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Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? (2020)
- Gravityloss 5y agoQuite a lot of repetition in the text. Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? There the fuel cost is almost negligible. I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade.
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- pfdietz 5y agoAlso, some of the parts are mature technology. We already built lots of steam turbines before building them for nuclear plants.
- panick21_ 5y agoWhile true the extreme low volume and high complexity and large size make it very expensive. There are just not enough of them built even if its older technology. Nuclear will never be cost competitive unless they can use the same turbines gas and coal plants use. And that is of course what most GenIV reactors do.
- pfdietz 5y agoJust in time for that supply pipeline to dry up because there are no more new coal plants. :) There are still steam turbines for gas fired combined cycle, but I'm not sure those are suitable. What nuclear needs to do is go to something radical, like supercritical CO2 turbines. But that involves a large cost and delay to mature those, and it may be too late. Perhaps it can be combined with the CO2 turbine technology for the Allam cycle (oxyfuel combustion of gas in CO2 for zero marginal cost CO2 separation.)
- Gravityloss 5y agoOne can read about the Olkiluoto 3 EPR and it just seems very complex. The turbine has hydrogen cooling for example. (Can't seem to locate it anymore, but there was a really good pdf explaining the plant.) It's a mystery to me why the CO2 turbines haven't gone forward? The talk has been there for 15 years.
- namibj 5y agoHydrogen-cooled turbo generators are not unusual. Could it have been the generator half of the turbine genset that had the hydrogen-cooling you remembered?
- panick21_ 5y agoMore coal plant will be built for a while yet. Even at smaller volume they are still far cheaper then the current steam turbines. And yeah, a CO2 based turbine will be better, but those are not commercially available. Supercritical CO2 Brayton cycle seems to be a good candidate.
- newuser94303 5y agoChina is planning on learning how to make nuclear reactors cheaper
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoSo is the UK: https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactors.aspx#section-the-technology https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoNulcear reactors cost millions of dollars to make. Solar Panels and wind turbines are much smaller and more modular. It's much easier to optimize production if you are making millions of panels than dozens of reactors. Also, some important parts of reactor design involve local conditions like water availability which makes it harder to have a single design that can be widely copied.
- worik 5y agoAnd they make thousands of coming generations pay to store the waste we generated for our consumption. High level nuclear waste is not something you can responsibly lock up in a vault and forget about for 200,000 years. What ever is done with it, where ever it is put, it will need some monitoring for 200,000 years. What are those future generations going to think of us? Will they characterise this as: "The Age of Greed"? Maybe the "Age of Stupid"?
- ericd 5y agoOr maybe they’ll just reprocess it, as is currently done in France?
- pfdietz 5y agoReprocessing as done in France doesn't really help. The separated Pu can be sent back to be used again, in MOX fuel for thermal reactors, but spent MOX fuel can't be further reprocessed, as it has more of the troublesome higher actinides (which dominate the heat load in a repository that dictates how spread out it has to be.) Making MOX fuel is sufficiently expensive that the separated Pu has negative value. Reprocessing only really helps if you can feed the Pu into fast reactors that can more effectively consume the actinides. And France has given up on its fast reactor program.
- koheripbal 5y agoLong term storage is a solved problem. People vastly over-estimate the amount of waste involved. It is ONE barrel PER YEAR for an operating reactor. That is a non-issue.
- rstuart4133 5y ago> Why wouldn't the learning curve apply to nuclear power? You would think so. Which is why nuclear's apparent negative learning curve in the west is such a surprise. https://archive.thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve-b389ef2de998/ https://archive.thinkprogress.org/does-nuclear-power-have-a-... "Apparently negative learning curve" means from the raw data it is each plant is getting more expensive to build. Worse, when they analyse it, the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues. I can't help but think that in post industrial societies, maybe we are getting worse at building things.
- godelski 5y ago> the main driver behind the cost increases doesn't appear to be government regulation or politics. It's all about construction and supply issues. My understanding is that the reason construction and supply costs is so high is because we go so long between building new ones that the process has to essentially be re-invented. That nuclear does not benefit from economies of scale. One could argue that this here is coupled with government and politics given that if the approval rate is low and people fight them, then it drives the cost up. And on the other side, that's why they were so much cheaper when we first built them and why they were cheap for France. There were lots of orders and so there was a benefit from scale.
