some of those extra profits to sabotage attempts to consider any alternative energy sources.

> Biggest concerns are usually placement and durability to bad weather.

And energy storage, and peaking, and matching demand to supply at the grid level. None of which are included in the usual "costs" of solar.

> very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy

A longer view of history shows a clear pattern: "After a gasoline price shock, households respond in the short run mostly by reducing travel, although estimates from the literature suggest the response in the short run is quite low (e.g., Hughes, Knittel, and Sperling 2006). Over long horizons, households adjust their vehicle technology and reduce further their consumption of gasoline.

...

The market share of full-size pickups, utility vehicles, and vans fell more than 15 percentage points between its peak in 2004 and early 2009. Small cars and the new cross-utility vehicle segment picked up most of this market share" [1].

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086%2F657541#...

The petrochemical industry is huge we've yet to find alternatives for it. Half the stuff around you was made with something derived from oil, and you can't replace that with wind or sunlight in the foreseeable future.

Very little oil is used to make plastic.

In Europe between 4–6% of oil and gas is used for producing plastics and globally around 6% of global oil is used. By contrast, 87% is used for transport, electricity and heating.

https://www.bpf.co.uk/press/Oil_Consumption.aspx

6% is hardly a small fraction at scale.

If we could reduce our oil usage by 94% I'd weep with joy. Yes that's still a lot of oil. But it would be a complete sea change from what is currently happening.

A lot of what the petrochemical industry does took over from other stuff or isn't vital, there just hasn't been enough push back against it.

Stuff like medicine, sure, crucial and very hard to find replacements for.

But single use plastics can probably be replaced 95% (the environment would appreciate it if we banned them), dyes are mostly not vital, synthetic fibers can be replaced 95% with minor critical impact, just using natural fibers, etc.

The petrochemical industry is just the cheapest option in many cases in a world driven by conspicuous consumption of non vital items.

there are pathways to produce synthetic oil from coal or using carbon capture if you have cheap energy. I hope they will catch up if fossil oil prices skyrocket.

This is the secret flipside of solar power's duck curve: it makes a lot of stupidly energy intensive paths towards non-fossil oil production a lot less stupid if you just have the energy to burn. Think about how in the 2000s we had a weird obsession with ethanol and other biofuels, only to learn that they were merely 40-50% efficient. If your energy mix is predominantly fossil fuels, you're better off just not burning the oil. But if you have solar, suddenly it becomes a good option for energy storage, especially in industries that need the weight properties of chemical fuels (i.e. aircraft, where you HAVE to be able to burn and exhaust your fuel or the plane will be too heavy to land).

Pretty much all chemical changes can be made with reasonable amounts of energy. That includes making "bioplastics" as well as the typical plastics we use today like polyethylene, polystyrol and so on, from biomaterials. What doesn't work in a way that's remotely economical is transmuting elements. It is, for example, possible to make gold today, the old dream of alchemists. But it's several orders of magnitude too expensive.

Common plastics are made from highly abundant elements, so running out of oil as a chemical feedstock is a quite surmountable problem given cheap enough energy.

We should also note that wind turbines require huge amounts of petroleum derivatives to operate.

Yeah but at least the byproducts produce a solid that can last for years vs treating it as a consumable.

I'm fulling expecting someone will reply to me and say that making plastic wastes 75% of the oil or something during production, and that it's just as wasteful amortized across the lifespan of a wind turbine. I'm tired, man.

You can compare material intensity of different electricity generation technologies.

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/material-intensity-electr...

According to International Energy Agency mineral demand for clean energy technologies would rise by at least four times by 2040 to meet climate goals, with particularly high growth for EV-related minerals.

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...

You can recycle the minerals so it will also fall back down to almost 0 on a longer timescale.

If you keep burning gas you will never stop mining.

We have heard many claims from politician about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

You can recycle the minerals and you should recycle minerals, but almost no recycling technology can recycle 100% of minerals and recycling has always costs attached to it (this can be for example capital costs, building recycling facilities, operating costs in form labor costs for separation, energy costs for melting material and purification processes).

For example aluminum is recycled, not because we have have a shortage of aluminium ore (Earth's mantle is 2.38% aluminium by mass), but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum. https://international-aluminium.org/work-areas/recycling/

Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals https://blog.ucs.org/jessica-dunn/how-are-ev-batteries-actua...

The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries, by exploiting lax environmental regulations or corrupted environmental protection officials.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chittagong_Ship_Breaking_Yard

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2024/10/05/g-s1-...

> aluminum is recycled... but because recycling is less energy intensive then production of fresh aluminum

So what?

> Recycling of EV batteries will lose between 1-10% of the valuable metals

How much gasoline, coal, and natural gas can you recycle?

