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Comment by PotatoEngineer | Hacker News Reader

We're going to need something as fossil fuels run low and coal becomes increasingly stigmatized. Solar is an interesting field to explore, as is wind, hydro, tides, and other non-fossil energy sources. Sooner or later, one of those fields is going to generate electricity efficiently, even if only because fossil fuels (very eventually) get more expensive. Researching these things now means that there will be more options later.

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There are lots of good arguments for electric cars. Fossil fuel supply is not one of them. At a bare minimum, we have 64 years of oil left, but that assumes that we will never be able to find any more or wring more oil out of fields than expected. History shows that both assumptions are not good ones to make.

Emissions, cost & the environmental impact of tar sand mining are better arguments for electric cars.

Unfortunately it seems to be more politically rational to invest in existing inefficient green technology than R&D (see: Solyndra).

Fossil fuels can last a very long time. America's largest shale oil reserve isn't in North Dakota, it's in California in the Monterey Shale formation, currently unexploited.

I'm actually more worried about flying than about individual transport. I'd argue that affordable intercontinental flights have had a tremendously positive effect on the world's society as a whole. The intensified relationships make war between industrialized nations very unlikely for the time being. Yet we don't really have any feasible alternative to fossil fuel there at the moment. The sooner we save it for those important matters the better, but unfortunately that's not how free market economy works. I expect we'll have a period where flying is a privilege again.

Wind is already cheaper than nuclear would be in Denmark (using prices from the UK). Solar is getting cheaper too. Whether they're viable or not depends on location, e.g. solar isn't really too great in Denmark, we're too far north. Storage is a problem, but not quite as big as you would think, and a multitude of solutions do exist.

Denmark has a plan of getting rid of fossils over the next decades, and we're well on our way. It's not a research plan, it's an investment/building plan.

Furthermore, while some subsidies are currently needed to cover risks and capital expenditures, the studies I've seen predict that we're probably going to end up with an infrastructure that's not more expensive, it may even be cheaper. Like energy from an old nuclear power plant is really cheap today because the capital expenditures have been covered many years ago (discounting insurance and other thorny nuclear issues).

But these things have already been researched for some time. More than being researched, they have been put into practice. And this has already shown us that they are relatively expensive and hard to scale, while hydrocarbons are cheap and scale well and are not subject to much in the way of political risk or NIMBYism. And this will continue to be so for decades at least.

Any promoter of renewable energy really has to be aware of this or they will not be able to target their interventions effectively.

You don't want to hear it, but the answer is nuclear fission.

I do want to hear it, actually. Thorium looks especially good in the long term, though it's still in the research phase.

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