- ncmncm 5y agoNo. Nukes cost so much and take so long mainly because they are big capital projects that attract wholly legal corruption. Once the money starts flowing, it would be stopped by completing construction, so that is delayed, sometimes indefinitely, sometimes until all the money available has been spent. Occasionally an actual reactor may be delivered, in the end, but that is increasingly rare, thus evidently optional. And no one ever gives back any of the money.
- spupe 5y agoOk, but by that logic refineries would also show the same pattern. I'm not aware that they do, although I'm having a hard time finding data to back this up.
- oconnor663 5y ago> I think the large unit size hampers learning - less iterations per decade. This article makes a similar argument: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-power-a-solution-to-climate-change/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/is-nuclear-pow...
- legulere 5y agoA huge chunk of costs for nuclear is construction, which greatly suffers from Baumol’s cost disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
- aaron695 5y ago
- edent 5y agoOne interesting thing that I didn't see mentioned in the (excellent) article - is that renewables allow for local and hyper-local electricity generation. With any system, there will be transmission loss. But when the solar panels are in the field down the street, or on your roof, that becomes negligible. It also touches a little on the installation time. Nuclear power stations takes years to build - even after the tortuous planning process. Wind farms are quicker to install. A solar array is almost instantaneous by comparison. The panels on my roof took a week - and most of that was dealing with scaffolding and my dodgy wiring. If you can install solar panels day-after-day, you benefit from an increased learning rate. And, frankly, the training for how to do it isn't arduous. Nuclear might be the future - but it requires a highly trained workforce and constant maintenance. All of which are expensive.
- tonmoy 5y agoElectricity transmission costs are really negligible. You will never be able to produce enough power just from solar panels on your roof, and the cost and complexity of needing to maintain and repair installations at each house may offset the negligible gain obtained from getting rid of the transmission loss
- ianschmitz 5y agoThere are plenty of people making enough power just from solar panels on their roof. It doesn’t work everywhere of course and requires some form of storage or offsetting by powering the grid during the day.
- tamaharbor 5y agoUnfortunately you wind up paying for your local system as well as the grid backup.
- ikiris 5y agoYes, how awful to support the logistical needs of society and modern infrastructure like power and running water. You don’t live on an island where food and potable water magically appear.
- rayiner 5y agoThis is a funny article considering that there’s literally a war going on where Germany has been hesitant to oppose Russia because it’s move to renewables left it highly dependent on Russian gas. https://fortune.com/2022/02/25/ukraine-anger-sanctions-germany-italy-hungary-europe-eu-failure-cut-russia-swift-payment-network/ https://fortune.com/2022/02/25/ukraine-anger-sanctions-germa...
- ManuelKiessling 5y agoSorry, what? If we hadn’t any renewables at all, we would be even MORE dependent on Russian gas.
- xyzzyz 5y agoYes, if you had no renewables, but closed coal and nuclear plant anyway, you’d be more dependent on Russian gas, sure.
- Ygg2 5y agoYeah but shutting down nuclear power after Fukushima is akin to jumping of a building in Germany, because these was a tsunami in Jagan.
- nautilius 5y agoFukushima was the latest but hardly the only incident. One of them caused fallout all across Europe. Hint: it was just occupied by Russian forces.
- yodsanklai 5y agoHow much would renewable cost if it wasn't supported by fossil fuel (e.g. for extracting and processing the resources needed to build solar panel)?
- rootusrootus 5y agoDoes the analysis include those same costs in the fossil fuel price? It takes a lot of oil to find, extract, and process oil.
- beebeepka 5y agoHow much would fossil fuels cost if they weren't supported by all kinds of horrible sacrifices we have to make? Pollution and wars sure are worth it!
- fivea 5y ago> How much would renewable cost if it wasn't supported by fossil fuel (e.g. for extracting and processing the resources needed to build solar panel)? I find your comment pointless, given that in a not so distant past the bulk of energy was produced from fossil fuel. Thankfully, the world is transitioning away from that, and at a considerable speed. We went from propaganda selling the lie that renewables were a passing fad to a point in time where entire countries register days where all their energy needs come from renewables and even overproduce energy, leading to negative energy costs.
- RobertoG 5y ago"[..] entire countries register days where all their energy needs come from renewables and even overproduce energy [..]" I think you mean electric needs. That it's around 30% of the needs of the average country. It's important to be very clear about those distinctions. I think, in this issue, overselling is so dangerous as underselling.
- tialaramex 5y agoThat must depend enormously on the country though right? Motor vehicle use, gas heating, air travel, intensive agriculture these are surely things that will vary a lot from one country to another, yet they use large amounts of non-electrical energy.