> The worst kind of recycling is decreasing the costs of recycling by outsourcing to third world countries

That's going to happen as long as those countries are poor. They need to develop their economies quickly to demand better laws. Climate change will be a danger for many of them in the coming years.

Better, less-polluting recycling tech will help them far more than continuing to burn fossil fuels.

I just wanted to show that there no such thing as perfect recycling technology.

If you want to choose least material intensive source of energy, you choose nuclear energy. By choosing nuclear energy you get the benefit of almost decarbonizing you electricity production as can be seen in France.

Nuclear isn't perfect either. You can be embargoed for uranium way more easily, if you don't already have it. It's more expensive to build than solar and takes much longer (and don't BS me with "it's because of the regulations!" - everything, even solar, has regulations that drive up the cost and construction timelines).

If you can build price-competitive nuclear energy without government backstops or insurance, you have my blessing.

I personally think nuclear's time is in the far future when we have more advanced, exotic materials that make it radically safer and cheaper. For applications where solar isn't sufficient, such as space propulsion.

No energy technology is perfect each has it's benefits and drawbacks.

Yes a nuclear power plant more expensive than solar power plant. But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive (or it can be cheaper if you have access to cheap natural gas, Texas power grid).

https://doi.org/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642

https://www.olivierdeschenes.org/uploads/1/3/6/6/136668153/j...

Uranium is plentiful. Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Occurrence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_reserves Also uranium is very, very energy dense. Current nuclear fuel can provide up to 45 gigawatt-days per metric ton of uranium. So stockpiling few years worth of fuel is not a problem. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/b...

Governments are always supporting new technologies https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/cleanenergy/tax-guidanc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source... https://emagazine.com/clean-energy-subsidies-explained-how-t...

Nuclear energy also quite safe https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

> But an electric grid based on renewables, if we add the costs for storage, backup generator, power lines upgrades needed for smoothing out regional variations of production, is more expensive

Show your work. I'm telling you right now you're wrong. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446112

Even the Texas power grid makes heavy use of wind and solar.

> So stockpiling few years worth of fuel is not a problem

Weird you were oddly concerned about being "China dependence for PV" but this you just wave away. Stockpiling a few decades of PV and batteries is also not a problem.

"Rare earths" (not really used in panels) are plentiful too. Refining them is polluting and low-margin so developed countries prefer not to deal with them. Btw uranium is the same.

> Nuclear energy also quite safe

I didn't say anything about it being unsafe. But making it that safe currently costs a lot of money in materials, labor, and regulations.

Honestly it feels like you decided beforehand "nuclear is the way" and are trying to make every fact fit that. Or you're a troll/paid off by Big Oil. Sorry.

Texas Net Electricity Generation by Source, 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Texas

Natural gas (40.5%) Coal (12.7%) Other fossil (1.01%) Nuclear (8.47%) Renewable - Wind (23.2%) Renewable - Solar (13.7%) Other Renewables - Hydro, Biomass (0.18%)

Texas has access to cheap natural gas, which is used when renewable don't deliver. In Texas the price is king.

> Big Oil. Sorry.

I would really prefer high world-wide carbon tax. World-wide because cheap Chinese poly-silicon production for cheap PV is an excellent example of carbon leakage.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_leakage

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...

As opposed to gas or coal turbines which are naturally lubed somehow?

It will be a boost for renewables, but hardly the end for natural gas. Keep in mind that while ~20% of natural gas was supplied via the Persian Gulf, that means 80% was not.

I expect that batteries will eventually solve the day-night cycle for solar, but for seasonal storage, natural gas is much easier to store, so this still looks to me like a mix of energy technologies, with renewables getting a larger share.

For the US to start going that route we need a certain group of politicians to stop telling everybody that windmills are killing whales and birds en masse, claiming solar "isn't there yet" (somehow it never is), and that there is such thing as "clean coal." Literally the only thing I don't hear them fighting (loudly) against is hydro power.

The politicians say what the people with money want them to.

Or they could just do their job in good faith because most of them come from money and have a good salary. A dream, I know.

this misses the fact that petroleum is incredibly useful outside of the burn it to make electricity and burn it to make car move use cases.

All the more reason to not squander a finite, precious resource to generate electricity.

Not really. If we only need it for petrochemical products, like medical plastics etc, losing 20% of available crude globally is a non-issue.

We can probably stand to use a lot less plastics too. Outside of medicine it's mostly replaceable, and reducing our usage to less than 80% of current usage would be trivial if we didn't burn it for energy.

In that scenario Iran can keep their strait. We won't need them.

So don't use it for cars. It's strictly optional these days.

Not really. Needing 1MM barrels gives you a lot more independence than needing 100MM.

> Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide.

If your sovereign territory happens to support them geographically. This is true for many, but not all countries.

