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The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

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Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#51

Post by vlovich123 »

ggm wrote: post #50
vlovich123 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a gree…

Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?

Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install.

As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build.

But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power.

Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#52

Post by shiftpgdn »

vlovich123 wrote: post #47
adrianN wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.

https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…

Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#53

Post by ggm »

vlovich123 wrote: post #51
ggm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?

Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic…

Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.

More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.

Almost no new wind or solar can be deployed at scale in Australia now without battery deployment. Both individuals and grid scale batteries are fine. They serve different parts of the supply chain.

FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.

Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.

Networks are, and always were a public utility function. Converting to bid models was a huge mistake.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#54

Post by dabber »

ggm wrote: post #49
vlovich123 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.

Plastics have many substitution options outside of the narrow range where it's the best choice. I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.

> I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.

Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#55

Post by vivekd »

vlovich123 wrote: post #30
jes5199 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

combination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t

I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.

Plastic is only cheap because it's a byproduct of oil. It'll stop being as cheap and plentiful if we stop producing oil and we'll naturally move to cheaper substitutes

Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#56

Post by ggm »

dabber wrote: post #54
ggm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastics have many substitution options outside of the narrow range where it's the best choice. I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser.

> I'd be more concerned about how gas is feedstock for pharma, and fertiliser. Would you elaborate on what you mean by this? I don't follow.

Gas, including ethylene from oil production, is used heavily in pharma, plastics and fertiliser production. If oil becomes uneconomic to produce, the supply of drugs, explosives, plastic and fertiliser is at risk, at the very least of price shocks.

Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important.

The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#57

Post by adrianN »

vlovich123 wrote: post #47
adrianN wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.

https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…

I bet a lot of that 16% is fertilizer.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#58

Post by perrygeo »

essemharris wrote: post #11

This report was written by the Club of Rome, notable for having made some of the silliest predictions about population growth in the 20th century

First, they were not predictions, they were comparative scenario runs. Second, empirical data has tracked the business-as-usual scenarios for decades and has been independently verified multiple times by peer review. Third, they study a dynamic system that includes population and are not trying to "predict" population growth in any way. Before you call someone's work "silly", you might want to make sure you understand it at a basic level. Otherwise, it's clear who looks silly here.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#59

Post by CapstanRoller »

namaria wrote: post #46
CapstanRoller wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system and I'm sure there are many more like me. You and the people you care about will, of course, be totally unaffected and simply observe the suffering of Those Other People Who Don't Matter from a distance, then step out of your bunker into the newly rejuvenated world and begin enjoying life? Wake up! YOU ARE ALSO INSIDE THIS MACHINE, ALONG WITH EVERYO…

Accelerationists and preppers are merely engaging in self soothing behavior to mitigate their discomfort stemming from a lack of understanding and control over the world.

Some of them are sociopaths, and the accelerationist crowd especially is full of unabashed fascists.

Re: The Seneca Effect: Growth is slow but collapse is rapid (2017) [pdf]

#60

Post by cobber2005 »

jes5199 wrote: post #15

I am hoping that the modern world is not one single system that can crash all at once, but is rather many systems, such that a crash leaves room for new things to grow bigger

There is a model of nested dynamic systems called 'panarchy'.

> Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [which sometimes is a collapse], and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs.

https://islandpress.org/books/panarchy

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