61–70 of 269 posts
I am just curious about manufacturing capacity of these green energy gadgets in Western World. When I look at the parts for my solar installation everything is made in Asia. My system is rather simple: 4-6 panels each ~400 Wp and stupid single phase inverter. That battery production isn’t a thing in the West is already well known fact. In my eyes this green energy transition totally depends on factories in Asia. And…
Critiqued 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…
This statement seems false unless you take it to somewhat tautologically mean that electrolysis could use seawater as an input. The quantity of water in the ocean is vast, we could remove enough hydrogen to store 5 years of world energy usage and that would still be a tiny fraction of the water in the ocean. Less than 0.0001%, probably less than that.
* Liquid water in the ocean 1.37e21 kg * Roughly 1.37e20kg of hydrogen * Roughly 120 MJ of hydrogen/kg * Annual energy usage is 5.387e14 MJ * So we require roughly 4.489e12 kg of hydrogen, or 0.00000003% of the hydrogen in the ocean.
I feel like most of the "real costs" of green hydrogen are overstated. There don't seem to be any actual impediments. It's true that current prices are high but hydrogen electrolysis presently costs maybe 5-7x what natural gas does for unit energy. This is expensive but economies of scale have to at least cut that in half if we did it at scale and it's very much within reach. (And it seems plausible that economies of scale cut it down even further.) Yes, people are balking but that's why we need to just subsidize it until costs come down.
Green Energy has radically lower thermodynamic efficiency and energy density than ANY other currently used energy source (especially fossil and nuclear). These two qualities of an energy source have a direct relationship to economic efficiency and utility. Economics and Energy are 1:1 causal - economic growth ONLY occurs with energy growth. Lowering the quality of energy means lowering economic productivity, efficiency and activity.
When they say it will result in "trillions of net savings", this is PRECISELY the same as saying that you can increase profits by driving all costs to zero. It's either fraud or ignorance to claim such a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> will just become profits for the companies ... greed Of course they will. You can thank this effect for the high standard of living we enjoy from the free market.
Is there a free market though? Seems like it's all taxed and regulated.
Read The Wealth of Nations and you will see that Adam Smith was a vociferous advocate of regulation. Because "free" was not "unregulated" in the original conception, it was rather "open to any participant, such that they have the opportunity to benefit", which as we have noted over the past 300 years of economic history requires regulation and enforcement mechanisms (funded by taxes).
I am just curious about manufacturing capacity of these green energy gadgets in Western World. When I look at the parts for my solar installation everything is made in Asia. My system is rather simple: 4-6 panels each ~400 Wp and stupid single phase inverter. That battery production isn’t a thing in the West is already well known fact. In my eyes this green energy transition totally depends on factories in Asia. And…
Er, no. 13 large new battery factories are expected to come online in the US in the next 3 years.[1] General Motors is building four. Ford is building three. SK Innovations is building two. Stellantis (Fiat, Chrysler, etc.) is building two. Volkswagen and Toyota are building one each. This doesn't include Tesla, which isn't saying. China's ambassador to the United States is now complaining about the US cutting China out of the battery supply chain.[2]
[1] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Ramps-Up-Batte... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-15/china-s-e...
Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline? Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and material…
Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.
Complete BS. Green Energy has radically lower thermodynamic efficiency and energy density than ANY other currently used energy source (especially fossil and nuclear). These two qualities of an energy source have a direct relationship to economic efficiency and utility. Economics and Energy are 1:1 causal - economic growth ONLY occurs with energy growth. Lowering the quality of energy means lowering economic productiv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right. The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is…
How did we get the first railroads built? By a combination of horses dragging materials so humans could lay the rail lines and then trains dragging materials as the initial lines were built. There was almost certainly an initial increase in horse power consumption, and then a decline as the new system came online. This isn't a new thing, this is how many replacement transitions that depend on the previous system play out.
Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline? Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and material…
There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right. The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is…
I think the easier way to look at it, though, isn't the upfront cost of the transition, but the outcomes that are 10-20 years down the line. A big "spend" right now should result in less overall carbon emitted (according to most of the lifecycle analyses that I'm familiar with, anyway).
It's a really good point that we need to optimize this, of course. It would be ideal to manufacture solar panels in places with a favorable energy mix versus somewhere that's still 100% coal. But in a lot of cases, it's better just to get the things out the door as fast as possible using the technology we have.