Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#631

Post by rini17 » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #630

rini17 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, sadly, not in widespread public awareness. But some research is there, such as [1] [2]. If a hydropower dam has been built today on lower Mississippi it would over time fill with a cubic-mile-worth of toxic sediment on the top of currently existing problems. This is not an exaggeration, an additional superfund site with a volume measured in cubic miles, due solely to the hydro project itself I don't see how el…

First, if . The lower Mississippi has poor hydro potential. And the region is already a cancer alley. Again: hydro does not create that risk or the polutants. This is an extreme reach.

Ah now I get it, when something instead of producing pollution directly, merely concentrates it in a reservoir, we can blithely ignore it. /s

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#632

Post by Budabellly » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #625

ben_w wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low energy density though — a fully charged 1kg LiIon battery has enough energy to raise its own weight by a height of about 50 km. Wikipedia says energy density of 0.36-0.875 MJ/kg; assuming 0.5 MJ/kg and putting it into PE = mgh -> 0.5 MJ/kg * 1kg = 1kg * g * h -> h = (0.5 MJ/kg)/g = ~51 km http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%280.5%20MJ%2Fkg%29%2Fg...

I think that ultimately this limits how cheap gravity batteries can get, there’s just too much material and those materials are already well-understood components with little chance for falling costs. We would likely need entirely new and innovative materials or designs A gravity battery that used completely new materials or design to come up with something cheap. Where as lithium ion batteries generally get cheaper…

Admittedly, I know very little of the battery industry, and not much more about gravity battery viability.

That said, naive me would would ask why we can't just fill ballasts with waste water or other dense waste materials on-site?

Energy density over a gravity battery's working lifetime is a different metric than "per-charge", and maybe more relevant for supplying energy back to a grid (compared to, e.g. a home).

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#633

Post by fakedang » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

ikerdanzel wrote: post #617

fakedang wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, read my last line. The SWF is responsible for all the subsidies in the UAE, and if they collapse, it would mean we have far bigger problems. The SWF invests in all major indices across all major markets, and even in multiple private equity firms (including my old firm, which was one of the biggest in the world). The collapse of $1.1T worth of investments would be the signal of a global collapse. Imagine if Bla…

You making an assumption UAE will never dip their hand into their golden goose. Money come and go. Just go ask Rothschild and Rockefeller when they had wealth beyond imagination back then. I wouldn't put too much faith in SWF. Nokia gone. Lehman gone. They take along a lot of billionaire money too. So SWF will have to be incredibily lucky like Buffet to keep their wealth. Let just say in 50 years, it will be very dif…

Fun fact, the Rothschild and Rockefeller wealth still exists, although it's heavily fragmented. For the Rockefellers, the US government explicitly stepped in and split their golden goose (Standard Oil - > Exxon + Chevron + Texaco). The Rothschild money permeates Europe throughout. The split is because that's what happens when you get a family spanning more than thousands of members. And each of their branches are massively wealthy.

You mention the UAE dipping into its SWF, except it already does that. The SWF accumulates the oil wealth from exports, which is reinvested into various investments around the world. A fraction (about 50B USD) of the annual returns from that wealth is what is used to run the UAE and all of its welfare programmes, its military, etc. Unlike the Saudis, UAE and Qatar both benefit from really small local populations - there are about 300k Qatari citizens and 1M Emirati citizens worldwide.

And Buffett is not lucky. He made a lot of successful bets everywhere year - I recommend reading his investor letters if you can, where he explains his rationale behind every investment decision, including the ones that turned out to be duds.

Just as you say that SWFs won't exist in 50 years, there are banks in Switzerland that have existed for hundreds of years. Oxford and Cambridge are just as prestigious today as they were 800 years ago. Once a culture is established and buttressed, it will be hard to shake it off.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#634

Post by aoeusnth1 » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

albertop wrote: post #375

outworlder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rooftop solar still have 5+ years ROI Why is that a problem? Most people take multiples of that time just to pay off their mortgage. Maybe if you are house flipping, but even then this tends to increase their value.

