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I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were. I th

I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were. I think all the innovations in the storage space are coming together with 10s if not 100s of different options to provide the final nail in the coffin of fossil fuels. Long term though i guess 30 to 40 years is a reasonable time frame to envision a global economy that becomes net negative. I have gone from a pessimist to an optimist on this topic. Having said that the incumbents will not give up easily and aggressive goals can only be pursued by fighting their misplaced priorities.

mbgerring 5y ago
The large agency forecasts have underestimated the growth of renewables for I think about a decade. But, concerning your optimism — one of the reasons that renewables have gotten better and cheaper faster than predicted is that smart people decided to work on it. There’s a lot of opportunity in clean energy and climate tech, and working on it full time is a great way to manifest your optimism.
- pydry 5y ago
  China's energy insecurity is also a large part of it. Their exposure to shipping blockades in the south china sea and reliance on oil and gas imports provided a lot of the early impetus for beating down the price.
- heurisko 5y ago
  If one is not able to work in the industry oneself, there are also clean-energy ETFs that one can invest in, to support companies working on clean energy, which can manifest similar optimism by-proxy.
  - rotexo 5y ago
    Have any recommendations? I bought a bunch of shares of VOTE recently (the Engine No. 1 ETF), but I’m curious about others.
    - heurisko 5y ago
      I think a Google search for "clean energy ETF" yields some good results. I wouldn't say I am 100pc invested in clean energy ETFs, but do hold them for ideological reasons.
hannob 5y ago
> I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were. No need to wait for 10 years, it's already pretty obvious. Look at any solar projection from any major institution 10 years back.
adrianN 5y ago
I sure hope so, but at least here in Germany NIMBYs are highly organized and effective at preventing more wind turbines. It doesn't help that many politicians do their best to prevent wind turbines too.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I wouldn't like to have a wind turbine just next to my home (let us say less than 1 km) either, and I would definitely fight against placing wind turbines into protected natural areas like mountains, which are pretty much the only places far from the sea that have almost constant wind. The proponents of wind turbines seem to forget that wind turbines are huge industrial systems. Placing them all over the map in a populated territory in the name of nature sounds a bit like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Future generations may shake their heads on current placement of wind turbines just like we shake our heads on our forefathers placing iron smelting industry in the middle of cities. I can see their appeal in shallow seas around North Germany, Denmark or England, where they can produce a lot of power from constant sea winds and be a bit out of sight and hearing, but people pushing them into Erzgebirge are damaging valuable places for a few megawatts of power.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral. Just putting up a couple of offshore turbines in northern Germany won't be enough by a large margin. In Germany we always had very strict laws that regulate how long a house can be shaded by a wind turbine per year (8h/year, 30min/day iirc), only recently politicians started imposing arbitrary distance rules based on wrong information about noise immissions. I'd rather have a wind turbine close to my house than a road, provided I'm not in the flicker-shadow region of the blades.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      "We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral." That sounds far from optimal to me. If sea turbines are, say, five times more efficient and legally/socially non-problematic, why not just cover the sea with them as far as possible?
fy20 5y ago
The EU wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. Europe's forests absorb around 10% of today's CO2 emissions and they are expanding. Given over 50% of CO2 emissions comes from transport and energy (natural gas is the real elephant in the EU), just pushing hard with today's renewable technology could quite easily go a long way towards meeting that goal.
IkmoIkmo 5y ago
Renewables seem to be growing quite fast, the fear I have is that electrification may take longer. Car transport seems to be 'solved' (just needs roll-out over decades). But many other industries may take more time. Electricity is just 20% of energy use. [0] And forecasts for 2040 are set around 28%. Even if electric goes all-renewable, you're still not there if you use non-electric for heating, industrial, air, sea etc. Second, renewable growth is quite strong now yet there's large increases in energy use and decreases of nuclear. All in all, it appears the share of no/low-carbon energy sources in 1995 (i.e. renewables incl nuclear and hydro) was roughly large as it is today [1], but unfortunately on a much larger total energy consumption. [1] That's absolutely depressing. It seems the trend has finally set in the last few years, but we're a long way from home. If we're talking 1950, I'd be an optimist. But it seems we're very much on a tipping point. The fact we'll be able to innovate ourselves to low-carbon is something I'm very optimistic about, but in the necessary timeframe... I'm very concerned. [0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-electricity-in-total-final-energy-consumption-historical-and-sds https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-elec... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-region?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
- mrfusion 5y ago
  Heating for one doesn’t just depend on switching energy sources. You also have options like better insulation, building codes, more efficient heat pumps or even moving south.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Got those in the northern hemisphere, weather from the south is coming to us. Won’t even have to move.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Yep. I'm proud of what I'm doing with my house. Installed heat pumps, put in $5000 of new insulation, replacing propane stoves/fireplaces with electric. Next car will be electric.
_Algernon_ 5y ago
Will we finally have fusion power then to? Cured cancer as well?
mrfusion 5y ago
Feel free to speak up in the doom and gloom threads that appear on here the next time there’s a heat wave or a forest fire. We need more optimists.
bluebubble56 5y ago
I'm oddly optimistic about it as well - I think we get bombarded with bad news regarding renewables so often that it can be easy to forget that there's plenty of good news too.

