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Miscellanea: The War in Iran

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Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#611

Post by Someone »

scoofy wrote: post #574
VK-pro wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else

I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return. Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a bl…

> Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free

One could even say it is risk-negative. It decreases the risk one runs of future oil price hikes.

If you buy solar cells, you buy futures on energy delivery at a guaranteed price.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#612

Post by clueless »

solatic wrote: post #153
bryanlarsen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Donald Trump obviously doesn't care either, because every action he has taken during his two terms has increased the risk of Iran developing nuclear weapons. JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was a lot better than nothing, which is what Trump traded it for. If Trump was serious about stopping Iran's nuclear program, he would have made taking Isfahan a top priority of the initial strikes.

People repeat themselves saying "JCPOA was highly flawed, but it was better than nothing", as if JCPOA would have prevented Iran from getting nuclear weapons. It would not - it only delayed Iran getting nuclear weapons, and so by that line of thinking, it only delayed the onset of war. Delaying the onset of war is not worthless, but it is not the same as arguing that war could have been avoided, which is what people…

> It's only true in a universe where Iran would have collapsed from within before the expiration of the sunset clause, and that clearly was not going to happen.

No one can know this hypothetical, but some def bet their entire futures/careers on this: that an Iran with a more prosperous middle class (as a result of JCPOA) might have had a better chance for social/internal reform, i.e. regime change.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#613

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

scoofy wrote: post #574
VK-pro wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sleep deprived so maybe not the right words, but isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? I feel maybe that’s more the problem here with renewables. It’s cheaper but not cheap enough to put the dollars there instead of somewhere else

I mean, the payback period is like 5 years if you count all the subsides. My point is only that, you can effectively take most of your house of the grid, even in an urban area, with a relatively short payback period, and an almost guaranteed return. Is it the most profitable place for investment dollars? Probably not, but it's effectively risk-free, and there are plenty of knock-on benefits, like having power in a bl…

I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.

It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.

For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.

Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.

Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.

For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.

But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#614

Post by Starman_Jones »

ReptileMan wrote: post #329
conception wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is definitely a way to gain leadership that is more amenable. There definitely has not been any historical cases of one country inflecting mass suffering on another country’s innocent population for the other to hold.. let’s say a strong grudge against the aggressor.

And there are cases like Vietnam that are USA best buddies now. And a lot of people that grew on a morning brew of agent orange and napalm are in their leadership now.

Would you say that the Vietnam War was a success for the US?

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#615

Post by hansvm »

scoofy wrote: post #561
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> environmentalists were like, "hey look, free energy," It's not free. It costs trilliions of dollars to build and maintain. I think it's worth it. But one place where the climate-change movement lost the plot was in underplaying costs and overplaying the doom.

If I install solar panels, a battery, and a next gen breaker box in CA, even with premium equipment and no subsidies, I'm looking at a max payback period of like 20 years, right? At that point yea, it's effectively free energy. Is it an investment? Sure, but it's an investment that trivially pays for itself.

To be fair, CA is one of the only places that's true, largely due to PG&E fuckups paired with a legislature keen to grant them unlimited money to kick back to shareholders.

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#616

Post by scoofy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #597
scoofy wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you. This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.

> system already pays for itself No, it yields savings. This is a massive difference. > You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you This is a real concern for any long-term investment, particularly when we're talking at utility/industrial scales. Dismissing it like this is basically arguing that solar is too new to be properly talked about, which is nonsens…

I guess, though, the actual “solar” part of the solar set up is by far the cheapest part.

The vast majority of the set up costs are just getting electrification done right.

Like, even if LNG becomes crazy cheap, a battery set up will still save you money in the long run just by allowing off-peak demand.

This is why I’m confused: for this to me remotely a bad investment, basically everything possible has to go wrong for you, whereas the risks associated with carbon energy production are very obvious and very likely.

Do you have some more likely counter scenario?

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#617

Post by [deleted] »

amarant wrote: post #278

A core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end: This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable. Optimistically then, perhaps this…

[deleted]

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#618

Post by mlmonkey »

cheema33 wrote: post #553
mlmonkey wrote: post #545

People often call this war "dumb". IMO: this war is just the next step in the 1200-year old Shia-Sunni conflict. The Sunnis hate the Shia, and vice versa. Ever since 1979 when Khomeini came to power, the Sunnis have been on edge. The terrorist attack on Mecca shortly after made matters worse ( https://www.brookings.edu/events/terrorism-in-saudi-arabia-p... ). At first they thought they'd get Saddam to take out Iran;…

> IMO: this war is just the next step in the 1200-year old Shia-Sunni conflict. US and Israel attacked Iran because of Shia-Sunni issues?

You need to think beyond first order effects.

Saudis want to get rid of Iran, for Shia-Sunni reasons.

Israel wants to get rid of Iran because of the 3 Hs.

Enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that; that's why KSA and Israel mended fences (for now).

Now Saudis cannot take on Iran at all; heck, they can't even take on the Houthis. So ... they found the 800lb gorilla (USA) and convinced it that those mean Iranians had made stupid faces at him.

Iran, meanwhile, showed colossal stupidity and arrogance by supporting these 3 Hs. Houthis, I can understand; they are going after Saudis mainly. But Iran had no dog in the Israel-Palestine fight!

Re: Miscellanea: The War in Iran

#620

Post by hansvm »

scoofy wrote: post #588
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn’t there an implicit IRR that a household would maintain and usually a 20 year payoff would be maybe not the first use of investment dollars? Yes. Also, the risk for industry is going all in right before a new technology comes out. At that point, you either write off your original investment and deploy the new kit. Or you accept a structural energy-cost disadvantage. I am massively pro renewables. But you have t…

The system already pays for itself. The only thing you lose if a new technology comes out is opportunity cost. You also likely don’t want to be an early adopter of the newest tech anyway if this is a concern for you. This doesn’t really make sense to me as an objection, so maybe I misunderstood.

There's a sort of mixing of units happening here, and I think it's causing some confusion. Here's an example (greatly simplified) scenario highlighting a flaw in your rationale:

1. Energy at your normal usage costs $1000/yr.

2. You can spend $20k now to have access to equivalent energy output for the next 40 years before it degrades to unusability.

3. Next year, somebody invents a flux capacitor bringing all energy costs for everyone down to $1/yr.

If you don't buy the thing, you spend $1039 over the next 40 years. If you buy the thing you spend $20k, and it's hit its expected lifespan, so you don't recoup any further benefits.

The real world has inflation, wars, more sane invention deltas, and all sorts of complications, but the general idea still holds. If you expect tech to improve quickly enough and are relying on long-term payoffs, it can absolutely be worth delaying your purchase.

If you predict massive improvements in solar/battery/etc tech, the only way it makes sense to invest now is if those improvements aren't massive enough, you expect sufficiently bad changes to the alternatives, etc. I.e., you're playing the odds about some particular view of how the world will progress, and your argument needs to reflect that. It's not inherently true that just because solar pays off now it will in the future.

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