141–150 of 176 posts
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Lost you. Large fossil fuel power stations are undeniably more efficient (cheaper) than the alternatives. Renewables are not competitive at all, yet.
Pretty much everyone DOES deny this, once you factor in all costs. Pollution costs everyone. The undeniably better prices don't count that cost.
Scaling of these solutions is what we need to worry about. Scaling wind and solar to actually provide energy on the scale we humans consume it is a totally different question that "how much does this cost per mega watt hour".
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> Adoption will happen without distorting markets with overwrought subsisidies and burning money trying to accelerate it further. So you think that instead of introducing counter distortions to protect the environment we should just keep the distortions that are damaging it that we already have?
We need to carefully balance tax breaks for renewable energy solutions so that they do not stifle innovation. The key is to make buying renewable energy enough to entice consumers; both families and business; while at the same time not slowing the progress of innovation because the handouts are too profitable to give up.
As part of that, all the existing subsidies given to fossil fuels should be removed, because subsidising and taxing them at the same time is silly.
(Some kind of measures should be take to return some of this tax money to the poor, as they pay proportionately more of their money on tax, and have the least ability to change their behaviour in the short term)
If this is done then renewables can thrive without any subsidy because they are already, in an economic literate reality, the better choice in large numbers of situations, and as their uptake grows this range will increase.
Why is this not done? Look at all the people in this thread who don't understand what an externality is and think taxes are evil. Hilariously, this has mostly just meant that the changes are still being implemented, but in a far more "big government" manner, with lots of rules, regulations and central control and money going to special interests.
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Pretty much everyone DOES deny this, once you factor in all costs. Pollution costs everyone. The undeniably better prices don't count that cost.
Agreed; pollution is the real cost. But that wasn't said; not even implied. At least how I read it. That last sentence seemed a non-sequitur.
"The whole point of the incentives is to pay a fair price for a superior product that does not cause pollution and health damage."
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We need to carefully balance tax breaks for renewable energy solutions so that they do not stifle innovation. The key is to make buying renewable energy enough to entice consumers; both families and business; while at the same time not slowing the progress of innovation because the handouts are too profitable to give up.
Tax breaks so often get sucked up by the supplier, so the consumer sees none of it. Prices will jack up until, even with a consumer tax break, its almost exactly the same deal as conventional energy. Anything else is leaving money on the table, which no rational supplier will do. Means, if tax breaks are not uniform (state by state for instance) then they server to impede new markets. Law of unintended consequences.
This happens when the industry itself is very uncompetitive.
Green energy is hardly "interns jockeying for a media job" competitive but it's still way above oil industry or finance industry levels.
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Tax breaks so often get sucked up by the supplier, so the consumer sees none of it. Prices will jack up until, even with a consumer tax break, its almost exactly the same deal as conventional energy. Anything else is leaving money on the table, which no rational supplier will do. Means, if tax breaks are not uniform (state by state for instance) then they server to impede new markets. Law of unintended consequences.
>Tax breaks so often get sucked up by the supplier, so the consumer sees none of it. This happens when the industry itself is very uncompetitive. Green energy is hardly "interns jockeying for a media job" competitive but it's still way above oil industry or finance industry levels.
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I admire your optimism :-) but I'm not 100% sure that is true. If there wasn't a political drive behind this, wouldn't it have been easier to burn coal for the next 100 years?
There are lots of examples of innovations changing entire industries without a political drive being behind it. The day someone discovers a clean energy method that is easily cheaper than fossil fuels will be able to cash in because the market will switch to it quite handily, regardless of politics. The only political drive I really worry over with things like this is cronyism that prevents innovations in an effort t…
In the UK, a government with ties to fossil fuel industry (where the money is centralised and easy to syphon into bribes and kickbacks) is sabotaging wind power in favour of fracking.
Abbot in Australia etc.
The technology is already there, it's all about the politics now.
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Germany main source of energy is still, by far, coal (lignite to be precise), and it's not going down yet. The expansion of renewable energy, which is very real, is being done at the expense of nuclear energy. I wish they would be doing it the other way around: closing coal power plants before the nuclear ones. But Germany has lignite, and doesn't have much of a nuclear industry, so economically it makes much more se…
AFAIK since 2013 they've almost totally stopped building new coal plants. They've removed subsidies on mining, too which has led to pit closures. If it's not going down already, I imagine it will be going down within the next couple of years.
I'm only looking at this from a greenhouse gases point of view. Maybe German nuclear power plants are particularly unsafe and it's better to wind them down quickly? I doubt it, which is why I lean towards an economical (more so than financial) decision.
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For nuclear: > A new 3,260 MW Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was given planning consent on 19 March 2013.[10] A guaranteed "strike price" of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (to be indexed for inflation over 45 years) was announced on 21 October 2013. The new power station would see Hinkley's contribution to the country's power supply rise to 7%.[9] At the time of the planning consent, the price for electric energy on…
Up north the latest nuclear plant guarantees price for its owners at 50 EUR/MWh (37 GBP) or less: http://www.energypost.eu/rosatom-signs-contract-build-nuclea...
1. This is excellent. It means we're well on our way to sustainable energy generation. Wind and solar are only going to get cheaper. Even without subsidies, there is no reason to ever build another coal or oil fired generation facility. Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up, to where peaking plants are too expensive compared to utility scale batteries. 2. Nuclear is dead. Very dead. Thor…
Totally offbeat angle, nothing to do with energy markets at large, but: My whole country is situated north of the 60th parallel north. Winters are friggin cold and I would be very concerned if there were no sources of energy not dependent on sunlight or wind. Also, I'm a neurotic so in case of a nuclear winter type of effect I would love to have some nuclear reactor technology going. For deep space exploration solar…
My guess is that, in case of nuclear winter, the complex societal structures that make operating nuclear energy possible will break down anyway.