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In few years renewable power may become a better economic option
- rossdavidh 8y agoThis is, on balance, great news. However, when it happens, nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia (that depend on oil revenue) will encounter a cataclysmic change in their situation. Are we actually ready for a world in which Saudi Arabia and Russia have cratering economies? It could get ugly.
- village-idiot 8y agoSaudi Arabia will probably become uninhabitable as temperatures rise. That’s gonna be a mess.
- diafygi 8y agoOh yes, stranded assets are a real threat to incumbent energy companies (the term in the energy industry is called the "Carbon Bubble")[1]. Luckily, Wall Street is starting to generally favor financing new renewable over new fossil fuel sources (since stranded assets are a much greater risk for fossil assets), and in a fight between Big Banks and Big Oil, Big Banks win every time. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble
- CitizenTekk 8y agoI agree with this. But on the contrary, nations like Saudi could also go with the trend and opt in to using renewable energy such as solar as same goes to Russia. One must adapt to changes in order to allow balance. But yes, as we know, it will come with risk, much as been said, fossil fuel is also one of the things that deteriorate our environment and leave a mark. They either can have less the usage of fossil fuel or reserve it as for larger market such as aviation fuels or with in a large scale of industries and reduce as day to day usage basis.
- marviel 8y agoWell, that's great, surprising news.
- ibatindev 8y agoThat's a wonderful news but damn, that image by IRENA Renewable Cost Database it's awful.
- rossdavidh 8y agoMy thoughts exactly. A repeating axis that goes "2010-2017-2010-2017"? It would be difficult to make it less intuitive.
- tokenadult 8y agoI hope there is further work on renewable aviation fuels, as vehicle fuels in general will be a big source of demand for fossil energy extraction for quite a while, and especially for aviation applications. "Renewable energy in transport" report by IEA (.PDF) https://www.iea.org/media/training/presentations/Day_2_Renewables_5_Transport.pdf https://www.iea.org/media/training/presentations/Day_2_Renew...
- sp332 8y agoResearch is coming along. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/tonight-a-virgin-atlantic-747-will-fly-on-fuel-made-from-industrial-waste-gas/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/tonight-a-virgin-atl... It's not at the point yet where we can take CO2 out of the air, but we can probably take exhaust fumes from power plants or steel mills and make something useful out of it.
- AnthonyMouse 8y agoGround transportation is a much larger component than aviation and has known solutions. If we got to 80-100% electric cars and trucks before converting one turbofan to <unknown alternative> it would still be major progress. And in the worst case there are always biofuels or synthetic non-fossil liquid fuels, which are a lot more carbon neutral after you convert the energy that goes into their production away from fossil sources.
- sp332 8y agoRight, now that ground transportation is close to being solved, we need to get creative with air travel. It's about 2% of global emissions and it's a much harder problem.
- sjwright 8y agoHybrid electric jet engines are being developed, and have real potential to improve fuel economy. A substantial improvement in fuel economy could mean carrying less fuel, which in turn improves fuel economy. But if you’re talking about plug-in electric, the challenge is presumably battery weight versus fuel weight.
- Someone1234 8y agoSubsidized renewables or at full cost?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- redial 8y agoAnd subsidized fossil fuels?
- Someone1234 8y agoGood point. They should compare like with like and neither with subsidies otherwise you're just measuring which has the biggest government discount by proxy.
- chrisseaton 8y agoHow can you meaningfully separate subsidies from full costs? For example if governments fight wars to keep oil supplies running do we count that as a subsidy? Is diplomacy to keep a gas pipeline open a subsidy? Is building roads to transport fossil fuels a subsidy? What about building national grids to transport renewable electricity? No fuel system on earth operates without infrastructure subsidised by the government.
