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That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that has life

That is a bizarre claim to make. Energy will not be far cheaper and more abundant in 10 years. Trillions of dollars are invested in infrastructure that has lifetimes of 50+ years. It is not economically or technologically feasible to undergo an energy revolution that quickly. Even if we gathered the political and financial will, our production facilities and supply chains could not feasibly handle the load of rebuilding the world's energy infrastructure in a single decade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5guXaWwQpe4

Nomentatus 9y ago
Infrastructure becomes obsolete and is scrapped all the time, disappointing investors. Newcomen steam engines didn't get to their end of life or anywhere near it, they were mostly scrapped when Watt's revolution happened no matter how new they were. You're saying that investors have been caught short by present trends. I think that's true.
- tedsanders 9y ago
  That's not what I am saying. I am saying that if you are competing against something that has already been built and has 50 years of fixed costs already sunk, the hurdle to surpass it is enormous, far more enormous than competing against new marginal construction. I am also saying that energy infrastructure is a thing that costs trillions. We literally do not have the capacity to replace it in a mere 10 years, even if we built 10x the solar and battery factories and ran them 24/7. Current trends extrapolated forward have no indication that this will happen. (For the record, I am very bullish on solar power, having worked and consulted in the industry. But I am also grounded enough to realize that the revolution will be gradual, not done in 10 years. 10 years is not much time for something so capital-intensive. It's not like phones or computers.) I regret even commenting in the first place, because I hate feeding the dynamic of giving attention to poor quality and ill-founded comments. I wish I was discussing something constructive instead.
  - Nomentatus 9y ago
    Maybe what you want to say is that obsolete tech and plant has the "advantage" that it can now operate on marginal costs and ignore replacement costs since that won't be happening, making many previous "fixed costs" suddenly free and therefore not costs at all - something I well remember being taught in economics classes at university. This is true as far as it goes, but that path assumes relatively low marginal costs - not the case for energy. Coal isn't that economical - as for fracking, that's new tech not old; it may be a big part of the picture for a long while, and save some but not most of the old plant (large numbers of gas generators are a fairly recent phenomenon themselves.) From your selective choice of terminology, I don't think you've looked at economic theory in depth, here. In any case, all of this is perfectly consistent with what I said earlier. When the transistor arrives, vacuum tubes are just swept aside despite the fixed costs. Ten years did that, less in fact, I was there. There's a rather extreme threshold effect, once the right price point is passed, the old tech just falls off a cliff. There's a great chart of that happening to Kodak due to digital photography, extremely suddenly, despite all the fixed costs. They were making their best profits one year, staring at death the next. This link is close to the chart I remember seeing. Note the extraordinary difference one year makes! Every mall had a very expensive photo developing plant, then not. Scrap value only. https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destruction-2-0/ https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destructi... Because solar power effectiveness varies geographically the cliff will be a bit smoother, of course. Only in a real banana republic could you hold new tech off for a half-century, and you'd need to halt trade to do it. I'm old, I've seen a lot of change, and tons of valuable things - including large amounts of infrastructure, become valueless very suddenly, not to mention my collection of VCR tapes. There is such a thing as first-mover advantage, but that applies to new tech not old, so I'm assuming you don't mean to refer to that. I regret your stooping to vituperation. It wasn't necessary, or accurate.
