3 ms·

They 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

by ghouse 8y ago

They 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 ago
Can 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 ago
  Not without major improvements in battery tech or many massive public works projects like damns with pumps.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    Or 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 ago
      Last I heard, that San Onofre upgrade didn't go so well. Who's paying for that, again?
CountSessine 8y ago
Of 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...
- joshuahaglund 8y ago
  I googled coal subsidy and this is the first result. There's a lot of tax credits and subsidies. "Clean coal" for instance, or 3.4 billion for carbon sequestration (did that get past the lab yet?) https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-long-history-of-subsidies/ https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-lon...
  - CountSessine 8y ago
    Coal? Or oil and gas?
  - Kaidera 8y ago
    So even combining every possible subsidy given to the coal industry since 1950 they still only get a total of $72 billion of subsidies in present value. Given that coal's current contribution to GDP is ~$50 billion and the coal industry was larger in the past its pretty fair that the subsidies are completely insignificant and probably don't exceed 1% of the industry's economic value. So subsidies for coal are incredibly small.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in... Like securing our energy interests in "difficult" parts of the world using an intelligence service so pricey that it's illegal for us to ask how pricey it is. (Along with a pricey military to go along with that intelligence service now that I think about it.)
  - CountSessine 8y ago
    Come on. You and I know that America loves its army. You’d be doing this stuff even if it wasn’t to putter around in the Persian Gulf and supposedly make oil cheap (how’s that working out, BTW?) It’s already priced in.
- mikeash 8y ago
  Don’t forget the massive implicit subsidies they get in the form of dumping their pollution into our shared environment.
hacst 8y ago
In my mind the even bigger questions is whether it being "cheaper" will stay true once we actually try to scale the use of the technology. As in can we use this to actually produce most of our energy needs and still have the cost benefit? I'm not an expert on energy production but a study I recently read on this topic for the German "Energiewende" over here did not sound so great [1]. In Germany the renewables we can scale are mostly Wind + PV. However according to the study their seasonal patterns combined with the demand curve seem to make it pretty much impossible to actually expand them meaningfully. Over the year you'll get peak production far outstripping demand (we've already seen negative prices in our markets with current installed capacity) and in the troughs you will need huge production from other energy sources (mostly old coal plants at this point). As these are seasonal patterns this means you would need to store TWh over many months to average that out and make new installed renewable capacity actually useful. The study did some back on the envelope calculations for various options for that but none seemed to come close to achieving that. If that is true, system wide such nice looking renewable price calculations are preconditioned on a backup structure of conventional plants being on standby to fill in the throughs. As this is highly uneconomical for them the cost for that will still have to be paid by the system. At the same time due to the extreme variability prices will drop to zero during peak times (well...unless you have feed-in tarifs) making cheap production prices still be a loss. I imagine the calculations might look much more favorable in other locales where demand is better correlated with renewable production but I would be surprised if Germany is the total exception here. [1] http://www.hanswernersinn.de/dcs/2017%20Buffering%20Volatility%20EER%2099%202017.pdf http://www.hanswernersinn.de/dcs/2017%20Buffering%20Volatili...
nnain 8y ago
Renewable Energy (RE) activists make the claim that RE is cheap already, but my basic math doesn't check out well. Here's a calculation for Solar from (sunny) India: A 5KW Solar Rooftop costs in the ballpark of Rs 300,000 (~4000 USD), which takes care of a bill of less than Rs 5000 per /month (~60, 70 USD). That'll take 5 years (at least) to recover the cost of install. Then there would be the added cost of maintaining the setup. Now, USD 4000 might not sound like much to invest in a healthy future, but it's still a LOT of money for the majority of Indian households, and the idea is quite difficult to sell. So the only help can come from the government subsidies. Unfortunately, while the govt has set huge public targets, the subsidy doesn't reach common people. The current Energy lobby is showing it's ugly face here, and the government is warming up to the idea of taxing solar products. There's also the troubling fact that large corporations are setting up these huge RE powerplants (with backing from govts), when by the very nature, Solar energy should be rather distributed. I just hope we talk about the hinderance by governments and large corporations in the RE space a lot more and not let them collude or slow down this natural progression.

by ghouse 8y ago

xevb3k 8y ago

Can 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 ago
Not without major improvements in battery tech or many massive public works projects like damns with pumps.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  Or 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 ago
    Last I heard, that San Onofre upgrade didn't go so well. Who's paying for that, again?

