Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition

Don't be jealous of our peak power price though: $0.56/kWh

(I have a battery though, so I rarely pay full tote - which is one of the reasons I got a battery)

We pay like 30 cents in USD per kw.

Solar installation capacity is measured in watts, not watt-hours. So the unit you should he using here is GW, not GWh.

Pushes glasses up nose well actually, we should use GWp, but that's not really a unit and good ol' watts should suffice.

So is it bad that governments don't allow the processes and manufacturing to take place in their own countries, allowing independence and market dynamics and economies of scale to result in yet another order of magnitude cost reduction in solar? Or is it good that China doesn't do ecological protections, worker protections, or the things that western countries do, so we get to profit from the exploitation and pollution of their people and land?

It'd sure be awesome if regulations and regulators in Western countries weren't stupid. This whole game is just insane.

Let's just pawn it of on China, arbitrage the regulatory and human rights differential, and pretend the value is the same as if it's locally manufactured. Then we pocket the difference! Number go up!

Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?

Is there still a Politbureau?

To me it seems it is a dictatorship with cult leadership again. Xi reminds me more of a modern version of Mao Zedong (without the focus on starving millions to death though). The main reason I see China having a dictator again is so that he can push ahead with his plans of invading Taiwan.

> Europe is waking up slowly

Where do you see that? I don't see it anywhere. They are sleeping.

The MAGAchurian candidate.

I’m confused a bit, the premise they produce essentially all solar panels got an “indeed” with article-based assertions that exports doubled in one month, and it’s 14 GW more than the total amount installed in Spain ever, both very impressive. :)

Is there anything there about Chinese share?

I had the understanding they produce the vast vast majority as well, but that seems belied by exports doubling near instantaneously with demand? That made me wonder if there’s a lower cost floor producer(s) with, say, 10-20% of production that quickly got booked

Democracy works when the population is educated and rational. Its easier to get votes via populism that give short term benefit to certain groups but long term hurts education and makes people irrational.

Many Democracies have learnt that politics cannot be trusted in certain fields due to this reason many governments ensure interest rates are not controlled by politicians such as the Federal Reserve. Perhaps we should treat education as something that cannot be trusted by politicians and controlled by an impartial independent organization.

I don't think a democracy is necessarily a recipe for utmost economic success, it's more about having the ability to replace the leadership if they are failing the people. Without that, it's only a matter of time until you're stuck with a leader who's terrible, even if you currently have a good one.

I think many democracies have been struggling though, to find a good leader, lots of democracies been replacing their leaders over and over in recent times. That's definitely something to worry about, why aren't good leaders applying to be on the ballot or being voted in?

They have a benevolent dictatorship. 99% of dictatorships are utter and total disasters so the world is right to be wary. Pretty much all post monarchy political studies are about how to prevent the concentration of power because it usually goes horribly wrong. But yes, if you actually find a benevolent dictator it is the best form of government. You can’t really beat one decision maker that is immune to consequences.

The argument that the US is the 'cause' of the hurt ignores the fact that Iran is essentially taking the global economy hostage to achieve a political goal. By blocking the strait, Iran isn't targeting the US ... as you noted, the US is energy independent. They are targeting the developing nations and allies of the West. To blame the US for the pain caused by an Iranian blockade is to ignore the agency of the actor actually causing the harm. You cannot blame the victim of a provocation for the destructive methods the assholes chooses to use. Oh, and Iran is committing a warcrime doing this. For months, constantly.

This is pure terrorist tactics, taking innocents hostage in the hope that makes the police go away.

What we need, sorry, is another round of sniper shots, making it clear to the IRGC what the correct response is to hostage taking.

Of course, the percentage is all that matters. If you damage yourself 10% per month, you're dead in a year. And if you do in absolute value 10x the damage to another party but that's only 1% for them ... they're not dead, you are. And the problem gets solved.

Which is more or less what's happening here.

