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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

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Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#551

Post by ashtonkem »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #397
ashtonkem wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saudi needs to do one of two things before the oil runs out: 1) Diversify their economy 2) Build up enough sovereign wealth to maintain their citizens standard of living after the oil has run out. The first is very hard, because huge percentages of their population are completely disengaged from the economy. It's estimated that 30-40% of working age adults neither have a job, nor are looking for one. An unusually hig…

Why isn't anyone studying the Arabic states as UBI models? Incompatibility with western democracy? They are the closest to a large scale UBI system right now. Much bigger than those toy hundred people sort-of-UBI-but-not-really experiments.

Because they’re wildly unstable autocracies?

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#552

Post by ashtonkem »

ako wrote: post #401
freewilly1040 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it seems demand for oil will run out before supply

We'll still need oil, not for energy, but as a raw material for production of plastics and many other products.

Perhaps, but that won’t save KSA.

First, most plastics are now made from natural gas, something KSA doesn’t produce a huge amount of. They’ve got decent reserves, but their production lags. Qatar produced 70% more LNG last year than KSA. LNG is also kind of a pain to transit by sea, which advantages countries that can produce natural gas closer to the factories (e.g. The United States and Russia, among others).

And second, plastic production consumes a relatively small part of the world petroleum production. Here in the US it’s estimated that about 2.7% of our yearly petroleum consumption. World wide only 4% of world petroleum went into plastics (2012 figure).

So even if plastics continue to be made of oil, plastic consumption remains constant, and there is no major shift in who produces the feedstocks for plastic (all wildly optimistic assumptions), then KSA can expect to keep about 2.7-4% of their current oil export budgets. That is catastrophic for a country like KSA, who needs all the oil money they can get.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#553

Post by psychoslave »

djmips wrote: post #511
wazoox wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wood didn't give way to coal that gave way to oil. This is a terrible fallacy (albeit very commmon, even Vaclav Smil fell into it in his "Oil" book). The world currently consumes more coal than it ever did. Wood consumption is also record high. We simply stacked up energy sources. Check this page: https://ourworldindata.org/energy So far, fossil fuels still represent about 85% of our energy consumption, and about 99%…

>back in the 18th century, but we were 600 millions and lived 35 years. I'm not sure if this changes your point but many people lived to their 70s and 80s in the 18th century as they have for recorded history.

What do you mean with many people? A large part of aristocracy/bourgeoisie or most mundane people? What are good sources on that topic?

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#554

Post by gwbas1c »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #355
gwbas1c wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think if we had variable pricing that matched the availability of renewables, consumers would shift quickly. If you dig around enough, you'll find plenty of stories of variable electricity costs. From what I understand, it's more common for business customers instead of residential. (Apparently chillers that freeze water overnight with cheap electricity to run daytime air conditioning is a thing.) But anyway, I h…

A coworker recently showed me that they have a non commercial power plan/contract where they get hourly prices based on market rate. In South Australia where the sun is pretty intense, his power prices literally go negative for a few hours. Now if you had variable loads or a battery you could schedule them to buy and sell power based on the market rate. Since very few people have the ability to do this, you can const…

I believe that Tesla could hook my power wall into such a system if my local utilities offered it. Hopefully they do soon, because there's going to be major offshore windmills near my house soon.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#555

Post by Retric »

wazoox wrote: post #529
3pt14159 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on renewables and they are certainly part of the solution, but we can meet our energy without fossil fuels if we really leaned into nuclear the way the French did. It's simply a matter of political will. Musk looked at the regulatory tape around nuclear and said "I guess it has to be solar then" and I think that was a mistake. If we'd applied his economics of scale, and first principles thinking to nuclear we…

We can relatively easily solve the problem of electricity production using nuclear, renewables and therefore make carbon-free electricity. But electricity is only 30% of our energy consumption.

Cars, Heating, and cooking can be replaced with electricity just fine even if their not currently part of that 30%.

