First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
You're absolutely right it applies to suburbia too, not just rural areas and industry in rural areas.
> you can just regulate against it, problem solved
I think that is exactly what you'll lose the ability to do. If Marvin Heemeyer didn't need the town's septic connection we wouldn't know his name.
A huge fraction of regulatory enforcement exists in the gray area of "the government is wrong, or their enforcement of it is wrong but it's cheaper to bend over and take it than to fight it through a courtroom". If farmer Johnson can slap up a building kit on his property and power it with stuff he bought online and doesn't need the power company, Joe Schmo can do the same with an ADU. Yeah, they'll both get dragged through court but $50-100k of court costs to be proven right is a much smaller threat when the project can be done and generating income for the duration of the court case (it also renders the typical tactic of dragging out such cases much less effective).
And at a slightly larger scale, if some business interest can negotiate purely with a municipality to take over some disused factory and bring it back into use and get their power via bunch of panels and not get bogged down with state permitting to get a transmission line and substation the state loses a huge number of levers over the business interest and also they lose levers to control poorer municipalities (who'd happily take the business). Once again, they'll get dragged through court by the state, but spending 5yr and $200k just to be right isn't a dealbreaker when your widget factory has been operating the whole time.
Yes, of course governments can do worse things if they feel like it, but they run into problems of political optics and will more or less instantly.
You already see this kind of thing in some of the highest cost areas. Certain demographics in the greater NYC area often do building and land development things this way. It costs the same at the end, but by doing it without asking you get to use it while the whole process runs.
Yes, but thats a bad extrapolation because per-capita electricity consumption was still rising then but is mostly flat/decreasing in western countries since 2000 or so, and the significant rise in reneably fraction mostly started after 2000.
The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
> The hydro fraction is also a really bad indicator in general, because it basically just reflects geography of a country and not really its effort to reduce CO2 emissions.
As a ‘clean green New Zealander’, your comment is perfect.
We trash our country in such appalling ways. The fact they there aren’t many of us and that the easy way of getting power is hydro is coincidence, not a national conscience.
You are still arguing against a strawman. Cucumber3732842 is just saying that nameplate capacity is a systematically flawed metric when comparing renewable generation, because their capacity factor is consistently lower than for conventional plants.
A better metric would simply be annual production, where we're in the ~30% range globally (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...). Even that comparison portraits renewables very favorably, because dispatchable power is easier to handle than the same output from intermittent sources.
If you look beyond electricity (heating/total primary energy use) the picture gets even worse.
This is not an argument against renewables, this is against premature cheering and misleading use of numbers.
I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?
Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.
The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.
So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.
> As the world’s largest manufacturer of clean technologies, data on China’s cleantech exports provide an important early insight into the pace and scale of the energy transition. In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.
Note: Flagging on topics like this typically occurs from user action, not moderators.
These are not typical sockpuppet accounts either, but mostly established users that (conjecture) don't care about having the same non-technical debate among non-experts devolve into flaming and namecalling.
See relevant statements and context from moderators here:
If you can not win a war because your population is unwilling to bear the cost, then you are still unable to win (that is in fact a very typical way for a war to end).
Nobody is disputing the fact that the US spends more money on arms than anyone else and has the shiniest of toys as a result, but "winning" in war is about effecting the outcomes that you want, not about whether your weapon systems are superior.
The US military has clearly failed to deliver the outcome that Americans wanted in many recent conflicts (Vietnam, Taliban); counting those wars as "lost" makes a lot of sense.
One of the reasons to do a war is to simply show the enemy that you are able and crazy enough to go to war with them over whatever grievances you had. This is called strategic deterrence.
You are making the folly of thinking of war like lawsuits, where one side wins and the other side loses, and the losing side goes home with nothing. This is not so.
If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead.
You can both "win" or both "lose" if your goals are not in direct conflict (rare).
I'd argue that the most important thing when trying to win wars is to aim for realistic outcomes.
The first gulf war was arguably a win because of realistic goals (get Iraq out of Kuwait and stop them from invading it again), while most other interventions in the region were basically "designed to fail", and unsurprisingly never achieved anything of note (and the problem was not lack of military capability).