- credit_guy 5y agoHere's the simplest way to get to net zero: solar, wind, batteries, natural gas, then hydrogen. Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night. To help store energy from summer to winter, they need to become 1000 times cheaper, which is not going to happen. For that you need peaker plants. Initially methane-based, later they can be converted to hydrogen. It's as simple as that.
- fivea 5y ago> Solar and wind are cheap, but intermittent. Batteries can help store energy from day to night. You don't need batteries per se, only energy storage systems. Pumped storage, pressurized air, flywheels, ultracapacitors, and of course chemical batteries. Pumped storage and compressed air systems store orders of magnitude more energy and power than batteries.
- xyzzyz 5y agoPumped storage has a serious problem: you can’t build it just about anywhere. There is very limited number of sites, and the most practical ones are already built out. This also ignores the issue of environmentalists being almost certain to block destroying entire valleys or mountain ranges.
- Taniwha 5y agowhat you can do is retrofit existing hydro dams, add more generation capacity (penstocks/turbines) and then let them fill when the sun shines/wind blows and empty when it doesn't, this is actually more efficient than pumping water uphill
- ncmncm 5y agoThere are hundreds or thousands of times as many places to store pumped hydro as there are places to put hydroelectric dams. The latter needs a river valley and a watershed. The former only needs an elevated basin. An elevated box canyon would do; you just build a dam across the end. Sometimes, you dig a pit, or build a dam all around a flat hilltop. Furthermore, underground reservoirs have been demonstrated, in both natural and abandoned mining cavities. A hollow sphere anchored to the sea bed can have the water pumped out with surplus power, and allowed back in to generate power. Draining water from an elevated reservoir to a deep underground cavern can multiply the energy storage capacity. Height is strictly limited to hill height, but underground cavities may have any depth, to the limits of drilling.
- jdauriemma 5y agoCan someone ELI5 why renewables are more expensive for consumers where I live? In Pennsylvania my electric utility allows me to choose my supplier. Invariably, the renewables are more costly than the fossil fuels. What gives? Is this just a regional phenomenon?
- gameswithgo 5y agoputting variable inputs like solar and wind on the grid makes the grid more expensive to manage.
- microdrum 5y agoSame reason internet bandwidth if more abundant and cheaper than ever, but your Comcast bill seems to actually only go up. Local rooftop solar, with no reliance on utility monopolies, is the most important thing in the global energy picture, and I'm afraid it isn't even close. And I'm pro nuclear. But it's past time to recognize that it's the distribution monopolists that are the problem. Solar and batteries free you from that.
- jdauriemma 5y agoLet’s stipulate that I don’t know why broadband bills are getting more expensive, if you don’t mind.
- microdrum 5y agohttps://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/05/ajit-pai-promised-cheaper-internet-real-prices-rose-19-percent-instead/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/05/ajit-... The phenomenon is that consumer prices for broadband go up, even as the wholesale cost of bandwidth (what Comcast is reselling to you) goes down. The cause of this is a mix of two things: 1. Cable companies have regional monopolies. Without a choice, they can raise prices on consumers without losing customers 2. Cable companies face ever increasing 'infrastructural' costs, such as environmental review, trenching, construction, permitting, easements, etc... These costs are well established as going up in excess of inflation (part of why we can't build new infrastructure anymore) and therefore even while the product itself (internet access) gets cheaper, the 'last mile' of distribution keeps getting more expensive.
- sfifs 5y agoThe article hints at it through the "investments" angle but doesn't come out and state the importance of political will. One big reason renewables became so cheap is because around 2008 Beijing Olympics, China decided that they were done with air pollution in the cities. IIRC at that time coal power and other industrial production had to be stopped for a couple of months in the surrounding provinces to make the games happen and people (importantly top bureaucrats who lived in Beijing) decided they liked the clean air. China doesn't have any substantial deposits of fossil fuels that give get clean air (like gas that US has) and Oil and Gas has to be largely imported leaving them at the mercy of international market prices and currency fluctuations. So they started heavily investing in renewables production capacity, first in wind (China's installed capacity started doubling yoy around then) and then Solar from 2010/11 even if they were expensive then and it wasn't clear how much of a learning rate benefit there would be. Similarly massive electrification of public transport and introducing subways later in the decade again to reduce pollution in the cities. Now i believe they have 3X the installed base of the next biggest country (US) and still accelerating. Later on the Paris Climate treaty just added extra momentum with the climate change and carbon reduction angle. But it was originally a political decision that took political will - to get cleaner air in the cities even at a possibly higher cost.
