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The case for energy optimism
- kragen 4y agoSee my notes in https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html about this and related topics. The note https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html predicts energy optimism 14 years ago, including a lot of the details about how it's happening.
- DoreenMichele 4y agoThe things that seem largely missing from such articles: 1. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. 2. Passive solar design. We have created a world highly dependent on various energy inputs. It has gone a long way towards killing off walking, cycling and vernacular architecture (where passive solar is a historic default). Those technologies still exist. They can be brought back into more mainstream use.
- User23 4y agoLet’s not forget how incredibly relatively efficient Otto and Diesel engines are. Doing the same work with actual horse or ox power would produce considerably greater emissions.
- tuatoru 4y agoI fully support those things for health reasons. We would be so much more healthy, physically and mentally, if we had good local connections and comfortable, pleasant public spaces to occupy. They aren't relevant to the problems of making steel or non-ferrous metals or cement or plastics, or to the problems of shipping things around over long distances. Which we cannot avoid, while maintaining a high-tech civilisation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tpm 4y agoIf you don't need to drive around in a car then you are 1) not burning fossil fuels to drive and 2) not needing steel and other materials to manufacture said car. Energy efficiency saves energy to use it where it's really needed. This does not matter if it's one Potemkin village but it matters on the level of states and can be seen in statistics like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... where probably every EU country is much lower than the US, for example.
- ako 4y agoAnd not burning fossil fuels, reduces polution, this making more positive impact on health.
- HPsquared 4y agoNational energy consumption figures should really include the embodied energy of imports, minus that of exports. Consumption is not the same as production. Consumption of goods (not just storage and passing-through) should also count.
- nightski 4y agoI think this is backwards. Everyone assumes people are lazy because of the cars. I propose that cars were made because people are lazy (or, in reality, have no time in this dual income era we live in - walking takes a lot of time, even if it is very enjoyable). If you make walk-able, mixed-use neighborhoods there is no guarantee people will use them. In contrast, I bike over 1000 miles a year and walk several times a week. Yet I am not in a walk-able mixed use neighborhood nor have any interest in living in one.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoif you look at housing prices of walkable mixed use neighborhoods in the US, it certainly appears people want to live in them.
- adrianN 4y agoCars were made for game theoretic reasons: As long as few people drive, cars give drivers extreme advantages. When a critical mass of drivers exist, the advantages deminish, but infrastructure investements (now politically viable!) can delay the process. As soon as most people drive most of these advantages disappear regardless of further infrastructure investments, but people who don't drive now suffer from extreme disadvantages that didn't exist before car-centric infrastructure.
- ackfoobar 4y agoAnd because drivers are now the majority, we can rob the people who don't drive to pay for the infrastructure to support our unsustainable lifestyle! Go democracy! --- Sorry for the sarcasm. I'm more and more leaning towards libertarianism nowadays.
- hedora 4y agoRegarding 2, from the article: > People think you can’t throw GPUs at solving an energy shock but in the medium term you really can if those GPUs are used by civil and chemical engineers and not to mine shitcoins. I suspect 1 is usually missing because the obvious conclusion is that excess (and increasing) production capacities will mean people have more choices regarding their lifestyles. If you want walkable, go for it!
- jnsaff2 4y agoI get that he does not call out your exact favorites in there but the last few paragraphs talk quite a bit about the potential for energy demand going down for reasons that could be extended or even include yours. Also I would say passive solar design is only one part (and seemingly becoming less important) of Passivhaus way of building. Why not include all energy efficiency improvements?
- xupybd 4y agoDid anyone else find that hard to parse? The odd thing is I can't figure out what it was that made it so tricky for me to read? Perhaps I just need more sleep.
- kaashif 4y agoI think the sentences are slightly too long, lack punctuation, and are...monotone? I don't know, but I agree. Maybe I also need more sleep.
- freetime2 4y agoI found it to be difficult to follow. My assumption was that the intended audience was for people who are much more familiar with these things than myself, who wouldn't need (or want) expanded context. Or it could just be poor writing.
- tuatoru 4y agoYep, you need quite a bit of background knowledge, imho. And it's poor writing--just "notes to self". If you have time look at the charts in the linked paper, "Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition"[1]. The "experts"--the International Energy Agency IEA, the National Renewable Energy Laboratories NREL, etc.--are getting things badly wrong, because of the limitations of their modelling software. 1. https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X
- DubiousPusher 4y agoAs long as global governments are comitted to consumer capitalism there is now doubt that for the richest countries energy abundance will not be a problem. The question is at what long term ecological cost that energy abundance will come.