Also, solar power overwhelmingly our largest energy source. It’s generally ignored in these calculations but farms for example are very dependent on sunlight.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#556

Post by bagacrap »

_carbyau_ wrote: post #243
bawolff wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of people in the world with lots of different situations. If you only fund things that benefit every single person equally, you won't fund anything, because there are no initiaves that benefit every single member of society equally.

I agree with your first sentence. But you lost me after that. I never asked for benefit to every single person perfectly equally. For society, having the quite significant proportion of people who are renters and apartment dwellers getting more than an insignificant benefit from our own government should be a thing. I am not asking for handouts. But for the handouts to those people wealthy enough (not rich per se but…

I have no horse in this race, but it seems to me the solar panels on single family dwellings do benefit everyone. Presumably there are times when the house in question is producing more than it uses, at which point electricity is being pumped back into the grid (I dunno about aus but in the US they're compensated far below market rates for this generation). So it sounds to me as if home owners are selling off space that they own (at great expense!) to contribute to the grid. Apartment dwellers (or condo owners) as you have noted don't usually have the same kind of space to sell off.

And of course apartment dwellers benefit from the reduction in externalities.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#557

Post by pydry »

wazoox wrote: post #535
pydry wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why not. Renewables already means periodic negative power prices for most countries that have them. They will likely use this electricity to make these chemicals closer to where they are needed. This is already happening with aluminum in, e.g. Germany. Even if they don't, 1/3 of the countries in the world are drenched in sunlight. The competition will make margins on these industries pretty pitiful.

Negative power prices are only possible because there are other resources to provide the production baseline. As there exists no system to store power at scale, production must match exactly consumption at any time; so when the wind blows or the sun shines and there is no demand, the generated power is basically worthless. But this is only possible because renewables represent only a small fraction of all power in mo…

I foresee -ve prices becoming more common. Overproduction is a cheap way of dealing with the variability of a source that is 2-3x cheaper than others even if it ends up not being used or if some is wasted (e.g. wind turbines that are left turned off when it's very windy and grid demand is low).

If that overproduction can be channeled into e.g. hydrogen production which can be used for airline fuel or heating homes or for topping up the grid when it's not windy or sunny all the better.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#558

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #541
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We had a world 100% on renewable, back in the 18th century There's nothing renewable about using wood if you're not replanting the forest.

With 600 million people it was likely filling in naturally as people shuffle about.

Maybe in other places, but certainly not in 18th century Europe.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#559

Post by pmiller2 »

relaxing wrote: post #517
pmiller2 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You tell me why poor countries wouldn’t invest in solar, wind, hydro, or geothermal. (Hint: you have to build the infrastructure first, and not all of these are even practical everywhere.) Hydrogen isn’t all that practical as a fuel, and biomass just puts CO2 back into the atmosphere. Can you think of a renewable source of energy that’s both attractive to poor and developing countries, and also practical? Oil is easy…

You’re massively underestimating the infrastructure needed to take oil and put it in the consumers’ hands. Biomass puts CO2 back in the atmosphere, but at least it’s not increasing the total CO2 in the biosphere.

Most of that infrastructure is in the extraction and transport to the destination country. Once the oil is there, all you really need is a storage system, and a way for consumers to buy it.

There's no need to pump it around, at all. You can transport it by truck. Growing up, my family had a fuel oil heater. We'd have the tank filled periodically, and that was all there was. Likewise, gas pumps are just storage tanks hooked up to pumps. There's practically nothing to it; it's all basically 19th century technology that's easy to build, and doesn't require any sophisticated engineering.

Re: Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?

#560

Post by TuringTest »

Retric wrote: post #555
wazoox wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can relatively easily solve the problem of electricity production using nuclear, renewables and therefore make carbon-free electricity. But electricity is only 30% of our energy consumption.

Cars, Heating, and cooking can be replaced with electricity just fine even if their not currently part of that 30%. Also, solar power overwhelmingly our largest energy source. It’s generally ignored in these calculations but farms for example are very dependent on sunlight.

Heating and cooling, OK. Cars require batteries, and there's not enough lithium to support as many electric cars as there exist combustion engine cars now. A breaktrhough will be needed, either in battery tech or shared transportation (either public transport, car-sharing, or generalized telecommuting).
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