CountSessine 8y ago

Of 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...

joshuahaglund 8y ago
I googled coal subsidy and this is the first result. There's a lot of tax credits and subsidies. "Clean coal" for instance, or 3.4 billion for carbon sequestration (did that get past the lab yet?) https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-long-history-of-subsidies/ https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/coal-a-lon...
- CountSessine 8y ago
  Coal? Or oil and gas?
- Kaidera 8y ago
  So even combining every possible subsidy given to the coal industry since 1950 they still only get a total of $72 billion of subsidies in present value. Given that coal's current contribution to GDP is ~$50 billion and the coal industry was larger in the past its pretty fair that the subsidies are completely insignificant and probably don't exceed 1% of the industry's economic value. So subsidies for coal are incredibly small.
bilbo0s 8y ago
>Of course there are some terrible externalities that we don’t price in... Like securing our energy interests in "difficult" parts of the world using an intelligence service so pricey that it's illegal for us to ask how pricey it is. (Along with a pricey military to go along with that intelligence service now that I think about it.)
- CountSessine 8y ago
  Come on. You and I know that America loves its army. You’d be doing this stuff even if it wasn’t to putter around in the Persian Gulf and supposedly make oil cheap (how’s that working out, BTW?) It’s already priced in.
mikeash 8y ago
Don’t forget the massive implicit subsidies they get in the form of dumping their pollution into our shared environment.

hacst 8y ago

In my mind the even bigger questions is whether it being "cheaper" will stay true once we actually try to scale the use of the technology. As in can we use this to actually produce most of our energy needs and still have the cost benefit? I'm not an expert on energy production but a study I recently read on this topic for the German "Energiewende" over here did not sound so great [1]. In Germany the renewables we can scale are mostly Wind + PV. However according to the study their seasonal patterns combined with the demand curve seem to make it pretty much impossible to actually expand them meaningfully. Over the year you'll get peak production far outstripping demand (we've already seen negative prices in our markets with current installed capacity) and in the troughs you will need huge production from other energy sources (mostly old coal plants at this point). As these are seasonal patterns this means you would need to store TWh over many months to average that out and make new installed renewable capacity actually useful. The study did some back on the envelope calculations for various options for that but none seemed to come close to achieving that. If that is true, system wide such nice looking renewable price calculations are preconditioned on a backup structure of conventional plants being on standby to fill in the throughs. As this is highly uneconomical for them the cost for that will still have to be paid by the system. At the same time due to the extreme variability prices will drop to zero during peak times (well...unless you have feed-in tarifs) making cheap production prices still be a loss. I imagine the calculations might look much more favorable in other locales where demand is better correlated with renewable production but I would be surprised if Germany is the total exception here. [1] http://www.hanswernersinn.de/dcs/2017%20Buffering%20Volatility%20EER%2099%202017.pdf http://www.hanswernersinn.de/dcs/2017%20Buffering%20Volatili...

nnain 8y ago

Renewable Energy (RE) activists make the claim that RE is cheap already, but my basic math doesn't check out well. Here's a calculation for Solar from (sunny) India: A 5KW Solar Rooftop costs in the ballpark of Rs 300,000 (~4000 USD), which takes care of a bill of less than Rs 5000 per /month (~60, 70 USD). That'll take 5 years (at least) to recover the cost of install. Then there would be the added cost of maintaining the setup. Now, USD 4000 might not sound like much to invest in a healthy future, but it's still a LOT of money for the majority of Indian households, and the idea is quite difficult to sell. So the only help can come from the government subsidies. Unfortunately, while the govt has set huge public targets, the subsidy doesn't reach common people. The current Energy lobby is showing it's ugly face here, and the government is warming up to the idea of taxing solar products. There's also the troubling fact that large corporations are setting up these huge RE powerplants (with backing from govts), when by the very nature, Solar energy should be rather distributed. I just hope we talk about the hinderance by governments and large corporations in the RE space a lot more and not let them collude or slow down this natural progression.