A large part of the stagnation in energy consumption seems to be that the cost of energy hasn’t gone down much. The sixties and seventies marked a point where identifying and exploiting natural energy sources (mostly coal and oil) started to increase more rapidly in capital cost per unit energy produced. It seems that the last fifty years have been the beginning of the end for that whole class of energy production, which fueled the past two hundred years of growth. We are only now seeing the results of investment into alternatives.
Solar power in particular has plummeted in cost by many orders of magnitude, which is truly amazing. There are signs that it may become cheaper still. Nuclear power may become both cheaper and safer, but regardless of whether regulation costs too much now, it might not have a very much lower cost floor. We don’t know, and it might be worth finding out.
The interesting thing about solar power in particular is that it is pretty much purely capital-based. Unlike oil wells and coal mines relying on specific deposits that become exhausted, the production of energy from sunlight increases almost linearly with the amount you invest in it up to a small but significant fraction of the planet’s surface, and will produce essentially forever. There’s an upper bound based on maintenance and replacement of the equipment, but that limit seems likely to be at least 10 times larger than our current total energy production.
That’s just one of multiple possible energy sources that we’re working on. There are certainly major transition problems, but in the long run I think we’re now starting to head out of energy stagnation.
Solar power in particular has plummeted in cost by many orders of magnitude
You need to take into account the base here. Same with batteries. If something goes from ludicrously expensive to just plain very expensive, it is not so impressive.
I spent 3 months trying to put together a picture of what a 100% renewable energy economy would look like. When you take into account a) the need to build and maintain the RE infrastructure using RE (currently it is almost all done with fossil fuels for cost reasons) b) the vast infrastructure needed per Gw generated due to the low density of RE sources, c) intermittency which means you require a lot of redundancy, a lot of storage, a lot of cables, and backup dispatchable power (ask Germans right now!). The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations. So the RE cost is additional,
The total system cost is enormous.
FWIW my conclusion was a minimum 30-50% hit on living standards, and at worst it cannot actually work. If you want to bring the whole world up to 1st world living standards it is not at all possible.
> [solar] effectively forever
Solar installations have a very limited life span of the order of 10 years. And a very serious waste disposal problem. Similarly with wind turbines.
So no, not forever. While OP alludes to “maintenance costs” this by no means captures the extent of the problem.
For clarity I think AGW is a real, serious, man-made problem. But that does not imply that a solution is easy, or even possible. In any case, irrespective of the AGW issue, fossil fuels are running out and we need a solution, or we will be forced to dramatically reduce energy use and living standards.
People will say you can have a high living standard while consuming little energy. OK then, show me a country with very high living standard and low energy use. And 10kw/person is a lot of energy.
I spent 3 months trying to put together a picture of what a 100% renewable energy economy would look like.
I would love to see a detailed write-up about this, or absent that, what do you think is the best currently available write-up on this topic, that comes closest to the truth?
Solar installations have a very limited life span of the order of 10 years.
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations
This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).
Do you buy the premise (or perhaps the conclusion) that the energy stagnation of the past ~50 years is one of the key reasons why “the future” hasn’t yet been realized in the way that one might have assumed back then, had we been more willing to use the required amount of energy to produce and sustain those innovations (like flying cars and nanotech)?
That said, I never thought that flying cars were a reasonable expectation for the near future, mainly because the failure modes are terribly bad and keeping them from happening at intolerable rates is incredibly expensive. Even if we were very rich, they were powered by Mr Fusion, and piloted by infallible software, occasional mechanical defects alone would make them not something I’d want to use every day.
We do have nanotech already, just not the “build everything for free” magical wish fulfillment nanotech. More energy wouldn’t have helped that much, there are lots of very real problems at that scale that we still know little about solving. We may get further toward magical wish fulfillment nanotech in time, but it will take a lot of brainpower not horsepower.
A large part of the stagnation in energy consumption seems to be that the cost of energy hasn’t gone down much. The sixties and seventies marked a point where identifying and exploiting natural energy sources (mostly coal and oil) started to increase more rapidly in capital cost per unit energy produced. It seems that the last fifty years have been the beginning of the end for that whole class of energy production, which fueled the past two hundred years of growth. We are only now seeing the results of investment into alternatives.
Solar power in particular has plummeted in cost by many orders of magnitude, which is truly amazing. There are signs that it may become cheaper still. Nuclear power may become both cheaper and safer, but regardless of whether regulation costs too much now, it might not have a very much lower cost floor. We don’t know, and it might be worth finding out.
The interesting thing about solar power in particular is that it is pretty much purely capital-based. Unlike oil wells and coal mines relying on specific deposits that become exhausted, the production of energy from sunlight increases almost linearly with the amount you invest in it up to a small but significant fraction of the planet’s surface, and will produce essentially forever. There’s an upper bound based on maintenance and replacement of the equipment, but that limit seems likely to be at least 10 times larger than our current total energy production.
That’s just one of multiple possible energy sources that we’re working on. There are certainly major transition problems, but in the long run I think we’re now starting to head out of energy stagnation.
You need to take into account the base here. Same with batteries. If something goes from ludicrously expensive to just plain very expensive, it is not so impressive.
I spent 3 months trying to put together a picture of what a 100% renewable energy economy would look like. When you take into account a) the need to build and maintain the RE infrastructure using RE (currently it is almost all done with fossil fuels for cost reasons) b) the vast infrastructure needed per Gw generated due to the low density of RE sources, c) intermittency which means you require a lot of redundancy, a lot of storage, a lot of cables, and backup dispatchable power (ask Germans right now!). The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations. So the RE cost is additional,
The total system cost is enormous.
FWIW my conclusion was a minimum 30-50% hit on living standards, and at worst it cannot actually work. If you want to bring the whole world up to 1st world living standards it is not at all possible.
> [solar] effectively forever
Solar installations have a very limited life span of the order of 10 years. And a very serious waste disposal problem. Similarly with wind turbines.
So no, not forever. While OP alludes to “maintenance costs” this by no means captures the extent of the problem.
For clarity I think AGW is a real, serious, man-made problem. But that does not imply that a solution is easy, or even possible. In any case, irrespective of the AGW issue, fossil fuels are running out and we need a solution, or we will be forced to dramatically reduce energy use and living standards.
People will say you can have a high living standard while consuming little energy. OK then, show me a country with very high living standard and low energy use. And 10kw/person is a lot of energy.
I would love to see a detailed write-up about this, or absent that, what do you think is the best currently available write-up on this topic, that comes closest to the truth?
What’s the source of this? I’ve only seen talk of ~30-year lifetimes for solar, for example https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/30/how-have-expectations-for-useful-life-of-utility-scale-pv-plants-in-the-us-changed-over-time/
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).
Interesting!
Do you buy the premise (or perhaps the conclusion) that the energy stagnation of the past ~50 years is one of the key reasons why “the future” hasn’t yet been realized in the way that one might have assumed back then, had we been more willing to use the required amount of energy to produce and sustain those innovations (like flying cars and nanotech)?
The future very rarely goes the way we predict.
That said, I never thought that flying cars were a reasonable expectation for the near future, mainly because the failure modes are terribly bad and keeping them from happening at intolerable rates is incredibly expensive. Even if we were very rich, they were powered by Mr Fusion, and piloted by infallible software, occasional mechanical defects alone would make them not something I’d want to use every day.
We do have nanotech already, just not the “build everything for free” magical wish fulfillment nanotech. More energy wouldn’t have helped that much, there are lots of very real problems at that scale that we still know little about solving. We may get further toward magical wish fulfillment nanotech in time, but it will take a lot of brainpower not horsepower.