- Someone1234 8y agoI agree, but entirely ignoring subsidies also won't inform you when renewables have reached the magical point when they become the "obvious" thing to do regardless of global climate change. When they become cheaper than oil/gas without a penny of government discount, then no matter how you slice it renewables have "won." Game over. They will be the future. Environmental benefits, unfortunately, haven't been enough for them to win. The financial battle is really the thing that will tip the scales.
- ghouse 8y agoIn the case of the national grid, here in the US with _very_ few exceptions, the price of electricity includes the cost of generation and the transmission grid. These are not socialized through the tax system. The exceptions include the Federal power marketing agencies [1] charged with marketing power from the hydro dams built during the Great Depression. While their initial cost was born by the country, their ongoing operation and maintenance costs are recouped from Transmission Access Charges. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Area_Power_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Area_Power_Administrat...
- BurningFrog 8y agoThen we can only hope people will continue to be greedy, and global warming should go extinct!
- marcoperaza 8y agoGreat if true, but color me skeptical. Almost anytime there is a story like this, the fine print is that renewables are only “cheaper” because of government subsidies. Is that the case here? Also, cheaper in some situations (e.g. hydro power for purchasers right next to a dam) does not mean cheaper when scaled to a whole country. Is that the case here?
- ghouse 8y agoGlobally, conventional fossil fuels receive greater subsidies (nominally, not $/MWh) than renewable power. Estimated to be up to $6 trillion when considering indirect subsidies [1] and $260 billion when only considering direct cash subsidies [2]. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X16304867 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1... [2] https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/december/commentary-fossil-fuel-consumption-subsidies-are-down-but-not-out.html https://www.iea.org/newsroom/news/2017/december/commentary-f...
- mikeash 8y agoCoal alone kills a million people a year worldwide. If we take the EPA's value of a statistical life of about $10 million, that's effectively $10 trillion in subsidies just for coal deaths. We don't typically consider being allowed to pollute to be a subsidy, but we really should.
- travisoneill1 8y ago$10 million per person fails the sniff test Global GDP per capita: $17,300 Global life expectancy: 72 72 * 17300 = $1,245,600 upper bound
- mikeash 8y agoSure, that’s the “if.” Although even the monetary value of a life is probably more than just the economic contribution.
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- ghouse 8y agoThey already are less expensive in areas that have the specific resource. For example, in windy parts of the world, wind is the least expensive. In sunny parts, solar is the least expensive. This is without subsidies. With specific subsidies, the area where they are less expensive is even larger. Of course, fossil fuels receive considerable direct and indirect subsidies, further complicating answering the question "what's least cost?"
- xevb3k 8y agoCan it completely satisfy our current energy requirements? Last I heard, nuclear was the only non-fossil fuel way of doing that. Is that still the case?
- RhodesianHunter 8y agoNot without major improvements in battery tech or many massive public works projects like damns with pumps.
- bilbo0s 8y agoOr massive public works projects like nuclear reactors. But yeah, obviously dams and deep wells with pumps are orders of magnitude less expensive than nuclear reactors. So that's likely where the money will go. But it's ALL gonna be pricey. Only thing that isn't quite as pricey are the fossil fuels. Very little stomach for future development on those however.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoLast I heard, that San Onofre upgrade didn't go so well. Who's paying for that, again?
- CountSessine 8y agoOf course, fossil fuels receive considerable direct and indirect subsidies This is the received wisdom of the clean energy movement, but every report I’ve read says otherwise. Oil and gas receive little if no operational subsidies in most countries and in fact are heavily taxed at every stage of exploitation. Even government investments in oil and gas typically return far better than the risk-free rate, which is remarkable for government. Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in...
- hnzix 8y ago"The stone age did not end for a lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." S. Yamani
- whatshisface 8y agoThe Energy Information Administration estimates that the US has 234*10^9 barrels of oil in reserves (unproven but technically recoverable). At today's rate of production that's about 64 years. S. Yamani's quote sounds very likely to come true. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...