- throwayyy479087 4y agoThe communist environmental record makes the US look druidic.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoConsumer capititalism and state capitalism aren't the only two options. Especially if the state capitalists and consumer capitalosts stop murdering people who try them out.
- dymk 4y agoCapitalism reduced the cost of solar by 90% in 10 years.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYeah. It has upsides and downsides...so does everything.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThere's a report on how renewables got so cheap and various types of government support account for most of it. Here's a very pro market capitalism take that still makes this very clear: https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
- epistasis 4y agoPerhaps not, but since nobody has ever tried something else on a large scale, and there seems to be an almost taboo on speculating on those forms of society due to accusations of Utopianism.... what are we left with? I, for one, am not willing to support a revolution without a plan for the day after. It may be an OK thing to be an anti-capitalist, but if one defines desired outcomes only in terms of what not to be, it's pretty damn uninspired.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI think this writing needs a bit more organization - it reads like a stream-of-consciousness flow from the author, and while that's okay for literature, for complex energy issues it's hard to parse. If the issue is the European energy market over the next six months or so, then at least quantify all the possible inputs more systematically. There's LNG tankers coming from the USA, there's whatever Eastern European pipeline capacity, there's Middle East and North Africa production of crude oil, there's the issue of whether crude oil is being imported to be refined, or refined products, etc. France's nuclear output potential is uncertain at best over the next six months. In addition, a rough calculation of the total input of wind and solar over the next six months would also be part of the picture. Jumping from there into lithium battery production for vehicles doesn't make much sense (and note there are many other storage technologies for feeding solar/wind into the grid in a controlled steady manner that don't have the small volume footpring that lithium provides).
- tuatoru 4y agoI agree that it is very disorganised. I interpret it as follows:- "I have been reading a lot of thinkpieces by (non-technical, political) people who 1) don't understand the difference between a stock and a flow, so equate a billion dollars spent on making lithium batteries (which last 20 years) with a billion dollars spent on pumping oil, which lasts days[1]; and 2) don't understand the trends in PV/wind/battery prices and think that we are doomed to expensive energy forever, rather than the likely situation of imminent massive electricity overproduction." "Those people are wrong, and extrapolating from Europe's gas shortage to a global crisis is wrong even in the short term." ----- 1. We saw a lot of this stock/flow confusion (or capital/consumable confusion) with Falcon 9 reusability. Lots of people thought space companies were all about rockets: they didn't understand that those companies don't sell rockets; they sell launches to orbit. Some people still don't get this.
- harry8 4y agoAustralians will read this hearing the words in his father's voice. Fairly or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull
- awfulwaffle109 4y ago[dead]
- timbit42 4y agoI can't read that website but I think the Aptera is a move in the right direction.
- mikewarot 4y agoI see this as a good example of the results of normalcy bias[1]. Europe hasn't even finished cutting itself off from Russian energy imports. German industrial infrastructure is centered around massive quantities of cheap natural gas. It is used as chemical feedstock for a number of products. The higher prices of LNG supplies from further and more costly suppliers will carry through making their products far less competitive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias
- Arn_Thor 4y agoThe supply shock has occurred. What's happening now is a process of adaptation, which will go on for months, if not years. Higher costs will certainly see changes in industry. But I fail to see how this article exhibits normalcy bias
- mikewarot 4y agoThe supply shock is still in progress. Unless a miracle occurs Russian oil which is still flowing overland to Europe will be cut soon by someone, there's a lot of people with motives.
- notorandit 4y agoThere is a main problem, IMHO. The more energy we consume, the more heath we transfer to the environment. After greenhouse gases (like COx and NOx), that's a huge underestimated problem. So, producing more electricity will in the end lead to more waste heath going to the environment (mainly the atmosphere and the sea). Better plan would be to consume less and better. Aw, but then we have the industry which wants exactly the other way around...