    - tedsanders 9y ago
      Yes, that's what I wanted to say. Which is why I said it. Let's look at some facts: * No one in the market agrees that energy will abundant and cheap in 10 years due to solar and batteries becoming far cheaper than natural gas. Natural gas companies have not been shorted to zero. Utilities are continuing to make capital expenditures. Natural gas plants are continuing to be built. Corporations are continuing to sign long-term power purchase agreements with renewable generators that lock in prices for 20 years. Maybe everyone is suffering from a collective delusion, or maybe energy transitions take decades. * The EIA projects roughly flat energy consumption out to 2040, with natural gas and renewables taking share from coal and nuclear. Hardly abundant. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf * For natural gas power plants, about 1/3 of the levelized costs are capital costs. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... * There are strong dynamic effects that will slow the transition. As the penetration of solar grows, the non-solar consumption peak will move to night-time and the marginal value of solar falls by about 1/2. Conversely, as natural gas plants shut down, their cost of fuel will fall and the value of their spinning reserve and other ancillary services will rise. * Building a transmission backbone for new utility-scale solar will take decades. San Diego's Sunrise PowerLink took 5 years of environmental review and construction, for instance: https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_SunrisePowerlink.pdf https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_Sunrise... * Increasing the supply of large power transformers to build out a new transmission backbone for utility-scale solar will face significant supply constraints: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor... * Today no energy storage solution is economical. Probably the solution with the great hope of scale-based cost reductions is batteries. How many batteries would we need? World electricity consumption is about 50,000 GWh per day. If solar displaces natural gas, then for overnight and peak backup, we need storage on that scale. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consumption+%2F365.24 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consu... * Can we hope to even approach producing 50,000 GWh of batteries within 10 years? Global annual production of batteries is around 30 GWh a year right now. There are factories under construction now to bring that up to around 100 GWh around 2020. Given that factories take years to design and build, that means we need to scale lithium production by roughly a factor of 1,000 and scale battery production roughly a factor of 1,000 and get the plans and investment lined up in the next couple years. Is Tesla ready for 1,000 Gigafactories? Absolutely not. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/li-ion-featured.jpg http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/l... Regarding your transistor example - First, according to Wikipedia and Science magazine, the transition was gradual over the 50s and 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube Second, the size of vacuum tube industry was never the size of the global energy industry. Building new transistors factories can be done. But building new factories to ramp up to trillions in battery and solar cell production within a single decade is ludicrous. P.S. I would appreciate it if your comments didn't assert to me 'You're saying' or 'Maybe you're trying to say.' It's more polite if you say 'What I think you are saying is....'
anovikov 9y ago
But fusion won't be available in 10 years either. There is a long, long way from net energy positive to mass rollout. Fusion is going to be harder than fission, and fission took 30 years from first controlled fission to 1% of electricity supply, which is the lowest which i could call 'mass rollout'. In 10 years though, renewables will be definitely making it - becoming cheaper than any new type of generation , probably almost stopping construction of any new non-relewable generation. Peak use of fossil fuels for electricity generation is now projected to happen in 2025. Trillions of dollars are being invested in infrastructure now - and yes, it is mostly investment into renewables already.