Seems like an elitist point of view. Just pointing out the for the middle class family putting a lot of money to maybe get even after 5+ years is not very attractive.

You can get a zero-down loan or a lease the panels with payments lower than your power bill. This has nothing to do with liquidity.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#635

Post by epistasis » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

Budabellly wrote: post #632

epistasis wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that ultimately this limits how cheap gravity batteries can get, there’s just too much material and those materials are already well-understood components with little chance for falling costs. We would likely need entirely new and innovative materials or designs A gravity battery that used completely new materials or design to come up with something cheap. Where as lithium ion batteries generally get cheaper…

Admittedly, I know very little of the battery industry, and not much more about gravity battery viability. That said, naive me would would ask why we can't just fill ballasts with waste water or other dense waste materials on-site? Energy density over a gravity battery's working lifetime is a different metric than "per-charge", and maybe more relevant for supplying energy back to a grid (compared to, e.g. a home).

Most people guess wrong about what technologies end up winning, so me as an internet rando could definitely be wrong about gravity batteries! Certainly the idea that lithium ion batteries would be cheap/high-specific-energy enough for cars would have seemed crazy 20 years ago. And even more so that lithium ion would make it to the grid!

My thought about them are mostly about learning curves, however. We have a long ways to go while we make lithium ion batteries cheaper, probably decades, and we improve a lot each year. Gravel, rock, stone, etc. and however we contain and move that around? That seems to be something that humans have been optimizing since our first days, and there doesn't seem to be much room for improvement at the moment.

My other assumption, which could be false, is that gravity batteries are not currently economical on our current grid with current electricity prices and price swings, an assumption I make because there are no installs I know of, and none planned. Instead of being uneconomic, they could just be untried, because the electricity industry is fairly innovative. If gravity batteries are economical today then I think there could be future for them.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#636

Post by manfredo » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 2:53 AM UTC

integer42 wrote: post #542

manfredo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doing much better in terms of actually being used as a large portion of countries electricity generation, as I demonstrated above. But more importantly, the reality is that nuclear isn't competing against renewables it's competing against a fossil fuel grid that's supplemented by renewables. Germany, the poster child for renewables, still emits 10x the carbon dioxide per watt of electricity as France. Let me put…

Its a nice appeal to simplicity to say nuclear is just 'heating water and spinning a turbine', I could also say the sun is a very large carbon-free maintenance-free opex-free reactor in the sky and we just need to design a secondary stage of the power plant to transform the energy to electricity. And instead of pistons OR turbines, we can use a new type of machine specifically built for this purpose aka renewable ene…

Correct, the sun is a great source of energy. But we use most of our energy when the sun is blocked by the earth. The sun is opex and capex free, but the storage necessary to make it feasible requires massive capital expenditure and massive operational expenditure.

The point is, just adding watts to the grid is not a solution. You needed watt when they're needed and where they're needed. And doing that with renewables is a lot harder, hence why we're really just supplementing fossil fuels with wind and solar not really working towards full decarbonization.

My assertions about the capacity of battery production were indeed backed by sources of predicted growth of battery production. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283498

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#637

Post by manfredo » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #620

manfredo wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even remotely. Batteries have some of the worst energy density both by unit of volume and mass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene... . Not to mention global annual battery production amounts to less than 1 hour of the USA's national electricity usage.

Your first point is valid, but I think the second is using the wrong measure — as batteries are rechargeable, surely the measure should be total existent batteries not annual production of batteries? (I would be surprised if this was viable even with my suggested measure, no argument there!)

Liquid natural gas freightliners are also refillable. I'm not sure what you mean by this. A cargo ship filled to the brim with batteries still has orders of magnitude less energy as a ship filled with the same mass of natural gas.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#638

Post by ben_w » Sun, Dec 06, 2020, 8:02 PM UTC

manfredo wrote: post #637

ben_w wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point is valid, but I think the second is using the wrong measure — as batteries are rechargeable, surely the measure should be total existent batteries not annual production of batteries? (I would be surprised if this was viable even with my suggested measure, no argument there!)