- gibolt 5y agoLast I saw, China has 97% of the world's electric buses, and probably a similar figure for taxis. The scale and transition is crazy and rapid. The savings on fuel alone easily made the upfront cost worth it; growing a new industry and cleaning up the air were nice bonuses
- sfifs 5y agoYes and I've seen the transition happen before my eyes as i have visited China at least couple of times a year ever since the early 2010s till literally the weekend before the Pandemic blew up. I still remember the air pollution of old (which made me decide to NOT take up a role with a promotion offered to me there at one point as my family members are asthmatic) and how one of my direct reports there used to get continuous coughing bouts every winter and hasn't really had them in the last couple of years.
- endisneigh 5y ago> Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? The answer is China (well, Asia, really). Now that we've answered that, let's pose a new question: Why is China capable of such investment but not the United States, even though the United States has more money?
- bamboozled 5y agoIt's what goes on under the table in Washington. Same thing for Australia. The Australian Government isn't hardly as crafty as the US though so it's more apparent.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoChina played a key role, but so did Germany, Japan, Australia and the US https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-1120 https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112...
- endisneigh 5y agoSure, but it’s still mostly China: > China’s fledgling solar-electric panel industry dropped world prices by 80 percent, a stunning achievement in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. China had leapfrogged from nursing a tiny, rural-oriented solar program in the 1990s to become the globe’s leader in what may soon be the world’s largest renewable energy source. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-dominating-the-solar-industry/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi... China has the plurality of solar installations, produces the majority, have given historically the most aggressive tax credits for production and use, and is forecasted to have the most growth.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoI'm very positive about Chinas contribution to renewable energy and electrification (e.g. electric cars, busses and bikes) so I in no way want to diminish that. I just wanted to point out that nations around the world had decades long plans around developing solar because it always made sense, and everyone who looked into it knew this. The question of why China benefitted so much is interesting, and I personally think it comes down to them not having much local fossil fuels, and therefore not having the people who control fossil fuels as a political drag factor in their politics.
- dathinab 5y agoOne big factor is that many renewables are "many smaller instead of one huge construction". E.g. many wind turbines instead of one huge power plant. This means that adaption over time can happen much faster and can potentially happen during the implementations of larger long term projects (e.g. huge off shore wind farms). It also means prototyping cost tends to be cheaper and it can be easier adopted by smaller groups instead of needing larger consensus. While I used wind turbines as an example it's also true for many other aspects like Geo-termal power, solar energy, solar powered water heating, etc. Even some classically "huge" projects like dams have smaller (micro) versions by now which as far as I can tell advance much faster in technology (often technology about micro-dams having less negative effects on the small-river they are build into, wrt. to fish but also sediment movement). Add to this that research on many of the renewable energies is ongoing since quite a long time and that increasingly more people and countries realize the importance it's not too surprising I think.
- bin_bash 5y agoYou can really see this in the wind farms east of LA. You see the initial, less aerodynamic tiny wind turbines and like Russian nesting dolls they get bigger and bigger.
- hardolaf 5y agoAnother big factor is that we lie about capacity when making up the numbers. We assume summer numbers under ideal conditions and not actual daily average capacity or minimum daily capacity. Just going from summer to winter greatly reduces energy production per day not even including weather events.
- 7952 5y agoLower cost per MW of capacity correlates with lower cost per MWh.
- whiddershins 5y agoI just never feel 100% clear that this massive drop in price doesn’t have some subsidies priced in that I’m missing. I know the biggest criticism aside from that is that the stated price of renewables ignore storage, so is incomplete. But that criticism is orthogonal to the discussion about rate of price drop.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoSeems to me that fossil fuels have been so manipulatively overpriced for enough decades that is the low-hanging fruit renewables are performing favorably against. Old folks remember when fossil fuels were way cheaper and it does not feel like that underlying floor is quite being struck. It's physically difficult to capture enough energy in one lifetime to compare with vast deposits of energy captured over millions of years. However it looks like those controlling the biggest oilfields might have already spent the petrodollars that have not even been pumped out of the ground yet. This would be expected to compromise their ability to drop the floor out and have as halting of an effect on alternatives as there was in the early-to-mid 1980's. Before that alternatives had extreme progress mostly in response to shortages, and skyrocketing costs remaining from the early 1970's, rather than climate, but it was still progress that could not continue after it became unfeasible financially. Now renewables are again moving fast toward the cost of currently-captured energy especially when they are widely distributed and operated by individuals rather than large powerful controlling organizations. Plus there is an urgency with climate degradation that is more recognized than ever.