Yes but if you spend some billions of dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban, you have only demonstrated that you are willing to make your own citizens suffer with diminished resources for no outcome.
>If you're walking home from work and some person tries to mug you, even if they are unsuccessful, that will permanently change your behavior as if they had successfully robbed you anyway. Maybe you'll change your route. Maybe you won't walk and drive instead.
In global politics, this tends to make you want to increase your defenses so it doesn't happen again, and find local partners for that defense. This usually comes at the cost of US influence, not its increase.
Like Iran is looking at its current situation and going "The literal only deterrence we could have to prevent this is to develop a nuclear capability. The US cannot be trusted to deal with, and it is pointless to try."
A nuclear Iran can now only be avoided by scorched earth. Scorched earth will now just cause an already partly US hating population to hate them more and create matyrs. Theres no possible upside to this conflict.
With Afghanistan, I think people fixate on the fact that the Taliban is still there and while that's true, Al Qaeda has completely been wiped out (except fringe groups that have adopted the name) and OBL, the person most responsible for 9/11, was successfully killed by an attack launched out of Afghanistan. The current Taliban and whatever terrorist groups remain in that region no longer have an interest in hurting the US directly. The current Taliban is also very different from the one in 2001, almost geopolitically flipped in some ways (allied with India instead of Pakistan, and almost certainly responsible for majorly disrupting China's OBOR project in that region, another win for the US.
Not to mention, 20 years of no Taliban. An entire generation of Afghans grew up without being under a Taliban government.
“A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.” - Snow Crash
Is it strategic deterrence, or just being so unreliably and inconsistent that insider information becomes more valuable?
Is it strategic to demonstrate a lack of planning or that you are a poor ally incapable of garnering support (either domestically or abroad)?
What nations are you talking about? E.g. in Germany, you can buy up to 7kW of panels, screw them onto your roof, wire them up with controller and battery and feed up to 800W into local grid, no one is gonna stop you or anything (only thing you need to do is register online with the grid operator if you have >2kW of panels).
Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e. landlord) actually can't easily stop you from doing this.
Not quite as I understand it. At the low end, a couple of panels, yes. Beyond 960W of panels you will still need an an electrician rather than just the Schuko plug.
It's not clear to me why, for example, 2kW of panels which are also limited to 800W need need the special plug.
Hopefully I'm wrong!
"With a standard Schuko plug, a maximum of 960 watts peak is allowed on the DC side, regulated by DIN VDE V 0126-95. With the Wieland connector, a special feed-in socket, the limit increases to 2,000 watts peak. Anyone wanting to operate a system with up to 7,000 watts of module power will need a permanently installed feed-in socket, thus entering a range that is technically possible but also more complex to implement."
The limits in power you can install, power you can inject to the grid and power you can just directly sell to neighbours through a micro-grid (zeeo, as it's illegal) tell quite the story.
Typically, you have "dumb" panels connected to a mppt-controller/charger/inverter box which is connected to batteries and and electrical plug. This controller tunes voltage/current that is taken from the panels, optionally manages the attached battery and measures and feeds into the grid connection.
Some systems are capable of running in isolation from grid (providing 230V AC on their own), but this is less common and often unnecessary.
Grids are not set up to move significant percentages of national consumption over longer distances, and expansion is slow, expensive and prone to nimbyism.
Countries already struggle to move electrical energy inside their own borders (e.g. Germany: north=>south), shifting double digit percentages of national consumption across Europe is not gonna happen any time soon. Germany alone plans to spend at least ~€100bn over the next decade on this (internally, not on connecting Spain!).
Much more effective to focus on local generation first than to try and rely on slightly better conditions for solar panels half a continent away.
Presumably that the water bill (for tap water) was priced to cover both tap water provisioning and sewage works. But people using (free) rainwater to flush toilets ruined the pricing model, making the tap water price go up.
I honestly don't see the problem, it's probably still worth it (because society still needs to provide less tap water and saves there).