mbgerring 5y ago

The large agency forecasts have underestimated the growth of renewables for I think about a decade. But, concerning your optimism — one of the reasons that renewables have gotten better and cheaper faster than predicted is that smart people decided to work on it. There’s a lot of opportunity in clean energy and climate tech, and working on it full time is a great way to manifest your optimism.

pydry 5y ago
China's energy insecurity is also a large part of it. Their exposure to shipping blockades in the south china sea and reliance on oil and gas imports provided a lot of the early impetus for beating down the price.
heurisko 5y ago
If one is not able to work in the industry oneself, there are also clean-energy ETFs that one can invest in, to support companies working on clean energy, which can manifest similar optimism by-proxy.
- rotexo 5y ago
  Have any recommendations? I bought a bunch of shares of VOTE recently (the Engine No. 1 ETF), but I’m curious about others.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    I think a Google search for "clean energy ETF" yields some good results. I wouldn't say I am 100pc invested in clean energy ETFs, but do hold them for ideological reasons.

hannob 5y ago

> I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were. No need to wait for 10 years, it's already pretty obvious. Look at any solar projection from any major institution 10 years back.

adrianN 5y ago

I sure hope so, but at least here in Germany NIMBYs are highly organized and effective at preventing more wind turbines. It doesn't help that many politicians do their best to prevent wind turbines too.

inglor_cz 5y ago
I wouldn't like to have a wind turbine just next to my home (let us say less than 1 km) either, and I would definitely fight against placing wind turbines into protected natural areas like mountains, which are pretty much the only places far from the sea that have almost constant wind. The proponents of wind turbines seem to forget that wind turbines are huge industrial systems. Placing them all over the map in a populated territory in the name of nature sounds a bit like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Future generations may shake their heads on current placement of wind turbines just like we shake our heads on our forefathers placing iron smelting industry in the middle of cities. I can see their appeal in shallow seas around North Germany, Denmark or England, where they can produce a lot of power from constant sea winds and be a bit out of sight and hearing, but people pushing them into Erzgebirge are damaging valuable places for a few megawatts of power.
- adrianN 5y ago
  We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral. Just putting up a couple of offshore turbines in northern Germany won't be enough by a large margin. In Germany we always had very strict laws that regulate how long a house can be shaded by a wind turbine per year (8h/year, 30min/day iirc), only recently politicians started imposing arbitrary distance rules based on wrong information about noise immissions. I'd rather have a wind turbine close to my house than a road, provided I'm not in the flicker-shadow region of the blades.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral." That sounds far from optimal to me. If sea turbines are, say, five times more efficient and legally/socially non-problematic, why not just cover the sea with them as far as possible?

fy20 5y ago

The EU wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. Europe's forests absorb around 10% of today's CO2 emissions and they are expanding. Given over 50% of CO2 emissions comes from transport and energy (natural gas is the real elephant in the EU), just pushing hard with today's renewable technology could quite easily go a long way towards meeting that goal.

IkmoIkmo 5y ago

Renewables seem to be growing quite fast, the fear I have is that electrification may take longer. Car transport seems to be 'solved' (just needs roll-out over decades). But many other industries may take more time. Electricity is just 20% of energy use. [0] And forecasts for 2040 are set around 28%. Even if electric goes all-renewable, you're still not there if you use non-electric for heating, industrial, air, sea etc. Second, renewable growth is quite strong now yet there's large increases in energy use and decreases of nuclear. All in all, it appears the share of no/low-carbon energy sources in 1995 (i.e. renewables incl nuclear and hydro) was roughly large as it is today [1], but unfortunately on a much larger total energy consumption. [1] That's absolutely depressing. It seems the trend has finally set in the last few years, but we're a long way from home. If we're talking 1950, I'd be an optimist. But it seems we're very much on a tipping point. The fact we'll be able to innovate ourselves to low-carbon is something I'm very optimistic about, but in the necessary timeframe... I'm very concerned. [0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-electricity-in-total-final-energy-consumption-historical-and-sds https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-elec... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-region?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

mrfusion 5y ago
Heating for one doesn’t just depend on switching energy sources. You also have options like better insulation, building codes, more efficient heat pumps or even moving south.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Got those in the northern hemisphere, weather from the south is coming to us. Won’t even have to move.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Yep. I'm proud of what I'm doing with my house. Installed heat pumps, put in $5000 of new insulation, replacing propane stoves/fireplaces with electric. Next car will be electric.

_Algernon_ 5y ago

Will we finally have fusion power then to? Cured cancer as well?

mrfusion 5y ago

Feel free to speak up in the doom and gloom threads that appear on here the next time there’s a heat wave or a forest fire. We need more optimists.

bluebubble56 5y ago

I'm oddly optimistic about it as well - I think we get bombarded with bad news regarding renewables so often that it can be easy to forget that there's plenty of good news too.