ZIRP (also, Quantitative Easing or QE) was the policy since 2008. Rates actually rose in the first Trump admin [1] so this isn't quite as causative as you suggest. Other things did happen that contributed to the inflation shock of 2020. This goes back to the Obama admin too, specifically:

1. After the OPEC oil shock of 1973, the US banned crude oil exports (in 1974 I believe);

2. In the early 2010s, hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") was invented, which created the US oil boom in the Permian Basin (from west Texas up to the Dakotas). Almost all oil wells in the last 10-15 years have been fracked. This was a massive capex outlay by oil companies at the time. This is important;

3. Obama, facing a hostile Congress in 2015, wanted solar and wind subsidies so he made a deal with Congress that included lifting the 1974 crude oil export ban. Oil production quickly went up and ever since we've been exporting ~3Mbpd of crude oil, which is essentially excess demand, and this is how the US became the largest single oil producer in the world;

4. OPEC but really Saudi Arabia in particular crashed the oil market in 2015-2016. There are two competing theories on why they did this. A lot of people think it was to kill the frackers. I don't think this makes sense. It was years after fracking came about. I think it was to punisht he US for becoming a crude oil exporter. And it worked. Roughly half of oil producers and services companies went bust [2];

5. When oil prices are low, producers will generally suspend production until prices increase because they're selling at a loss. They'll layoff staff and come back when prices improve. So this is self-correcting. But oil companies had to keep selling because of their massive debt;

6. Because of (5), oil inventories exploded and when Trump took office in 2017, oil experts believed that oil prices would remain low because of persistently high crue oil inventories [3];

7. Trump pulled out from the JCPOA in 2018. To counter expected Iranian sanctions, Trump got OPEC to increase production [4];

8. In October 2018, Saudi agents, allegedly on the orders from MBS, killed Saudi citizen and US permanent resident Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi embassy in Istanbul. I actually believe this is relevant to what happened subsequently; and

9. In November 2018, Trump granted 8 waivers to Iranian oil exporters to continue exporting [5]. This crashed the oil markets [6] and basically screwed over OPEC. But I think MBS had to eat it because of the Khashoggi fallout.

So come 2020, it is my belief that when Donald "Art of the Deal" Trump got MBS to cut oil production and then MBS later refused to increase production (to both Trump and Biden), it was payback for 2018.

So I don't think there's any causation between ZIRP and the inflation shock. It was a combination of two things: the oil price shock and the pandemic became the perfect environment for companies to raise prices, something many believed they'd get punished for prior. This is the era when dynamic pricing really took off.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-oil-producers-pac...

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

[3]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=29532

[4]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/22/opec-ministers-strike-deal-o...

[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/02/trump-will-grant-8-waivers-t...

[6]: https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/the-great-oil-crash-of-...

In addition to what jmyeet said, Trump doesn't control the interest rate policy. The Fed does. Despite his attempts to change it, Fed independence is still a thing, and definitely was still a thing in 2016-2020.

Looking at peak wind isn't particularly helpful I'm afraid. The problem is what happens when there is no wind, like in early May (https://gridwatch.co.uk/). Having more wind capacity isn't helping. Batteries are for smoothing minutes/hours not days. Solar obviously only a few hours a day and weak at this latitude.

Yeah, that would be wonderful too, but I didn't want to engage the downvoters (like you apparently did). This is a forum for discussing "hacking", not for political tribalism (not addressed to you but to them). SMDH.

Sure, but I'd wrap that up into the renewables box.

If a temporary disruption, we’d go back to business as usual as soon as the supply constraint abated. The scale and time duration oil flows will be disrupted has led to a “burn the ships” transition, because it is simply the more economically rationale path now. More rapid global energy transition means the forward carbon emissions curve gets bent down.

https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Irans-Oil...

https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Persian-Gulf-Oil-...

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/28/oil-inventory-exxon-strait-h...

It is a bittersweet victory. Petroleum demand is going to be forever destroyed -if you were on the fence about scaling renewables, all doubt has been eliminated. Energy dependence is a strategic nightmare, with a proven solution available for the taking. Solar, batteries, EVs, whatever you can install, as quickly as possible. There are already regional stories where solar-friendly Spain is seeing lower price changes than Italy because the renewables are lessening the impact of the closure.

However, if you were financially struggling before this happened, you are in for a world of hurt. Food, fuel, fertilizers, and dozens of downstream refined products are going to see large price increases for months to years.

I wonder how much has been offset by all the bombings and oil dependent countries having to fall back to coal until they can switch to solar or another oil supplier (if they can afford to do either at all).

That really depends. Oil and gas could just as easily get replaced by coal in a not-very-different alternative world.

that's way too high brow of a reference for this crowd.

At least in America, most people do not like nuanced takes on issues / people, even if you are being playful.

I'm afraid you need to go fit inside one of the echo chambers and conform to a given narrative good sir.

Well apparently over 95% of that 45 years of preparing has been obliterated, their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications.

What a mess.