Sidenote: Whenever someone tells you that (vital) reserves of some ressource are going to run out soonish (implying drastic consequences), you should be extremely skeptical:
Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).
This applies historically for oil, lithium, rare earth metals and basically everything else.
edit: I'm not saying we're never gonna run out of anything-- I'm just saying to not expect sudden, cataclysmic shortages in general, but instead steadily rising prices and a somewhat smoothish transition to alternatives.
I always add "cheap" to the sentence. It seems they are always talking about the cheap version of anything. Going to run out of water? Or are we running out of the "cheap" version of water that does not have to be processed?
This is a valid point: quickly depleting reserves often indicate that pricing is not sustainable. Which is bad.
But non-sustainable pricing is very different from "cataclysmic collapse", and too many people expect the latter for too many things, which is just not realistic in my view (and historical precendent makes a strong case against that assumption, too).
A society where water prices gradually increases to "reverse-osmosis only" (instead of "pump-from-the-ground-everywhere") levels is very different from a society where water suddenly runs out.
> Such predictions have an abysmal historic track record, because we tend to find workarounds both on the supply side (=> previously undiscovered reserves) as well as flexibility on the demand side (using substitutes).
That's a classic example of the "preparedness paradox" [1]. When no one raises the alarm in time or it is being ignored, resources can go (effectively) exhausted before alternatives can be found, or countries either need to pay extraordinary amounts of money or go to war outright - this has happened in the past with guano [2], which was used for fertilizer and gunpowder production for well over a century until the Haber-Bosch ammonia process was developed at the start of the 20th century.
And we're actually seeing a repeat of that as well happening right now. Economists and scientists have sounded the alarm for decades that oil and gas are finite resources and that geopolitical tensions may impact everyone... no one gave too much of a fuck because one could always "drill baby drill", and now look where we are - Iran has blasted about 20% of Qatar's LNG capacity alone to pieces and blocked off the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil prices skyrocketing.
I don't see the Guano industry as a straight counter-example, it even illustrates my point:
If you had made predictions/scenarios in 1850 based on Guano deposits running out within a decade or two, you would have mispredicted completely, because a lot of the industry just transitioned to sodium nitrate (before synthetic fertilisers took over). Nowadays media landscape would've gladly made such doom-and-gloom predictions for global agriculture back then.
I completely agree that quickly depleting reserves often indicate non-sustainable pricing for ressources (which is obviously bad long term), but that is very different from sudden collapse.
I've seen articles from the 1880s claiming oil will run out by 1890. 140 years latter...
Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen. Right now I'm guessing we won't run out because wind and solar is so much cheaper for most purposes everyone is shifting anyway - this will take decades to play out.
> Yes we can run out of oil, but nobody really knows if or even when that will happen.
We can run out of cheap and accessible oil very, very fast if the shitshow in MENA continues to escalate. Qatar already lost 20% of their LNG capacity in a single strike.
The US may have enough domestic oil production to sate its domestic demand, but the prices would still skyrocket even for them. Europe meanwhile, we're straight fucked here. Technically the oil hasn't run out, it's still in the oil fields of the journalist-butcher country and other sheikdoms, but that doesn't matter if it cannot be pumped out any more because the wells got blasted to pieces or if it cannot be transported thanks to Iranian mines, Europe is still running out of oil in practice.
What does "Europe running out of oil" mean to you? Gas at the pump for >10€/l, potentially with some rationing scheme? Do you honestly think that's gonna happen?
It is easy to get infected by the media narratives that are notoriously biased towards maximum drama, but I firmly believe that we are not gonna escalate into such a scenario.
There's always options; sorting priorities because of price, radical electrification of transport, or, at the extreme end, picking up coal hydration again (worked well enough to keep the Nazi war machine running for quite a while, with much worse access to crude).
For comparison: Copper prices did increase by 500% since 2000, but people barely even care, and that's how I would expect "shortages" to typically go.
"Reserves" are the name of something that exists only at a set price. Change the price, and the reserves change too.
The people that rush to tell you that reserves are running out tend to omit what price they are talking about. That way of expressing oneself is normally called "a lie".
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
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