- paganel 4y ago> If this can continue along with the current weather forecast this winter does not look that bad and gas prices should move towards a stable level albeit materially higher than before the Ukraine invasion, likely around 100 euro for TTF The average price before all this inflation took off was of about 15 euros for TTF. When, last October, the price had reached 130 euros for TTF (meaning the current level), the EU was all up in arms against the "speculators" [1]. All this to say that even a 100 euro per TTF price won't do any good in the medium to long term for most of the European industry, meaning they'll have to go bust. [1] https://euobserver.com/green-economy/153295 https://euobserver.com/green-economy/153295
- 3pt14159 4y agoThere is also the down side of up. At some point, maybe ten or twenty years from now, we're going to have a lot of bankrupt companies around the hydrocarbon economy. Everything from gas stations to oil rigs is going to have non-trivial costs to decommission. The sooner we understand this and plan for it with specialized funds[0] that can handle it the better. Right now we're in the established candle makers versus upstart electric bulb manufacturers part of the story. The difference for us is the sheer scale of this transition. We already have petrol stations in Canada that are run at a yearly loss because the estimated costs of disposing of the surrounding soil are high enough that it's cheaper in net value accounting terms to lose money year by year. [0] I imagine something like an escrow style fund where payments into the fund are paid back with interest after a predefined period of time if there is no cleanup from the entity or its subsidiaries, including subsidiaries that have been sold off to new owners. That way it aligns incentives and rewards good actors that take preventative steps to ensure less costly decommission.
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoOne of the moonshot ideas I'd love to advance in my lifetime is just a real estate investment fund that buys up contaminated properties like said gas station, rehabilitates them slowly using inexpensive methods like bioremediation, and rolls sales of cleaned land into more contaminated properties. The cost to lock up that much capital for that long tied to that much liability would be significant of course, but starting an endowment it would be a huge public benefit that, eventually, could pay for its own operations.
- galdosdi 4y agoIsn't that really just the EPA superfund program?
- SuoDuanDao 4y agoInteresting, I'm Canadian so I hadn't known about that. It looks like the Superfund uses traditional (expensive) remediation methods, but there are probably a lot of similarities to what I imagine.
- worldvoyageur 4y ago" Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh. No recycling, no tech improvement, full market penetration, no savings from autonomous vehicles or the like and it is 3.8 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - market price assuming today’s lithium price of $60k works out to $230bn, or the dollar equivalent of 23 days of global oil consumption. Assume more normal lithium pricing of $20,000 and you get 8 days of current run rate oil consumption for a year’s worth of lithium vehicles at 100% market penetration. This is existential for commodity trading houses longer term: they can sell more lithium, copper and nickel but the core businesses they are in are big, lucrative and going to shrink and there is no certainty that lithium is not going to disappear into vertically integrated supply chains that do not need freewheeling intermediaries or “financialized capital”. [...] This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is the latest from the Sadoway lab - if we are going to use primarily sulphur and aluminium for batteries they will be laughably cheap. A tried and tested way to make money in materials science is to “do it better, with more available materials and less energy” - this is all three if commercialized. Over the last few years cobalt demand estimates have been crushed by developments in cathode chemistry due to cost and performance improvements in simpler chemistries - I am sceptical that this is the last time that today’s “unobtainium” becomes tomorrows chopped liver. Maybe new nuclear works, even if at low levels of total energy provided simply for stability and security reasons? Perhaps we can do a lot more pumped hydro than we thought? All the while the solar wafers get thinner and more efficient and use less materials…. the preponderance for everyone now calling for longer term structural energy inflation when papers like this are coming from Oxford which take account of these dynamics seems deeply unwise if you are doing anything but playing quarterly revisions. "
- theptip 4y agoI found this quoted passage quite interesting too. > An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table. One thing I'm not sure about -- do we actually have enough lithium to sustain ~ the current price at much higher consumption levels?
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoInteresting to see the commodity traders take on this, freaking out about a boring, predictable energy supply system not needing them as middle men. > An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table. Tragic that it took a war to accelerate the right thing, but better than people using the chaos to do their usual disaster capitalist thing, like the UK tried and surprisingly had to retract.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- paganel 4y ago> and machine learning engineers rake the table. This is no better than the belief in rain deities that used to be widespread in more traditional societies. No, "machine learning engineers" won't magically make (and especially transport and store) energy out of nothing. We've taken this "de-materialisation" thing to the next level, to our detriment. Not everything can be fixed and even less created with the use of software.
- analyte123 4y agoHe is simply referring to the fact that if you can predict either the weather or power demand better than others you will have an advantage in power markets.