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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
#82Garbage 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…
It's perhaps naive and over-simplistic, but the s-curve is so well-established you can probably fit the production cost curve over time to the s-curve and get a useful prediction. There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.
The s-curve has two important parameters, but looking at any amount of history before the first inflection you can only ever deduce one of them.
So, how exactly to you intent to fit the renewables (that are pre-inflection) production curves into it?
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching. Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics. The argument is that in order to extract oil, you need to spend energy, and, logically, the most easier oil to extract is extracted first. That means that oil extraction is every year more expensive (energetically not financially). Because technology can make extraction more eff…
If you can read French, this guy https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici has published a lot of vulgarization on the topic - with numbers.
If my memory of reading one of his books serves, fracking now costs 50% of the energy it produces (in addition to non-energy environmental impact, which is pretty large), up from ~10% for the easy oil we had ~50 years ago. Current-tech solar panels are in the same order of magnitude (again, not counting non-energy environmental impact). Nuclear energy has the highest yield. I seem to remember that coal is the worst, unless it's burnt at the point of extraction.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#84Garbage 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…
> It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse.
You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime?
Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#85If you can suffer the french accent, I believe Jean-Marc Jancovici is making some good points about this issue : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#86One thing I've not seen a decent discussion of is what industries benefit from enormous amounts of almost free electricity? Other than the manufacturers of wind, solar, etc systems, how does this effect the economy? Obviously that effect is going to be significant, but what exactly does it look like?
In the UK it already means all the electric car drivers program their cars to charge when it gets really windy (or did).
Once grids implement a sane variable pricing system and manage transmission capacity properly electricity prices are unlikely to go zero or negative.
EVs alone will probably soak up excess demand (& contribute back when pumped storage starts running dry).
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively. Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year. Ther…
> we are not short of any of those materials For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years. Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of min…
In fact, we do not have "plenty" of lithium. There's not enough lithium in the world to put in all the batteries for all the EVs we'll need to replace ICE vehicles. This is entirely orthogonal to the fact that recycling lithium ion batteries is expensive, difficult, and potentially dangerous in the case of any type of mishap.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/electric-vehicles-wor...
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we are not short of any of those materials For the most part you are correct. But building the mines, refining, supply chains, etc takes time. So you are perhaps missing one of the main points I was trying, maybe unsuccessfully, to make: we need to deal with the 'right now' and not just worry about how we'll be fine in 50 years. Lithium is a perfect example. We have plenty in the ground. We don't have plenty of min…
> We should be allocating Li carefully until those issues are resolved in 5-10 years. Well intentioned policy like this can have the reverse effect. If you limit lithium usage you will limit demand, which can reduce the effort expended to build new mines.
Did I suggest that? I mean we should be realistic about Li availability and incentivize its usage appropriately.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#89Garbage 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…
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. 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.
It matters if you disrupt the dirty energy pipeline well before you've secured enough green energy to self-sustain a green energy future.
Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production and use as we ramp up manufacturing and deployment of the systems needed for clean energy production, and then see a tapering off of the current production methods as the new ones come online. 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 draggin…
> We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production
Right. But right now we're incentivizing the opposite. We're telling fossil fuel companies we don't need them anymore long before we've actually figured out a way to live without them. Do you see the problem yet?