[Gibbon1]

Yeah they're trying to delay the decay of their valuation.

A few years ago went looking at producing hydrogen by electrolysis for ammonia production. There was the usual 'well maybe' stuff but nothing showing anyone was doing anything concrete. Few days ago checked a again and there are a bunch of corporate news items about building electrolysers and hydrogen storage to replace natural gas reformer units.

The problem the fossil fuel companies have is they can convince low information stupids that oil, gas, coal and nuclear are the only viable technologies. But they can't convince the accountants.

[dauertewigkeit]

Yours seems like an unnecessarily cynical take. For sure oil companies try to green wash themselves with investment in green tech that seems too far fetched. Sure. But there are also many genuinely good intentioned people working on that green tech because they genuinely see a possible future application.

For that matter oil companies invested in battery tech as well. For the most part they just want to appear like they are doing something. But their green washing shouldn't discredit the green tech itself.

[rbanffy]

Oil companies know they are going to join the original oil suppliers, the dinosaurs, soon enough and they need to invest and build IP in renewables to be able to transition over to the green side.

Nobody wants to be the next Kodak.

[matthewdgreen]

The reason firms “become the next Kodak” is because they’re busy protecting their enormously profitable legacy business from competing technology. This can be actually rational, provided the people doing this sell or realize enough profit on their assets before the older business disappears.

[Gibbon1]

I read an article where the author made a point that oil and gas companies aren't setup to compete in the renewables business. And they have the problem that companies that are already exist in that space.

When it comes to building out a deep water oil rig they have no competition. But when it comes to set up an offshore wind farm marine services companies have the experience, equipment, and are nimble.

Build solar panels? That's manufacturing and there is a whole other industry that makes commodity manufactured goods at scale. Batteries and solar panels are both extremely high volume commodity goods.

[tonyarkles]

> But they can't convince the accountants.

Neither can "pure renewables" in many places. I acknowledge that this article is 10 years old but... https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/nancy-pfotenhauer/2014/...:

> "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

I'm an electrical engineer and am personally mixed on wind and solar. I'm in a Canadian province that has fantastic solar and wind potential but doesn't have the geography for effective pumped hydro storage. Battery storage, currently, is so ridiculously badly priced compared to nuclear. For the same price you can get a battery plant with 8 hours of 300MW capacity, or a SMR with 18-24 months of capacity before scheduled downtime for refueling. Even if you're in the "nuclear always goes over budget" camp, that SMR would have to go dramatically over budget to cease to be cost competitive.

I'm quite convinced that in the medium term it's pretty much got to be wind + solar, hydro, natural gas, and nuclear as a mix. They're complementary! Wind and solar are great at providing "free" energy into the grid when they're producing. Hydro is great but there's only so much available for a given geography without having other negative environmental effects. Natural gas is good for handling peak capacity quickly for situations where the other sources can't ramp up quick enough. Nuclear's great for providing steady baseload.

During the winter my province only gets 8 hours of sunlight per day and it's often enough -40 outside. Right now the vast majority of our homes are heated with natural gas; on a per kWh hour on an annual basis the gas company sells 3x the energy that the electricity company sells. If we're going to drop our carbon emissions dramatically then we're going to need to convert to either electric heat or district heating (probably via massive geothermal plants, which we can get heat out of but the reserves aren't good enough for electricity generation). And if we do switch to electric heat we need to do so with zero fear that we're going to freeze when we have a prolonged -40 degree stretch of calm cold 8-hour days.

[matthewdgreen]

Citing an article from ten years ago on renewables is like citing an article from the 1800s. Go look at the cost and deployment curves for solar PV and wind. Make sure you focus on recent numbers: you’re out of date if your information is even a year old.

[tonyarkles]

While I don't have any links handy, my understanding from doing some digging into this a few months ago is that currently off-shore wind is awesome and has about a 40% capacity factor. On-shore not so much.

As far as the battery capacity and pricing goes, that math was done using the Wikipedia pricing for Tesla Megapacks quite recently.

The vast majority of sources I've found for trying to actually compare prices typically involves levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE), which as far as I can tell completely ignores the intermittency problem; that's where I did a dive into the battery storage prices and found them eye-wateringly bad.

I'm strongly not opposed to wind and solar; I'm just strongly suspicious of anyone who suggests that, in my climate and geography, we're capable of replacing all of our electricity generation and heating (currently natgas) with solar and wind without some form of baseload long-term backup. I prefer that baseload backup to be nuclear and not coal or natural gas, as is the current status quo here.

I did just do a relative cursory search to try to find some current numbers but the majority of articles had theses like "wind is struggling due to inflation and interest rates but is going to bounce back this year!" so that's... not super useful.

[matthewdgreen]

Battery prices have collapsed 60% in the last year. Tesla Megapacks from whenever you calculated them aren’t even close to competitive now. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2024/03/06/battery-prices-collap...

[tonyarkles]

That's awesome but assuming that that means getting Tesla Megapacks at half the price (inverters and infrastructure would likely prevent a 60% reduction and it makes the math easier), you're now getting 16 hours at 300MW out of your batteries for the same price as a 300MW nuclear plant that runs 18-24 months before refuelling.