- quotemstr 8y agoThe volume of "technically recoverable" oil increases with price though, since a higher cost per bbl can justify more expensive extraction. Somewhere around $70-$100 bbl, shale oil becomes economical to extract, and the US and Canada have trillions of barrels worth of the stuff. We're never going to run out of oil in the sense that oil will become unavailable, not in 64 years, and not in 640 years. Oil will become more expensive, and eventually, price increases will diminish and eventually stop the use of oil as an energy source. It'll always be available for use as an industrial feedstock and for use in highly specialized situations.
- Retric 8y agoThe issue is 200+$ a barrel oil is mostly useless. The world runs on cheap oil, not just oil. And the supply of cheap oil is finite.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y agoOil that is considered cheap today would have been considered irretrievable fifty years ago. That's the whole point of the quote.
- quotemstr 8y ago
- empath75 8y agoThe only thing that’s going to fix global warming is making carbon based fuel prohibitively expensive through some kind of carbon tax. Energy demand is fairly elastic and if energy is free or cheap, people will just use more of it, leaving us just where we started. See how bitcoin miners are abusing subsidized renewable energy for example.
- mikeash 8y agoIt doesn't matter if people use more if it's renewable. Cheap renewables cause energy use to go up? Hooray!
- empath75 8y agoIf the renewable energy isn’t displacing what would have been non renewable energy use it doesn’t matter. A glut of renewable energy ends up making gas cheaper which means gas gets used more for things that it wasn’t economical for before which means we’re exactly where we started.
- mikeash 8y agoIf it's cheaper than non-renewable energy then it will displace that usage.
- quotemstr 8y agoI don't think we should worry about the total quantity of energy consumed. The wonderful thing about the market is that it finds its own level: once externalities are properly Incorporated into prices, the quantity produced and consumed (which must be idential at equilibrium) will settle at a level that priorities competing concerns appropriately. Who's to say that this equilibrium level is somehow wrong? And what's wrong with miners using cheap electricity? The argument seems to go something like "that subsidy is meant for productive activity and Bitcoin mining isn't productive". Who's to say it isn't productive? The market things it is. What is the market getting wrong? What externality is it not incorporating?
- DennisP 8y agoThat'd be great but the word "storage" does not appear in this article. For wind/solar to truly be cheaper than fossil, the cost of storing enough energy to get through a few windless nights has to be included. Backing up by natural gas doesn't count; natural gas is a fossil fuel and if you take methane into account it might even be worse than coal. Hydro and geothermal don't need storage but they're also geographically limited. We can't expand them arbitrarily the way we could expand wind/solar. This also means using hydro to store energy from wind/solar can only go so far. None of this matters in the near term, since we can certainly expand wind/solar a lot before we run into problems. But over the next several decades we need to replace fossil entirely.
- pdonis 8y ago> natural gas is a fossil fuel and if you take methane into account it might even be worse than coal Huh? Natural gas only produces about half the CO2 per unit of energy that coal does.
- foota 8y agoI don't know about the claims re: methane and natural gas, but methane causes warming significantly worse per kg than CO2 does.
- CydeWeys 8y agoThe point is that natural gas (also known as methane) can leak out into the environment during production and distribution, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas, 30X as bad per mass. So if burning methane only produces half the CO2 per unit of energy, but just 2% of it leaks into the atmosphere at any point in the production/distribution pipeline, then it's actually worse.
- quotemstr 8y agoMethane has a relatively short half-life in the atmosphere, only 8.6 years, which means that over the long term it's not that potent a GHG versus long-lived CO2 (about 100 years, but it's complicated). The radiative forcing alone doesn't tell the whole story.
- scythe 8y agoUnfortunately renewable energy economics has to fight against the way that human minds perform time discounting. A wind energy product may be more economically efficient over its lifetime, but a coal-firing plant costs less today, even if fuel costs will add up over time. So these encouraging numbers may not obviate the case for government action in encouraging the uptake of renewable energy.
- briandear 8y agoNuclear is a better economic option already.