Liquid natural gas freightliners are also refillable. I'm not sure what you mean by this. A cargo ship filled to the brim with batteries still has orders of magnitude less energy as a ship filled with the same mass of natural gas.

Global annual battery production has to be first integrated with respect to time and then multiplied by the turn-around time to calculate global annual capacity to ship electricity by way of charged batteries.

I absolutely accept that this is a poor solution, and that I am quibbling over a factor of perhaps 500 at most when it’s short by a factor of ~250,000.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#639

Post by _carbyau_ » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #626

_carbyau_ wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So it sounds to me as if home owners are selling off space that they own (at great expense!) to contribute to the grid." Well, the "great expense" is subsidised is the issue. So not that great an expense. Effectively their power bills should cancel out the remaining costs eventually and then the home owner should effectively get "free energy" after that. How much free energy? Maybe none and they are ripped off! Mayb…

No, they're selling their roof real estate to improve the capacity for the whole grid. That's why they're receiving money, although you choose to think of as a subsidy. The great expense was the acquisition of said real estate. This money spend does benefit everyone (even me, on the other side of the planet), because it improves the climate change situation, and locals in particular, because it doesn't require using…

I never said not to do anything at all. I just want the action to be different. So you'd still get your climate change benefit - which I want too!

Maybe it works differently where you are but nothing is sold here. No paperwork changes hands regarding property ownership. At any point, if the homeowner wants to throw the roof solar out, they can.

They are getting a subsidy.

The subsidy makes the solar panel vs energy costs deal work out. It was ultimately to spur the solar panel industry - which I agree benefits everyone in the general global warming sense. But in the global sense it doesn't matter whether that is via a thousand homeowners or a single power station.

As for the land? :-) Australia has plenty of that. We're amongst the lowest population density on the planet.

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

Go full fantasy and we have arid land for enough solar panels to power everyone on the planet - twice over! That fantasy ignores many realities. It is a terrible idea in a practical sense.

But it makes the point - we've got space for solar panels for one or two solar power stations for our local populace.

My point is that benefitting everyone a bit more equally rather than significantly the homeowners would be nice.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#640

Post by donw » Mon, Dec 07, 2020, 9:58 AM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #484

donw wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like we're going to retrain an oil driller to be software engineer. Why not? Equipment at that scale is complicated, and requires a lot of skill and experience to operate. Not to mention responsibility. When you screw up, people die. Very likely including you.

You're discounting a key variable in the equation: You can't teach people who are not motivated to learn; who don't have enough desire to learn; who literally can't afford a "life changing" transition. Given the pay rate of oil workers, few are going to plan ahead and switch careers to something paying less. Keep in mind, that new pay drops further as the supply (of devs) increases. In theory, I agree with you. Howev…

I think there's a lot of underlying assumptions here we need to unpack.

First, you are correct, not everybody is just going to "learn to code", and that's not where I was going.

The industrial revolution replaced, to a large degree, muscles with machines, but still required human minds to work those machines.

This enabled an explosion of wealth across the entire world, giving everybody, in essence, access to the economic equivalence of an entire village's worth of labor. Goods which were once difficult to produce, and thus available only to the wealthy, became commonplace.

You see this in design trends: ornate designs were favored until mass manufacturing rendered them trivial to reproduce, and then the world embraced Futurism and Bauhaus.

In the information revolution, we are replacing minds with machines.

We don't need as many muscles, nor do we need as many minds, and where we seem to be headed is a sort of neo-feudalism, as those that control the machines have all the power, and our societies are ill adapted for all the muscles and minds that find themselves no longer economically necessary.

Nobody has a good answer to this. UBI, if implemented properly, may solve part of the problem, but human beings derive a great portion of their psychological nourishment from being valuable to their tribes.

Just as how not everybody is going to learn to code, not everybody wants to be an artist or a musician, either.

That's not even the ugliest problem.

Two: There tends to be a very common assumption amongst the technorati, of which I suppose I am a member, that "lesser" folks, those who learned a trade instead of getting a computer science degree, can't learn how to code.

I personally hate this attitude, and push back against it wherever I can. Yes, not everybody can be even a mediocre programmer; but, a great programmer can come from anywhere.