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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 ye

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....'

Nomentatus 9y ago
No you didn't say it, there was no way to tell that you hadn't factored in threshold effects from your first post, nor that you had glossed over high marginal costs for energy. Points you then pointedly ignore when replying. If you don't want to be asked what you're saying precisely, you just have to provide more detail earlier, or at the very least the proper rubrik. I just don't understand the hostility here mixed into factual matters. There's little to answer in your last post. Your definition of gradual was decades; re solar power it's already been decades, but the actual transitions to new technologies - the mass adoptions - happen quickly - so you're really changing the subject. The first consumer product (radio) to appear in my city with transistors came in the early sixties, at a price of $79 - a fortune then - but only a few years after that, you couldn't buy a regular radio with tubes. The transition was very rapid. Kodak's stock took a long time to fall to earth, but the loss of revenue was sudden, and massive. Re transmission - solar will strongly tend to be local. Batteries: you can look up discussions of Vanadium batteries (just one novel tech) elsewhere on HN, but note that individual batteries are now being built that are nearly 1GW - so 50,000 GW is very far from impossible - even if that figure turns out to be accurate. Not impossible at 5 cents a watt. Betting that this or that is impossible is usually a bad bet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-flow-batteries-the-energy-storage-breakthrough-weve-needed/#a6ee7675bde8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-... Actually, far larger "batteries" exist - reversible dams, many built only for energy storage purposes. Analogous mass systems have also been proposed using air and salt.
- tedsanders 9y ago
  I apologize if I came off as hostile. I don't feel hostile. In any case, I think it's fine to ask folks for clarification. But I think it's rude to assert: "What you're trying to say is..." Also, even if Vanadium flow batteries achieve commercial success and drop energy storage costs down to 5 cents a kWh, that's still above wholesale electricity prices of 2-4 cents a kWh: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_markets.cfm https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mar... Lastly, the EAI disagrees with your assertion that solar will be local (which I interpret to mean rooftop). It forecasts lower costs and higher volumes for utility-scale installations, which benefit from greater economies of scale.

Nomentatus 9y ago

No you didn't say it, there was no way to tell that you hadn't factored in threshold effects from your first post, nor that you had glossed over high marginal costs for energy. Points you then pointedly ignore when replying. If you don't want to be asked what you're saying precisely, you just have to provide more detail earlier, or at the very least the proper rubrik. I just don't understand the hostility here mixed into factual matters. There's little to answer in your last post. Your definition of gradual was decades; re solar power it's already been decades, but the actual transitions to new technologies - the mass adoptions - happen quickly - so you're really changing the subject. The first consumer product (radio) to appear in my city with transistors came in the early sixties, at a price of $79 - a fortune then - but only a few years after that, you couldn't buy a regular radio with tubes. The transition was very rapid. Kodak's stock took a long time to fall to earth, but the loss of revenue was sudden, and massive. Re transmission - solar will strongly tend to be local. Batteries: you can look up discussions of Vanadium batteries (just one novel tech) elsewhere on HN, but note that individual batteries are now being built that are nearly 1GW - so 50,000 GW is very far from impossible - even if that figure turns out to be accurate. Not impossible at 5 cents a watt. Betting that this or that is impossible is usually a bad bet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-flow-batteries-the-energy-storage-breakthrough-weve-needed/#a6ee7675bde8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-... Actually, far larger "batteries" exist - reversible dams, many built only for energy storage purposes. Analogous mass systems have also been proposed using air and salt.

tedsanders 9y ago
I apologize if I came off as hostile. I don't feel hostile. In any case, I think it's fine to ask folks for clarification. But I think it's rude to assert: "What you're trying to say is..." Also, even if Vanadium flow batteries achieve commercial success and drop energy storage costs down to 5 cents a kWh, that's still above wholesale electricity prices of 2-4 cents a kWh: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_markets.cfm https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mar... Lastly, the EAI disagrees with your assertion that solar will be local (which I interpret to mean rooftop). It forecasts lower costs and higher volumes for utility-scale installations, which benefit from greater economies of scale.