Interesting who funded this study: Institute for New Economic Thinking was founded with an initial pledge of $50 million from businessman and philanthropist George Soros . I'm sure researchers try extra hard to not be influenced by the funders and pursue real science. Let's hope they did in this case.
Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
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Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#12the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it seems to be highly dependent on solar mass adoption
You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.
yes and no - each day it is game rules plus the ability to negotiate; elected officials come in all flavors
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#13Critiqued at https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-9-16-cost-of-t... . '[H]ere are what I believe to be the main problems with the work: The principal driver of the whole thing is a forecast of rapid and continuous declines in the cost of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The assumption is that costs of these things will continue to decline exponentially without limit indefinitely into the future. Fr…
storage (and grid stability in general) is always the crucial achilles heel to renewables and it's always handwaved away with fantastical arguments positioned squarely against nuclear (here, springing up a whole global hydrogen economy out of nowhere). it's frustrating to see so much needless internecine fighting when nuclear plus renewables is the most viable answer we have right now to a fossil fuel free future. we need to be laser-focused on removing coal from our energy present, let alone our energy future.
coal is still nearly 30% of the electricity generation in the US (and 11% of total energy consumption). if we'd just kept building nuclear like we had between the 70s-90s, we'd be coal-free right now (other than that the bit used by industry, which is about 10% of the total coal use, and 1% of total energy consumption).
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very poor critique, as the URL, the title and the first sentence would suggest. Bad even by the low standards of these things generally. edit: Turns out the author runs a climate change denial think tank: https://www.desmog.com/global-warming-policy-foundation/ and has been talking nonsense on this topic for over a decade: > During a question and answer period following the debate, a question from the audien…
OK. But what about the idea that renewable energy costs have no floor?
That’s not the claim in the article.
From the article:
> For example, as shown in Figure 3B, past floor costs used in IAMs have already repeatedly been violated. We know of no empirical evidence supporting floor costs and do not impose them (see Document S1 section “The use of floor costs in endogenous technological learning models”).
So there is no claim that there will not be a floor. Just that the floor costs have been wrong for decades, and imposing them has led to extremely wrong predictions. So including them in an analysis is likely to again mislead rather than help.
Also, there’s a whole bunch of discussion about not using floor costs. So the “critique” is not much of a critique since it does not engage with the actual claims being made and the detailed explanations justifying those choices.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#15Interesting who funded this study: Institute for New Economic Thinking was founded with an initial pledge of $50 million from businessman and philanthropist George Soros . I'm sure researchers try extra hard to not be influenced by the funders and pursue real science. Let's hope they did in this case.
If anyone is curious about the full list of funders:
> This work was supported by funding from Partners for a New Economy (R.W. and J.D.F.); Baillie Gifford (J.D.F.); the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 730427 (COP21 RIPPLES) (R.W.); and the Oxford Martin School , through the Institute of New Economic Thinking and the Post-Carbon Transition programme ( LDR00530 ) (M.C.I. and P.M.). This research was also funded by the Economics of Energy Innovation and System Transition project ( EEIST ), which is jointly funded through UK Aid by the UK Government Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation ( CIFF ) (R.W. and M.C.I.).
It would be truly extraordinary if George Soros was able to use his indirect connection to one of eight funders of this study to influence its findings, but I suppose we'll never know for sure.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#16Interesting who funded this study: Institute for New Economic Thinking was founded with an initial pledge of $50 million from businessman and philanthropist George Soros . I'm sure researchers try extra hard to not be influenced by the funders and pursue real science. Let's hope they did in this case.
Interesting that you plucked George Soros out in particular. Is this /pol/?
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#17No post body was provided.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#18the cynic in me says that those savings will just become profits for the companies and government through taxes and greed....so savings are relative. Also it seems to be highly dependent on solar mass adoption
You know, collectively, we can do something about that… It’s a political decision in society to allow that added value to be sucked up by those who are already wealthy.
Isn't it too late for that now that the power imbalance afforded to Capital owners is so disproportionate?
I think that's what transpired from Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very poor critique, as the URL, the title and the first sentence would suggest. Bad even by the low standards of these things generally. edit: Turns out the author runs a climate change denial think tank: https://www.desmog.com/global-warming-policy-foundation/ and has been talking nonsense on this topic for over a decade: > During a question and answer period following the debate, a question from the audien…
OK. But what about the idea that renewable energy costs have no floor?
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Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#20Can we really build batteries at the scale needed for this? I’m a bit skeptical.