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> Honestly, it sounds like a pretty good deal. Firstly, that's 7% of global GDP per year, not some one-time fee. But more important that sounds like a horrible

> Honestly, it sounds like a pretty good deal. Firstly, that's 7% of global GDP per year, not some one-time fee. But more important that sounds like a horrible deal since 100% of that is leading to climate change. And as a bonus it's also going to the companies fighting most strongly to prevent any change on the matter. > Besides, renewables aren't free of negative externalities, either. Neither is breathing. The comparison between renewables and fossil fuels is not even close, not by a few orders of magnitude. Take the figure halfway through the article as comparison [0]. > Would you tell the caveman not to burn sticks for warmth, out of respect to CO2 emissions? This is a blatant strawman, I won't even comment. > Would you tell the people of the developing world that increased energy expenditure per capita, no matter the source, necessarily results in a greater impact to the environment? I did not say this, I don't know why you think I did. I will simply repeat my previous comment: the levelized cost of solar in north America is already below that for gas and coal. In Africa, where the sun shines a heck a lot more, that number will be even better. They can either build fossil fuel energy, which will be costlier, worse for their people, and make them dependent on outside oil and coal imports. Or the can build cheap and cleaner renewables, which will also give them better energy independence from the rest of the world. See China. Do you think they're building wind, hydro, and solar like crazy out of the goodness of their heart? Or perhaps their doing it to not be dependent on oil and gas imports and to get cheaper electricity to boot? > but I question your assertion that some kind of panacea can be achieved with renewables where we can maintain our present population and standards of living and have a radically smaller footprint on the environment. I made no such statement. Renewable are not a panacea. Everyone in the world cannot have a McMansion, if only because there isn't the surface area for it. But by stopping the burning of fossil fuels and switching to renewables we will have a substantial decrease in our footprint on the environment. (oil and gas still have important uses as chemical feedstocks, and as long as we don't pollute with them they're no different from other things we extract from the ground) [0]: https://ieefa.org/resources/how-big-indias-solar-waste-challenge-compared-coal-fired-power https://ieefa.org/resources/how-big-indias-solar-waste-chall...

gottorf 3y ago
> the levelized cost of solar in north America is already below that for gas and coal The levelized cost of solar in the US is comparable to combined-cycle gas plants (at around ~$37/MWh) without taking into account the cost of storage[0]. Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion. You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest. > In Africa, where the sun shines a heck a lot more, that number will be even better. They can either build fossil fuel energy, which will be costlier, worse for their people, and make them dependent on outside oil and coal imports. I mean, that's great. By all means, they should build whatever makes sense. If fossil fuels are in fact worse by every metric as you imply, it would be ridiculous to invest more in that direction. But the fact remains that over the past decade, they've added more generation capacity from natural gas in one year (on average) than all renewables combined over the ten years[2]. So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy? > See China. Do you think they're building wind, hydro, and solar like crazy out of the goodness of their heart? Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas[3]. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China [2]: https://www.iea.org/regions/africa https://www.iea.org/regions/africa [3]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china https://www.iea.org/countries/china
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  > The levelized cost of solar in the US is comparable to combined-cycle gas plants (at around ~$37/MWh) without taking into account the cost of storage[0]. Comparable yes. But this comes back to the framing of the discussion. The US price does not include a price on the carbon (and CO2e) polution from those sources. And given that the majority of gas/coal's LCOE is made up of variable costs (i.e. fuel) it will be sensitive to such pricing. > Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion. That is also changing. Batteries are not the only option. Other vaiable options are wider more interconnected grids, as you mention below, as well as pairing with options such as hydro power. Another consideration, many places currently have time of use pricing, with the evening/night being cheaper. With the intermittency of solar, for example, time of use pricing during the day may decrease, incentivizing a shifting of loads to during the day rather than at night. > You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest. The US grid in particular needs modernization before even considering the intermittency of renewables, so a some portion of that modernization cost is going to be paid anyway. > So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy? Part of the explanation for that discrepancy is that while the levelized cost is currently on par or lower than fossil fuels, this was absolutely not true ten years ago [0]. The price for solar dropped ~6x over the last 14 years, and there is reason to believe that it will drop further still. > Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas. And given their large coal supply it will, unfortunately, be the last to be dropped. My argument for this is the same thing I mentioned for Africa; until recently they were simply not cost competitive, but that has been changing very drastically. You are correct that their mix is 60% coal, but compare it to 10 years ago and you'll see that it fell 15 percentage points (from 75% to 60%) [1]. So while they're building coal, they're building everything else faster (and that everything else is majority renewables). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
unmole 3y ago
1. GDP is also calculated per year. So, the not some one-time fee argument doesn't make any sense. 2. Solar is not a solutio for baseload without grid level storage. 3. China continues to build loads of coal power plants too.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > 3. China continues to build loads of coal power plants too. This is brought up often. But you know what? If China replaces its car park with EVs, heats its buildings with heat pumps etc, then even coal powered that's a massive win. But in the meantime, renewables (and to a lesser degree, nuclear) continue to chip away at the fossil part of their energy mix. Or at the very least, replace what would have been more fossil use otherwise.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  2. Grid level storage has many forms, it does not need to be batteries. For example, hydro can be used as medium term storage. And even short term the rate at which water is passed through the damns can be varied to balance out the solar. 3. Yes, but if you look at their production mix, coal has come down from 75% to 60% over the past 10 years, the large majority of that has been taken up by renewables [0]. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

