[api]

Solar power and batteries have come a long way, but there's still little political will to change things. Nuclear power could progress a lot further too, but again no political will.

There's no economic forcing function either since coal and gas remain on average the cheapest and easiest to deploy and manage sources of energy, and that won't change unless there's enough investment in alternatives to get them over the mass adoption hump.

The worst fears about fossil fuel depletion have so far not manifested, which might be a bad thing long term. We may have enough fossil carbon to cause truly catastrophic climate change if we actually burn a significant fraction of it.

I wonder though if the economic structural problem isn't even harder to solve. The entire financial system relies on eternal growth. Number must always go up or everything breaks.

Even if we put an end to most fears about supply side limits to growth by cracking fusion or developing super cheap utility scale batteries, there would still be demand side limits to growth from things like stabilizing populations and diminishing marginal utility of wealth. Mere stability without significant growth would bring about the collapse of the financial system and the economy as we know it, and probably quite a lot of political turmoil since we don't have a really great replacement sitting in the wings.

(No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)

[klmadfejno]

> (No, planetary migration won't keep GDP growth going any time soon. Humans could settle on the Moon or Mars but they're too far away to contribute much to our Earthly GDP. They'd be mostly isolated economies of their own.)

I don't really agree with your take on things but this one stuck out to me as particularly wrong. If there were suddenly another population of humans on another planet, there would, at a minimum, be a regular flow of digital goods, as well as physical shipments, largely one way earth -> mars.

[burlesona]

Good comment, don’t know why you got downvoted.

I will say I disagree about fossil fuel being cheapest though. The data show we’re at the inflection point now such that new renewables are cheaper even than natural gas and coal. That is very likely to get even cheaper.

I think the real exciting and interesting challenge is how to adopt society to energy that is incredibly cheap and abundant BUT not necessarily stable. Batteries are the most obvious and likely best solution, but are there other adaptations that we could make?

Consider, for example, and two-priority grid: your house could have one circuit that it “interruptible” and may cut off during severe shortages, while a second circuit is uninterruptible and powers things like your heating in the winter. This is just an idea off the top of my head, but there are many many other things that we could potentially do to adapt.

[baron_harkonnen]

Why in the world is this comment being downvotes? There is nothing in this comment that I see is incorrect, and if you’re going to vigorously down vote because “I don’t like things that make me feel bad!” you at least ought to comment as to what could be wrong here.

[Retric]

It’s not a question of political will solar is now cheaper than coal in the vast majority of the world. It’s one of the reasons why coal went from 39% in 2014 of US generation down to 19.3% in 2020 with a lot more scheduled for decommissioning over the next 5 years. Even when Trump was making many pro coal speeches, industry viewed coal as a dead end.

China is often mentioned as adding new coal power plants, but even there coal fell from 80% of electricity generation in 2010 to 57.7% in 2019.

Natural gas on the other hand has become more popular, but it also produces significantly less CO2 per kWh.

[oceanplexian]

Coal use had decreased quite a bit in the US but I believe it’s understood that cheap natural gas has been responsible and not solar.

So far as the importance of coal I think an overlooked aspect is that it’s a major ingredient in manufacturing steel. In the last year alone steel has shot up 37% in price, which has big implications for all sorts of industries.

[Retric]

The US also dropped total fossil fuels due to a mix of wind and solar. What specifically killed coal however wasn’t just prices but dispatch ability as natural gas is far cheaper to turn off and on daily. Crazy cheap solar means the ability to turn off generation every day will continue to become more valuable.

  Per person annual electricity generation was: 
  Fossil Fuel   8,626 kWh in 2014 vs 7,861 kWh in 2019
  Solar            55 kWh in 2014 vs   327 kWh in 2019
  Wind            570 kWh in 2014 vs   914 kWh in 2019
  All Renewable 1,689 kWh in 2014 vs 2,302 kWh in 2019

Fossil fuels actually peaked in 2007 at 9,922 kWh vs 1,170 kWh of Renewable.

[api]

Solar is only cheaper if you don't count storage. I think storage will eventually catch up, but it's not there yet.

[Retric]

You can hit ~60% of total electricity generation using solar with 0 storage. Wind is still cheap even if mostly used at night, add in existing hydroelectric dams and natural gas generators and you’re there.

You only need storage if you want to hit 100% green grid which is a great goal but separate issue from simply saving money.

[fallingfrog]

He said that political will could fix problems where there is no economic forcing function to do so. For people who subscribe to an extreme Ayn Rand view of the world, that’s a heretical statement. Markets are believed to be a magic bullet that solves every conceivable problem and coordinated effort not done in search of profit is always bad.

Every utopian dream contains a totalitarian nightmare in it, unfettered capitalism is no exception. The truth is that different problems require different solutions, markets are good for some things but not others.