Also, without large storage capacity, you might end up being self-sufficient during sunny, windy days, but find yourself very dependent on your neighbor countries for imports on overcast days or at night without wind.

The combination of all of this is especially unfortunate for hydro, where you're pretty much fully dependent on the geography you've been handed.

So I'd say the self-sufficiency story of renewables doesn't fully hold. They benefit from regional cooperation and trade just as much as fossil fuels, if not more. (In my view, that's not really a counterargument, but it does raise the importance of having a well-integrated, cross-border grid even more.)

Why do you have to go to absolutes? If 90% of countries can be 80+% self sufficient, that’s still an amazing thing

These 20% will still make you dependent on foreign country.

For example Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels.

> Germany is dependent on China for PV panels

This is gas brain thinking.

Panels aren't burned to make electricity. If literally everyone stops selling you panels (nearly impossible) you continue generating electricity the old way. Nothing bad happens. The panels you already have continue working.

Other countries make panels too. India has a glut right now.

https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f...

You can't base energy of an modern industrial country on purely solar panels alone, they don't produce any electricity in the night and have electric output reduced by weather. You have always to combine them with other power sources for backup.

For Germany it's domestic wind + domestic coal + imported gas.

In case you ask for energy storage in Germany, the amounts are quite low. https://openenergytracker.org/en/docs/germany/storage/

So you admit then that using as much solar and wind and storage as possible reduces the need for imported gas. As such it should be a national priority.

It should be a national priority to use as much already installed solar and wind and storage as possible, when the operating costs are low. The big question is: where should the future investments be made, who will pay them? How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas? 2x, 10x, 100x of current yearly spending? Because gas is already very expensive in Europe, it's used precisely when renewable don't produce enough electric energy.

The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake. The French almost made the same mistake.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/renewables-up-nuclear-down-in-fren...

> The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake

It's time to stop talking about it. It's done. Unless the stopped plants can be restarted (which I'd support) this is completely useless. It doesn't mean anything.

> How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas?

The upper bound today (keep in mind battery tech gets cheaper all the time) it would cost $5tn to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446112

You don't need to run Germany on batteries for 6 months. Even 1 month is more than plenty.

> Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels

There is merit to putting one's energy policy on autopilot by doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to.

> doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to

So you're suggesting to cut solar incentives and never discuss SMRs?

I think you might be predicting future performance from past returns here.

but much less dependent. Its way easier to stockpile a big buffer supply of LNG if its only 20% of your supply, for example. Its way easier to trim some 20% demand and still keep the country largely running, for example.

"much less dependent" is still a huge win. Sure 100% independent is better. Isnt this obvious? i dont understand the point.

If you're 80% self-sufficient, you're not self-sufficient.

If a kid lives on their own but their mom buys them groceries once per month and their dad swings by on thursdays with pizza and beer, that kid's still pretty darn self sufficient.

Similarly, if a country can use 80% less oil or imported fuel than they would have without renewable energy, I think they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't have to be isolated from trade, it's okay to import some things and export others. Energy sources can be one of those things. But if they rely on energy imports, then when something disrupts their supply then they are in trouble. However if they get 80% of their energy from renewable sources, then they have significantly less of a problem.

They have significantly less of a problem with regards to their balance of trade, but any meaningful dependency on imports means that electricity prices will still be entirely dependent on the price of whatever is imported, at any point in time imports are happening. Still not great, and I wouldn't call that sovereignty!

Also, highly depending on what metric we mean by "80% self-sufficient" (peak capacity? long-time average?), there might either be a lot of work left, or this might be "effective sovereignty".

But the dependency turns from a stop the world calamity to an annoyance.

If you’re 95% self sufficient it will stay at headlines in the local press.

Losing 20% of your electricity supply is a calamity, not an annoyance. So unless you want the calamity, you're still dependent on imports.

Personally, I don't see an issue with that, as long as the neighboring countries you're importing from are reliable and will be able to supply at the times you need (i.e., they don't have the same possibly spiky import dependency as yourself). The other option is massive storage capacity.

I just don't think it makes sense to just equate renewables with automatic sovereignty.

Dunno about you, but losing 20% of my electricity supply is an annoyance. I just don't run the clothes dryer and hang my clothes on a rack instead.

(And yes, I have solar + battery, and have lost 100% of my outside electricity supply on a half dozen occasions since having it installed, and my actual response has been to not run the clothes dryer.)

That would be the situation in an integrated/"smart" grid. The grid could tell your washer/dryer to defer or worst case shed their load.

In the grid we have, where most people don't have batteries, nor a way to react to (or even perceive) network-side load shedding commands, you get rolling blackouts at best, and brownouts, damaged devices etc. at worst.

