Hacker News Reader

Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

When you calculate the amount of power the plant is likely to produce over its lifetime, the cost per kilowatt-hour is likely to be much higher than for fossil-fuel power. It’s even likely to be higher than the cost of power from solar panels, thanks to the fast drop in solar-panel prices in recent years. If costs don’t come down — and decreasing the costs of mirrors and steam turbines is hard to do — solar thermal power might prove to be a dead end.

I hate this attitude - the costs of the produced energy is not everything. Who said that energy has to become cheaper and cheaper? If you want to reduce the carbon dioxide emission just introduce additional taxes for fossil fuels or even prohibit burning them or subsidize solar energy. Just accept the increased costs and enjoy your clean air.

View on HN

> Just accept the increased costs and enjoy your clean air.

That's easy to say, but shouldn't we use existing costs as a base metric for measuring how much increased costs we can bear? Otherwise we would have to accept energy costs that eclipse the cost of everything else--including basic living expenses. Of course, energy cost is tied to basic living expenses, so at some point higher energy costs would mean fewer people can afford to live. Therefore, clean air has to be balanced with the more basic human right to live.

Lack of clean air can also _impair_ the right to live. When coal was the default source of domestic heating in London, toxic smog frequently caused hundreds of deaths and generally caused respiratory diseases.

I hate it as well, but I think it is generally anticipated that any greentech solution is never going to be widely adopted until it achieves price parity.

Another thing that people often don't price in to the cost effectiveness of petroleum fuel sources are the many increasing billions that went/go into acquiring said fuel every year…

I'm not entirely sure I believe this myself, but I'm sure one can easily find studies describing the increased healthcare costs of the entire US population due to fossil fuel burning.

But I think it shouldn't be looked at in that light. The US government claims we, as a first world country, have the responsibility to protect those less fortunate than us. While that line is normally used to justify wars in far off countries (that just happen to be oil-rich), things like this are what I think of. Besides, it's not so much the pollution the US generates that scares me. It's places like China (or the next country that suddenly finds itself in a rampant industrial age) that scare me. Global pollution does not respect political boundaries.

So yeah, this will be more expensive at first. But the research needs to be done before it will get better. Somebody has to take lead so it can be ready by the time more 3rd world countries get "uplifted".

Which is another way to say that we won't start using "green" energy until we run out of hydrocarbon fuel.

It's a very dangerous attitude -- we need to use what's left of hydrocarbon fuel to bootstrap new energy while we still can, and have the luxury to afford to experiment.

I forget where the quote is from, but as has been said: "The definition of modern agriculture, is that it is a way to transform hydrocarbons into carbohydrates.". Unless we do something soon, running out of oil, will mean running out of food. We need it for tractors, and for modern fertilizers, for irrigation -- and for transport of food.

Oil (and coal) is cheap energy, because it's basically just laying around, waiting for us to burn it. It's grown harder to get -- but it is ridiculous to wait around for other energy to "become cheaper". If we don't make an effort to change the entire infrastructure the world runs on (quite literally) -- what will happen is that oil will become as expensive as "green" energy -- not the other way around.

And that is of course ignoring all the problems hydrocarbons leaves us with, in the form of various forms of pollution. That we'll have to clean up and/or deal with without cheap energy.

> Who said that energy has to become cheaper and cheaper?

It needs to if we want to have better living standard in future. Or even more or less equal living standards for all people on Earth. Which I think is a reasonable goal.

If the power is expansive poor people won't use it. Energy is one of the most important productivity multipliers there are. Forbiding developing countries access to reasonably priced energy means artificaly keeping them poor forever.

> I hate this attitude - the costs of the produced energy is not everything.

Put another way, for apples-to-apples you have to compare against the real cost of fossil fuels (including externalities).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com