[AtlasBarfed]

All I track is EROEI / LCOE of alt energy in the US. Is Russia able to undercut solar/wind economics in eastern europe?

The economics for migrating from Russian sources is already there. You're already losing money with coal plants, and natural gas will soon be more expensive to keep running than replace. Storage/level generation is a secondary concern, but as stated the extant nuke plants coudl do that.

[kragen]

It isn't able to undercut it, no, but it's able to supply the energy now, while transitioning to wind and solar is going to take about 8 years, maybe longer in places like Estonia.

[beberlei]

This is the important point, no matter how much we push, 100% renewable is still many years away.

[kragen]

100% will probably never arrive, but >50% renewable is about six years away. Denmark's almost there now, but their transport system is still almost all fossil fuel.

[ephbit]

It's always the diesel powered trucks.

Will they be replaced by battery powered electric ones? I don't think so.

What then? LNG-powered trucks?

Methanol fuelcell powered?

[kragen]

For long-haul land shipping, the simple solutions are electric trains or Fischer–Tropsch-powered diesel trucks. Maybe methanol-powered trucks or CNG-powered trucks can beat those (not LNG obviously!) but it's going to be an uphill battle.

For short-distance delivery, battery-powered electric trucks probably work fine—battery-powered forklifts have been common inside factories since well into the previous millennium, EVs' regenerative braking dramatically improves energy efficiency in city driving, the high peak power density and rapid slew rate that was such a selling point for the Tesla Roadster is another big plus over diesel, and if necessary fleet organizations can swap batteries daily in ways that would be unacceptably risky for Teamster OOs who could get stuck with a dud battery.

For fast shipping, Fischer–Tropsch Jet A-1.

Sea shipping is a somewhat tougher problem; obviously it's feasible to do with 99% renewable energy, as it was for all of human history until 250 years ago, but today's depreciation rates, geographical specialization and long multinational supply chains, and JIT practices strongly incentivize the much higher power densities of modern shipping. And the cost premium for Fischer–Tropsch diesel over modern bunker fuel is much larger than what truckers and diesel locomotives face.

Fortunately, though very dirty, sea shipping is a tiny fraction of the overall energy mix.

[ephbit]

> ... Fischer–Tropsch-powered diesel trucks.

Fischer-Tropsch with which kind of carbon/hydrogen sources? Hydrogen from electrolysis?

Fischer-Tropsch diesel would allow continued use of existing trucks until their EOL.

> ... Maybe methanol-powered trucks or CNG-powered trucks ...

My guess is that it'll be the liquid (or liquefied; not hydrogen though) fuel that is most universally applicable (different regions of the world with different temperatures, different uses in industries) that will prevail. Might even be Ammonia because it doesn't require a carbon source to be synthesized.

> For short-distance delivery, battery-powered electric trucks probably work fine ...

I kind of see the point that for short distances BEV have a strong position. But on the other hand my reasoning for that to be somewhat temporary would be: in the long rong, there needs to be some liquid fuel that gets used for long distance. As soon as this liquid fuel becomes cheap enough to be competitive, it will have a huge advantage over BEV that might then chew off even the short distance applications of BEV. If some liquid fuel were to become cheap enough then it'd be dramatically more flexible to refuel than BEV. Just fill up the tank, it's quick and simple tech. No need to structure your day that's busy (managing work and private life) around charging a vehicle. Also compared to maintaining the charching infrastructure and balancing the load of an electric grid, it's soo much less complex because liquid fuels come with robust load buffering built in.