gottorf 3y ago

> the levelized cost of solar in north America is already below that for gas and coal The levelized cost of solar in the US is comparable to combined-cycle gas plants (at around ~$37/MWh) without taking into account the cost of storage[0]. Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion. You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest. > In Africa, where the sun shines a heck a lot more, that number will be even better. They can either build fossil fuel energy, which will be costlier, worse for their people, and make them dependent on outside oil and coal imports. I mean, that's great. By all means, they should build whatever makes sense. If fossil fuels are in fact worse by every metric as you imply, it would be ridiculous to invest more in that direction. But the fact remains that over the past decade, they've added more generation capacity from natural gas in one year (on average) than all renewables combined over the ten years[2]. So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy? > See China. Do you think they're building wind, hydro, and solar like crazy out of the goodness of their heart? Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas[3]. [0]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China [2]: https://www.iea.org/regions/africa https://www.iea.org/regions/africa [3]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china https://www.iea.org/countries/china

_aavaa_ 3y ago
> The levelized cost of solar in the US is comparable to combined-cycle gas plants (at around ~$37/MWh) without taking into account the cost of storage[0]. Comparable yes. But this comes back to the framing of the discussion. The US price does not include a price on the carbon (and CO2e) polution from those sources. And given that the majority of gas/coal's LCOE is made up of variable costs (i.e. fuel) it will be sensitive to such pricing. > Add battery storage to the mix and the cost more than quadruples. The grid as it exists currently does not handle intermittency very well at all. Wind and solar cannot provide base load and need to be paired with some other source, which at the moment is most often gas combustion. That is also changing. Batteries are not the only option. Other vaiable options are wider more interconnected grids, as you mention below, as well as pairing with options such as hydro power. Another consideration, many places currently have time of use pricing, with the evening/night being cheaper. With the intermittency of solar, for example, time of use pricing during the day may decrease, incentivizing a shifting of loads to during the day rather than at night. > You can very well argue that we need to modernize the grid so that it can handle intermittent sources better, and I agree, but that ends up being a lot more expensive than your simple LCOE comparison would suggest. The US grid in particular needs modernization before even considering the intermittency of renewables, so a some portion of that modernization cost is going to be paid anyway. > So either renewables don't make as much sense as you claim, or there's something else going on. How do you explain the discrepancy? Part of the explanation for that discrepancy is that while the levelized cost is currently on par or lower than fossil fuels, this was absolutely not true ten years ago [0]. The price for solar dropped ~6x over the last 14 years, and there is reason to believe that it will drop further still. > Of course they have a strategic interest in reducing dependency on foreign oil imports. But 60% of their electric grid is still from coal, and they've added almost as much coal generation capacity as they did all forms of renewables over the past 10 years[1]. And if you look at their total energy consumption (including thermal needs, not just electricity generation), 85% of all energy consumed in China comes from coal, oil, and natural gas. And given their large coal supply it will, unfortunately, be the last to be dropped. My argument for this is the same thing I mentioned for Africa; until recently they were simply not cost competitive, but that has been changing very drastically. You are correct that their mix is 60% coal, but compare it to 10 years ago and you'll see that it fell 15 percentage points (from 75% to 60%) [1]. So while they're building coal, they're building everything else faster (and that everything else is majority renewables). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

unmole 3y ago

1. GDP is also calculated per year. So, the not some one-time fee argument doesn't make any sense. 2. Solar is not a solutio for baseload without grid level storage. 3. China continues to build loads of coal power plants too.

RetroTechie 3y ago
> 3. China continues to build loads of coal power plants too. This is brought up often. But you know what? If China replaces its car park with EVs, heats its buildings with heat pumps etc, then even coal powered that's a massive win. But in the meantime, renewables (and to a lesser degree, nuclear) continue to chip away at the fossil part of their energy mix. Or at the very least, replace what would have been more fossil use otherwise.
_aavaa_ 3y ago
2. Grid level storage has many forms, it does not need to be batteries. For example, hydro can be used as medium term storage. And even short term the rate at which water is passed through the damns can be varied to balance out the solar. 3. Yes, but if you look at their production mix, coal has come down from 75% to 60% over the past 10 years, the large majority of that has been taken up by renewables [0]. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?country=~CHN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...