- legulere 5y agoA much better explanation why fossil fuels are getting more expensive is that the EROI factor is getting smaller and smaller as fossil fuels get harder and harder to extract: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
- kumarvvr 5y agoOne reason for high price of fossil fuel based power is that they are extremely in-efficient. Coal plants are about 30% efficient, Combined cycle plants about 40 - 45%. Compared to Solar and Wind, which have no input costs other than initial investment and very low maintenance and upkeep costs. And, the investment costs of setting up a 1 MW coal/gas plant vs. 1 MW solar plant, is about the same.
- pfdietz 5y agoGas fired combined cycle plants are more efficient than that (best are 62%, HHV based).
- questiondev 5y agoif you follow /r/futurology /r/technology and sometimes here throughout the years you will see breakthrough after breakthrough, these small advancements do make it into manufacturing sooner than what people think, one of the biggest challenges was for me was reading about cool tech and waiting forever for it, then giving up on it and deeming it as a probably just a clickbait promise, but not to much sooner after i have forgotten the advancements, they make their way into everyday life proving to me that technology never comes as soon as you think it does, but it comes eventually.
- known 5y ago
- chris123 5y agoThey're not cheap. They're just look cheap, or they used to.
- marcosdumay 5y agoWell, they didn't. Renewables are on the same clear exponential trend for decades. There have been some small deviations, but they always correct back. At some point the article pulls out the monolog graphs where you can clearly see there was no trend change and people expected that since the 70s. Yet, there's that surprised tone all over it.
- throwaway73838 5y agoSimple answer: economies of scale.
- gcanyon 5y agoThe article says that for each doubling of capacity, solar has dropped 20% in cost. Nuclear currently represents 10% of world capacity. So if we scale nuclear to 80% (3 doublings), the cost would drop to ~50% of what it is now -- which would only drop it to about twice the cost of solar at present. So apart from the fact that nuclear probably wouldn't react the same way as solar, even doing so wouldn't make it cost competitive. But I still like nuclear.
- ncmncm 5y agoNuke costs are not coming down like solar, wind, and storage. There is no reason to think they would: they are really mostly concrete, plumbing, pumps, heat exchangers, and steam turbines, all extremely mature tech. And they are unavoidably expensive to operate. Those costs also will not be coming down. Fortunately, we don't need for them to come down. All we need is not to build any; then the cost stays fixed at zero.
- cubefox 5y agoIf you compare German and French electricity prices, you will see that renewables are a long way from being cheap.
- occz 5y ago>If you compare German and French electricity prices, you will see that renewables are a long way from being cheap. Don't they sell energy to each other, on account of being in the EU and having their grids connected? I'd assume that's true given that one of the bigger reasons given for the higher energy prices in Sweden this winter, despite running our grid on cheap renewables and nuclear, has been that we've sold a lot of that cheap electricity to Germany.
- ncmncm 5y agoThey do.
- belorn 5y agoI am noticing that the article is not mentioning the paradoxical relation between renewables and fossil fuels that is dominating the current political situation in EU. The country that invested most in renewables and have the highest amount of subsidies to renewables, ie Germany, is also the one that been championing natural gas to be classified as green in EU and is the primary customer of Russian gas and oil and thus funding the current Russian politics and military. The article talks about China and their fossil fuel dependencies, but its Germany that to a major degree dictate energy prices when their day to day demands on fossil fuels changes. Every since the invasion there has been a utterly silence in how the Russian grip on EU energy dependency will be solved if just Germany invest, construct or subsidize more wind power. Instead I read articles after articles than when the wind doesn't blow and its winter, Germany will need cheap fossil fuels for the next several decades. This is why removing Russian banks from SWIFT would hurt Germany since they then can't continue to buy more gas, or why nord stream will sooner or later be turned on. Sanction on Russian economy is only temporary because otherwise it will destroy the EU energy market, which many article highlight to be in the core of why the invasion exist.
