Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

The future will far more likely turn out to be mundanely unpleasant rather than captivatingly apocalyptic. But that wouldn't keep the audience that Zeihan has on the edge of it's seat and so while many others in his field think that way, they're not garnering the same kind of views.

I find his stuff very engaging and there's a lot to be taken from it, but it should be taken with a skeptical mindset of 'what's the most boring way this might play out' to approach some kind of truth.

This comment sent me looking, and I didn't see anyone making any kind of move towards installing a regulatory environment that is conducive towards a "quick win" for nuclear-powered container ships. This Flexport article [1] was interesting, but didn't mention any such legislative moves afoot. This article [2] lays some numbers down.

One way I can see to introduce and sustain nuclear-powered container vessels is to expand US naval shipyards that currently handle nuclear carrier and submarine construction to take on the container vessels' commissioning, refueling, maintenance, and decommissioning, design vessels with much longer service lifespans than current container ships to amortize the cost over a much longer period, standardize the power plants on existing designs, and carve out specially-secured multimodal ports with preferential rates for the nuclear-powered container vessels with much faster container moving infrastructure. In the US political-economic landscape, this would spread out the current military expenditures on the power plant R&D, manufacturing capex, and opex costs, into a wider market.

It would be an interesting geopolitical power play a nation, if the nation subsidized from taxpayer funds the regulatory compliance and national flagging expenses, to make a play to dominate and control the global container shipping service market. Nearly half of container ship opex costs are fuel and port costs [3]. Subsidize away the ruinous regulatory and security compliance costs of nuclear, crater the existing bunker-fuel powered shipping market rates, and controlling global shipping could be wielded as a significant geopolitical tool. Certainly cheaper than the trillions spent on the US military, and delivers leverage at the logistical and supply chain level. I can easily see China do this too, especially with their OBOR initiative. If this came to pass by any nation, then I'm sure it would rightly alarm a lot of people and nations.

[1] https://www.flexport.com/blog/nuclear-powered-cargo-ships/

[2] https://cleantechnica.com/2017/01/28/now-time-nuclear-cargo-...

[3] https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=2250

Of course, the availability of renewables is an issue that has to be dealt with in planning the grid. If they are cheap enough, overprovisioning helps a lot, having larger grid interconnects help - even if there is not always wind in Germany, there should be pretty always be wind in Germany or France as an example. We still can change the way existing plants produce electricity - adding pumps to hydroelectric plants to convert them into storage, store the gas used in biomass plants rather than constantly burning it. And of course we need to build up additional storage. But that is just at the beginning of the learning curve, as most grids currently can just absorb all renewables as they are produced.

Electric vehicles convert power to motion several times as efficiently as internal-combustion equipment (except ships and aircraft), so much less total energy is needed to move the same mass of (especially) people and cars. This is most immediately visible in the current usefulness of electric scooters.

(Big ships are already 70+% efficient, so there is less room for improvement. Small aircraft can claim benefits similar to cars, but airliners will suffer losses converting to (e.g.) LH2 or LCH4, and/or after the electric motors have worked; but there is still room for some improvement.)

Similarly, and surprisingly to many, the same applies to building heating systems, where better than 300% efficiency of heat pumps means that 1 kW of electric power produces 3+ kW of warm air. (The extra 2 kW comes from outside air.

So, today, while we still get more than 80% of raw energy from petroleum, renewables driving electric systems already have reduced that to 60% of actual delivered service.