Nomentatus 9y ago

Infrastructure becomes obsolete and is scrapped all the time, disappointing investors. Newcomen steam engines didn't get to their end of life or anywhere near it, they were mostly scrapped when Watt's revolution happened no matter how new they were. You're saying that investors have been caught short by present trends. I think that's true.

tedsanders 9y ago
That's not what I am saying. I am saying that if you are competing against something that has already been built and has 50 years of fixed costs already sunk, the hurdle to surpass it is enormous, far more enormous than competing against new marginal construction. I am also saying that energy infrastructure is a thing that costs trillions. We literally do not have the capacity to replace it in a mere 10 years, even if we built 10x the solar and battery factories and ran them 24/7. Current trends extrapolated forward have no indication that this will happen. (For the record, I am very bullish on solar power, having worked and consulted in the industry. But I am also grounded enough to realize that the revolution will be gradual, not done in 10 years. 10 years is not much time for something so capital-intensive. It's not like phones or computers.) I regret even commenting in the first place, because I hate feeding the dynamic of giving attention to poor quality and ill-founded comments. I wish I was discussing something constructive instead.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  Maybe what you want to say is that obsolete tech and plant has the "advantage" that it can now operate on marginal costs and ignore replacement costs since that won't be happening, making many previous "fixed costs" suddenly free and therefore not costs at all - something I well remember being taught in economics classes at university. This is true as far as it goes, but that path assumes relatively low marginal costs - not the case for energy. Coal isn't that economical - as for fracking, that's new tech not old; it may be a big part of the picture for a long while, and save some but not most of the old plant (large numbers of gas generators are a fairly recent phenomenon themselves.) From your selective choice of terminology, I don't think you've looked at economic theory in depth, here. In any case, all of this is perfectly consistent with what I said earlier. When the transistor arrives, vacuum tubes are just swept aside despite the fixed costs. Ten years did that, less in fact, I was there. There's a rather extreme threshold effect, once the right price point is passed, the old tech just falls off a cliff. There's a great chart of that happening to Kodak due to digital photography, extremely suddenly, despite all the fixed costs. They were making their best profits one year, staring at death the next. This link is close to the chart I remember seeing. Note the extraordinary difference one year makes! Every mall had a very expensive photo developing plant, then not. Scrap value only. https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destruction-2-0/ https://macromon.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/creative-destructi... Because solar power effectiveness varies geographically the cliff will be a bit smoother, of course. Only in a real banana republic could you hold new tech off for a half-century, and you'd need to halt trade to do it. I'm old, I've seen a lot of change, and tons of valuable things - including large amounts of infrastructure, become valueless very suddenly, not to mention my collection of VCR tapes. There is such a thing as first-mover advantage, but that applies to new tech not old, so I'm assuming you don't mean to refer to that. I regret your stooping to vituperation. It wasn't necessary, or accurate.
  - tedsanders 9y ago
    Yes, that's what I wanted to say. Which is why I said it. Let's look at some facts: * No one in the market agrees that energy will abundant and cheap in 10 years due to solar and batteries becoming far cheaper than natural gas. Natural gas companies have not been shorted to zero. Utilities are continuing to make capital expenditures. Natural gas plants are continuing to be built. Corporations are continuing to sign long-term power purchase agreements with renewable generators that lock in prices for 20 years. Maybe everyone is suffering from a collective delusion, or maybe energy transitions take decades. * The EIA projects roughly flat energy consumption out to 2040, with natural gas and renewables taking share from coal and nuclear. Hardly abundant. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/0383(2017).pdf * For natural gas power plants, about 1/3 of the levelized costs are capital costs. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... * There are strong dynamic effects that will slow the transition. As the penetration of solar grows, the non-solar consumption peak will move to night-time and the marginal value of solar falls by about 1/2. Conversely, as natural gas plants shut down, their cost of fuel will fall and the value of their spinning reserve and other ancillary services will rise. * Building a transmission backbone for new utility-scale solar will take decades. San Diego's Sunrise PowerLink took 5 years of environmental review and construction, for instance: https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_SunrisePowerlink.pdf https://www.irwaonline.org/eweb/upload/web_novdec_12_Sunrise... * Increasing the supply of large power transformers to build out a new transmission backbone for utility-scale solar will face significant supply constraints: https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transformer%20Study%20-%20June%202012_0.pdf https://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Transfor... * Today no energy storage solution is economical. Probably the solution with the great hope of scale-based cost reductions is batteries. How many batteries would we need? World electricity consumption is about 50,000 GWh per day. If solar displaces natural gas, then for overnight and peak backup, we need storage on that scale. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consumption+%2F365.24 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+electricity+consu... * Can we hope to even approach producing 50,000 GWh of batteries within 10 years? Global annual production of batteries is around 30 GWh a year right now. There are factories under construction now to bring that up to around 100 GWh around 2020. Given that factories take years to design and build, that means we need to scale lithium production by roughly a factor of 1,000 and scale battery production roughly a factor of 1,000 and get the plans and investment lined up in the next couple years. Is Tesla ready for 1,000 Gigafactories? Absolutely not. http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/li-ion-featured.jpg http://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/l... Regarding your transistor example - First, according to Wikipedia and Science magazine, the transition was gradual over the 50s and 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/05/return-vacuum-tube Second, the size of vacuum tube industry was never the size of the global energy industry. Building new transistors factories can be done. But building new factories to ramp up to trillions in battery and solar cell production within a single decade is ludicrous. P.S. I would appreciate it if your comments didn't assert to me 'You're saying' or 'Maybe you're trying to say.' It's more polite if you say 'What I think you are saying is....'

anovikov 9y ago

But fusion won't be available in 10 years either. There is a long, long way from net energy positive to mass rollout. Fusion is going to be harder than fission, and fission took 30 years from first controlled fission to 1% of electricity supply, which is the lowest which i could call 'mass rollout'. In 10 years though, renewables will be definitely making it - becoming cheaper than any new type of generation , probably almost stopping construction of any new non-relewable generation. Peak use of fossil fuels for electricity generation is now projected to happen in 2025. Trillions of dollars are being invested in infrastructure now - and yes, it is mostly investment into renewables already.