- klabb3 5y agoSince this is about price, how is is price of solar, nuclear etc calculated and compared? It seems like naively looking at dollar per Wh for an intermittent source is like looking at the price of a particular flower that only grows at one time of year, which will be misleading for our purposes since we have a baseload demand that we can't really adjust. What corrections are done to adjust for this obvious bias?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoUse the price of solar+storage instead.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoIt is complicated, but actual professionals have looked into this with more depth than a random internet commenter who has a weird feeling that they have been lied to for years by the news sources they trust and isn't quite ready to accept they've been conned and just Google the answer to their own question. When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
- KarlKemp 5y agoYes, there’s this sztrqnge slice of the population that really loves nuclear power because it’s hairy and expensive and dangerous, and they seem to have trouble believing that renewables can do the job, so they now grumble about „what if it’s dark?“ but aren’t interested in answers. It’s FUD, essentially.
- Plastocman 5y agoSo please tell us, what if it's dark?
- 5y ago
- youarethebest 5y agoIs nobody going to mention that materials for renewables were being built by slaves im China? Isn't that why prices are so low? Also its cute that people think we can move to renewables without nuclear. Its impossible and before you say batteries, think about the supply of natural resources needed to build batteries please
- FounderBurr 5y agoNo they didn’t.
- kkfx 5y agoIMVHO renewables do not really became "so cheap" nor so fast. If we see the speed of innovation in the '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s actual evolution speed and outcome are far, far, far slow and almost "broken". Anything get "better" but we seems to be unable to really produce something really new. In personal terms: having built a new home (so insulated, airtight and properly ventilated, properly exposed/designed to passive heat/cool as much as needed and possible) with domestic p.v. the "progress" just means that now start to be possible not being autonomous but nearly autonomous and start to be interesting IF it's not much needed and not every day having an EV but that's not much because such systems became chap more than because other systems became far more expensive and hearing many source their higher prices are voluntary made to make renewable cheap enough to push people who can adopting them. In practical terms I'm satisfied by the outcome, quality of my life is improved, resilience also. BUT in absolute economical terms that's not cheap nor really "naturally interesting". IMVHO renewable can only succeed naturally, not artificially, only if they will be the byproduct of PUBLIC research (not private one more or less publicly founded) producing FLOSS/Open hardware tools and standards for it. So far most products on the market, even the formally "FLOSS for software" are just crappy piles of crap, sold as production ready products when they really are just prototypes.
- jollybean 5y agoAll of this is a bit bupkis without taking into consideration the cost of grid, distribution, maintenance - and especially the quasi monopolistic and massively bureaucratic powers that operate those systems. Energy prices to business and consumers are staggering, and the 'transport' fees are proving to be a substantial portion of that. The 'Sunshine List' in Ontario, the government list used to publicise all civil servants making over $100K frankly was very focused on the electricity grid providers, with average wages multiple times the national average, and large swaths earning over $100K even a decade ago when that used to mean a lot. Start to show us prices being reduced to consumers (or significantly increased consumption) and then we can talk about the great future. The story is nice, but it's only halfway there.
- specialist 5y agoTLDR: R&D, cheap capital, Wright's Law, better accounting. Like all new tech stacks, solar and wind benefited from modest R&D, access to cheap capital (subsidies, financial markets), "economies of scale" (low enough unit cost with high enough production rate to unlock Wright's Law aka the learning curve). It remains to be seen if (or when) renewables will benefit from better accounting. Most impactfully, carbon tax to bake externalities into the street price of fossil fuels. Also, better energy market designs. And crucially, sufficient hush (extortion) money to soak up all the stranded assets held by incumbents. All those polluting coal power plants being run at a loss, teetering on the edge bankruptcy, because some revenue is better than none. -- FWIW, my thesis doesn't account for turf battles preventing widespread adoption. In the case of high volt energy transmission, required for next growth phase of renewables, the blocker in the USA are all the jurisdictional boundaries. We can't just build up the new power lines we need, because every Bubba in every county in every state needs to be bought off. David Roberts of https://volts.wtf https://volts.wtf does a great job of covering these policy tarpits.
- gumby 5y agoI’m afraid the premise stated in the summary is bullshit, which discouraged me from reading the article itself. It is very exciting that the cost of renewables has been falling. The bogus explanation: > renewable energy technologies follow learning curves [erroneous description elided]. The price of electricity from fossil fuel sources however does not follow learning curves Learning curves can have different shapes (the steeper the better) so I cut that bill out. It’s true that manufacturing and installing solar panels and wind turbines has followed a relatively steep learning curve as volume has increased but it’s foolish to claim that drilling, transporting, and burning fossil fuels do not. Fossil fuels are at a flatter point on the curve, true, due to maturity but in a commodity market there is a lot of competitive development pressure. And very high volume. What doesn’t move down the curve as fast is power plants themselves because they are not built identically in high volume.