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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

#141

Post by tuatoru »

01100011 wrote: post #37

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…

> We're probably short of copper.

While copper water pipes still have a market, I don't think we can claim to be short of copper.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#142

Post by opportune »

01100011 wrote: post #37

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…

Green energy requires massive amounts of energy to produce. The more we electrify vehicles and the more green energy in the grid, the greener it becomes to produce green energy.

I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#143

Post by jcranmer »

RobertoG wrote: post #75
bobthepanda wrote: post #49

Earlier 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…

> 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.

... that hasn't been the traditional argument behind peak oil, from its original adherents (checks notes) 70 years ago. The traditional theory is a pretty bare oil demand inevitably increases while fields run dry because we extract all the [usable] oil first--and one of the main points of the theory is to ask what you're going to do when you need oil and there is none left. It may be that newer adherents are arguing peak oil on the basis of energy-invested-on-energy-returned basis, but that's not the traditional argument for the theory.

While it is true that newer oil sources require more energy to extract, but that's not particularly relevant for a few reasons. For one, on current trends, it looks like demand for oil will peak well before economical supply of oil will be exhausted (which is the main point of the theory). But even being net-negative on energy production isn't necessarily a deal breaker, for there can well be cases where there's no realistic alternative to oil as an energy source due to its great energy density (see airplanes, for example).

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#144

Post by ncmncm »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #100
mrep wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article mentions "reserves" 5 times and cost/price not once. Same type of articles were written about peak oil and then the price of oil went up and magically reserves grew as it be came profitable to find and extract new sources of oil.

That's because reserves are what matters. I don't care if there's billions of tons of lithium at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, nobody's ever going to go get it because it's too dangerous, difficult, and expensive. The same thing with space mining. Nobody's going to go mine asteroids because it's stupidly expensive. For all intents and purposes, if we can't get to it, it doesn't exist. And let's not forget about…

You seem not to understand what "reserves" actually means.

It does not exclude easily accessible material. It only excludes material not assessed yet because there has been no need to, as existing reserves will last more than long enough to perform further surveys.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#145

Post by dv_dt »

ncmncm wrote: post #137
RobertoG wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The energy delivered by a solar panel is overwhelmingly more than needed to make it. The gain is enormous. There is simply no contest. Consider that makers of solar panels, and of the materials that go into them, get no break on their power bills. Each and every kWh that goes into making the panel is paid for, and necessarily has its cost folded into the price of the panel. Otherwise they would be paying power out of…

One could look for more direct sources, but the summary is that energy payback happens in 1-4 years out of current 25 year "life". And that 25 years is typically a warranty to 80% of original capacity. Year 26 of operation is not a sudden drop.

https://www.solarmelon.com/faqs/solar-panels-use-energy-manu...

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#146

Post by ncmncm »

01100011 wrote: post #89
cesarb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Every way to secure green energy requires some use of dirty energy.

So the only choice is between dirty forever, and dirty decreasing. If the latter, the faster it decreases, the less dirty energy you use on the transition.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#147

Post by ClumsyPilot »

WalterBright wrote: post #79
kbenson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, the ability to usefully interact with the stock market is very limited for the majority of people, as they do not have the extra income to invest. It's very much a system in which the lower class do not get to meaningfully benefit from most the time. On the other hand, the companies will be made of people, expand by hiring new people, and pay these people with those profits, so much of the money will…

> Companies saving vast amounts of it in war chests is, IMO (depending on how they save it), as it's effectively removing it from the economy. Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it. Even money in a checking account is invested. (The banks invest it, that's why they offer free checking accounts. They're not a charity.) The majority of people do invest in the stock marke…

> Nobody saves money in Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. All the money is invested, all of it.

Russian oligarchs invested vast amounts of money into super yahts and luzury London real estate, which sits empty 360 days a year.

Is that productive investment?

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#148

Post by bryanlarsen »

Yoric wrote: post #83
RobertoG wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn't pass the smell test. A "raw" solar panel in China costs about 25 cents / W, and each watt should produce about 45kWh over its lifetime (5W per day for 25 years). If the embodied energy in the panel is half of the lifetime energy, that means that there is 22kWh of embodied energy in that W of solar panel, and they're selling that embodied energy for about 1 cent / kWh. And that assumes that there are no costs to the panel other than the embodied energy.

A rule of thumb is that embodied energy in a finished manufactured product sells for about $1/kWh. By that rule of thumb, the embodied energy in a solar panel is about 0.5% of the energy it will produce over its lifetime.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#149

Post by ncmncm »

dqpb wrote: post #110
01100011 wrote: post #37

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…

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce In theory, bootstrapping will eventually be complete.

The stronger statement is true: as green energy becomes increasingly cheaper than dirty, industries will transition to clean wherever they can. New industry will start out using cheaper green, and green generation capacity is almost all new.

Re: Rapid Green Energy Transition Will Likely Result in Trillions of Net Savings

#150

Post by ch4s3 »

stormbrew wrote: post #71
ch4s3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mercantilism definitely is NOT a kind of capitalism. Adam Smith and other thinkers during the Scottish Enlightenment were specifically arguing against mercantilism. The Cron Laws in England were even successfully repealed by on of Smith's students.

I mean, I agree with you (I just said sometimes people call it that, not that it is that) but I don't think anything you said really contradicts it being a kind of capitalism. After all Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky disagreed literally violently with each other but Soviet Communism is still a label that contains all their efforts and systems.

Right but they were fighting over the direction of a type of political economy that predated all of them. Smith and other original thinkers that framed capitalism did so in opposition to mercantilism. Capitalism was a reaction to. And in many ways criticism of mercantilism.
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