That's the point I'm making with my second paragraph. I'm not dependent on the grid. If we get into the situation you're describing, I just throw the main breaker (actually don't need to do that, the inverters switch over automatically) and my home generates its own electricity. It doesn't quite cover all my usage, but it covers all my usage except the clothes dryer, so I just don't run the clothes dryer.

It's true that there are tragedy-of-the-commons situations where not everybody has a battery, but it's also true that there are higher-level but subnational entities within the U.S. that have invested significantly in renewables + battery storage. This chart of where electricity comes from on a state-by-state level is illustrative:

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...

California, Connecticut, DC, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington are > 95% renewables + natural gas, all of which is produced in North America. If it comes to the point where it's "keep the lights on or sever ties with fossil-fuel states", I'd bet that they choose the latter.

(Note that the table kinda refutes your point anyway: the only states that are > 1% dependent upon oil for electricity are Alaska and Hawaii. Other than natural gas, which is largely produced domestically [1], the other big fossil fuel source is coal, which is also produced domestically.)

[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/where-our-na...

If a country were in your individual position, I'd definitely call that self-sovereign, but I don't think that's how "80% self-sufficient" would actually look like. (I don't think that 20% of most countries' consumption is entirely discretionary, for one thing, whether measured by peak or average load.)

At >95%, it's probably a very different story. At that point, you basically turn off your aluminium smelter and you're good :) (And note how GP said "renewables", which gas isn't.)

And my point really isn't about oil specifically, it's about GPs "renewables increase sovereignty" thesis in general.

More countries are able to produce renewable energy than are able to produce fossil energy. As such, renewable energy providers more energy sovereignty than fossil fuels which is what matters. If it's 100% or not is mostly irrelevant for the decision making. If we're being rational.

Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.

> Going for the worst possible option, only because the better options are not 100% perfect, is to be considered irrational behaviour.

I guess I'm collecting all the downvotes because I didn't make it sufficiently clear that I'm absolutely in favor of switching to renewables as quickly as feasible. My point was not to stick with fossil fuels in the interest of "sovereignty" or anything like that. Especially massive solar deployment just seems like a no-brainer at this point.

But as we do that, I'd love to be realistic about new interdependencies and failure modes being introduced, so that they can be mitigated as we transform and build out our grids, not discovered in very painful incidents that "nobody could have seen coming".

Kind of sad to see how ideologically driven discussions around energy policy still are, and maybe always will be.

> without large storage capacity

That's like saying without gas stations good luck getting gasoline to the people. It goes without saying that batteries are an essential part of most renewable solutions.

I'm still reading a lot about theoretical storage ideas, but much less than I'd like about massive deployments, so I think it doesn't quite go without saying.

The US just gave away a billion dollars to NOT build renewable energy.

> war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too

"This recovery period doesn’t just get pushed out by 24 hours each day it gets longer as more production is forced to shut down or is damaged in the fighting. As I write this, futures markets for the WTI seem to be expecting oil prices to remain elevated (above $70 or so) well into 2028."

There are still processes that we haven’t replaced petroleum for, like Haber-Bosch. China has already banned the export of fertilizer for this reason.

Sure. And petroleum not burned for energy then becomes petroleum available for those processes.

I don't understand why so many people are raising an objection here when this should be a clear win-win.

Pessimistically, this will lead to the return of old-school Imperialism to secure the necessary oil supplies and increased exploitation of known deposits.

Just because there's an obvious good choice for the average citizen doesn't mean we'll take it, as recent history has more than proven.

On the dark side, it will take quite a while to offset the environmental costs of this war, even if this provided an essential incentive for switching. (In reality, energy infrastructure is often locked in longterm and not easy to switch in just in a decade or so.)

Only a small fraction of a typical barrel of oil is allocated to energy generation. The majority goes to transportation/industrial use-cases. The transportation usage can be allayed with sonar energy, but the industrial use-cases cannot.

I don't think anyone is making the argument that solar panels can completely replace fossil fuels in the short term. However, more electrification is better all around.

Nice.

Another upside seems to be that every Arab country in the Middle East seems to be on the same side as Israel. Nothing unites like a common enemy!

Why didnt Iran use this earlier to get rich?

Because it would have been an act of aggression to close off the strait. Iran did not want to invite war, the US and Israel have entirely been the aggressors in this recent conflict.

Sanctions were also an act of aggression. Iran could ask for fees for US ships to make up for their losses due to sanctions.

As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.

> the fuel bowser

The what?

> "Buying a BYD car ASAP"

A what kind of car?

I don't understand why I am downvoted. My questions are genuine. I legitimately have no idea what GP meant by either of those things, and legitimately don't understand why I supposedly should know.

It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.

I am not sure getting a million people killed in another decades-long middle-eastern war (one whose scale and tragedies will likely overshadow all the previous wars we have seen so far in region) in a country of 90 million people is really worth the push to renewables.

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