Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

Also other practical consequences of solar and wind: what about land usage? How much land do we need to power our huge appetite for energy? What impact does that have on the environment? Mining for rare Earth minerals? How do we recycle these systems at the end of life?

People keep talking about the cost of renewables, but in fact, money is the one renewable resource that we do have.

All of the above are majorly important questions. Maybe renewables aren't so renewable after all.

> I think if we had variable pricing that matched the availability of renewables, consumers would shift quickly.

If you dig around enough, you'll find plenty of stories of variable electricity costs. From what I understand, it's more common for business customers instead of residential. (Apparently chillers that freeze water overnight with cheap electricity to run daytime air conditioning is a thing.)

But anyway, I have a fancy powerwall and solar, but I only use it for backup. Why? There's no incentive to use the battery. It's 95% efficient, so if I use the battery at night, I get less net metering credits than if I just use it as backup.

As an upper midwesterner, that would be an incredibly hard sell. You could whip up support for coal again in heartbeat.

Renewables are a great idea in theory, but in reality don't jive well with people in the non-windy, non-sunny areas that also get really damn cold. It's sad to say it but nothing can beat what natural gas and coal can do already. They're cheap and can be used to generate electricity at an extraordinarily affordable rate. At the end of the day, that's the #1 thing most people are going to care about. If you told people here their electricity bills would double, they'd actively go out and demand the current politician step down.

If you look at where investors put their money, it's very clear that the learning effects have already convinced them that renewables provide the best ROI. It's not even a debate or a hypothetical outcome. This happened years ago. Price parity for wind/solar happened about seven years ago in most markets. The learning curves that this article talks about have not slowed down since and the result of that is that is that prices are no longer similar but at this point obviously cheaper (2-3x).

What's more interesting is what is going to happen next: they prices going to be an order of magnitude cheaper; and then another one. And this is going to happen quickly. And unless something changes, it's happening on a predictable timeline even. Investors and policy makers are already taking decisions based on this.

The effects of a two orders of magnitude change in pricing are both easy and hard to predict. The easy part is predicting that we will not merely use renewables to replace non renewables. Or put differently, an order of magnitude change in price will be paired with an order of magnitude increase in demand. The world electricity right now is a bit over 30 PWH (peta watt hour) per year, give or take. Normal linear growth would probably get us to 50-100PHW in a couple of decades. However, orders of magnitude changes in prices (10x, 100X, 1000X) could put us on a different path where we are producing hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of PWH of electricity. Like this half of this century.

People worried about storage: Elon Musk is building TWH battery factories right now. A few decades from now we might have hundreds or thousands such factories: enough battery production to store current electricity production for about a year every year. And bear in mind that batteries can be used more than once. A single TWH worth of batteries with about 3000 cycles would store about 3PWH of energy; we only need ten such factories to get to 30PWH. Back of the envelope math is fun.

That's all easy part to predict but it may be hard for people to wrap their heads around the numbers. Exponentials are hard for people's intuitions. The only uncertainty here is how long the learning curves will apply. The most pessimistic perspective on that would be that thousands of R&D projects, startups, research institutes are going to fail 100% starting right now and the learning curves will flat line completely and immediately. Any other perspective means that 10x is 100% certain to happen in 15-20 years and 100x would be extremely likely by 2060 or so. I hope to still be around by then. I could be off by an order of magnitude (both ways) and basically the only change would be the years in this paragraph would change a little.

The hard part is predicting what we'll actually do with this energy. There's no shortage of interesting applications that are essentially cost bottle-necked on energy. Synthetic fuels, clean water, heavy industry, transport, mass transit, etc. all benefit from orders of magnitude changes in pricing for energy. This is a massive economic opportunity.

What that also means is that the learning curves this article talks about will start impacting the cost of things that currently don't have them. Including most of our legacy fossil energy infrastructure. A gas plant burning fossil methane doesn't benefit from this learning curve. The same plant burning methane produced from thin air using excess solar/wind does: that becomes cheaper to operate as the price of solar/wind drops.

Current fossil fuel energy consumption is going to be a rounding error when you consider the demand increase fueled by a 100x drop in electricity prices. Eventually, fossil fuel is going to be beyond irrelevant as we'll literally be able to synthesize the entire current demand for that orders of magnitude cheaper than current prices. All forms of fossil fuel exploitation will grind to a halt because of that. That's good news.

It’s the opposite of growth. Would you buy a house if you knew it wouldn’t be there in 20 years?