[HN Gopher] Fossil fuels could have been left in the dust 25 yea...
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Fossil fuels could have been left in the dust 25 years ago
Author : helsinkiandrew
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-05-23 19:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timharford.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (timharford.com)
| lifty wrote:
| If the point is generalizable, we should build more nuclear power
| plants. They will become cheaper.
| jrnvs wrote:
| They can't be made in a factory and thus the learning effect is
| very small (if it even exists - nuclear reactors have increased
| in price).
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > They can't be made in a factory
|
| They can now, see Small Modular Reactors (SMR).
| fifilura wrote:
| Where can I see one?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Just need to:
|
| 1. Build prototype
|
| 2. Iterate on prototype.
|
| 3. In conjunction start standardizing and automating
| processes.
|
| 4. Achieve large enough scale to amortize the factory and
| process optimization costs over enough units to actually
| gain anything.
|
| The "SMR hype industry" seems to be perpetually stuck at
| 1, not even being able to deliver a single prototype.
|
| All the while talking like the factory already exists and
| SMRs are solved.
|
| Somehow it doesn't add up.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| https://aris.iaea.org/Publications/SMR_booklet_2022.pdf
| linked from https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/what-
| are-small-modular-....
|
| I don't know, I'm not a specialist. But this came up by
| doing a rudimentary search.
| fifilura wrote:
| Thank you! Seems like I have 4 choices (although i
| probably don't want to go to Russia, since they are at
| war).
|
| KLT-40S Russia
|
| HTR-PM China
|
| HTR-10 China
|
| HTTR Japan
| fifilura wrote:
| Yay! There is a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear
| Corporation. It has a nice ring to it!
|
| "Super safe bank"
|
| "Really clean hamburger restaurant"
|
| "Most trustworth car salesman"
|
| "Very accurate surgeon"
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| This is pretty interesting:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR7VDqUbaCg.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Did these increase in price in China too?
| nomel wrote:
| Please see the cost breakdown: https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-
| plant-construction-costs/
|
| Very very little is made/manufactured on site. You do not
| make turbines, computers, pipes, or much at all, on a
| construction site. You form, weld, pour, and assemble. The
| goal would be a _standard design_ , to cut those giant
| engineering and custom fabrication costs to a small fraction.
|
| You don't need to deliver a completed factory on a pallet to
| save costs (although that's possible with distributed small
| module reactors, as Asia is ramping up for).
| treyd wrote:
| Which is why France has such strong nuclear supply, they
| decided going into it to hage standard designs.
| Retric wrote:
| France's nuclear is fully owned by the government. The
| subsidies are so huge there's basically zero market
| forces in play on the supply side.
| mpweiher wrote:
| It's not subsidized. In fact, cheap nuclear electricity
| is used to subsidize other industries.
|
| The entire nuclear industry (construction, operation,
| support) cost France EUR 228 billion and produce 11000
| TWh (by 2012). That's 2,07 cents/kWh. Not too shabby.
| Retric wrote:
| Your numbers are wildly off and not just from ignoring
| inflation when using poorly sourced numbers from 2012.
| Quick, how much did they spend on fuel over that
| timeframe? Well according to that estimate it was 0, so
| it's hardly including the operating costs.
|
| To give some perspective: "In March 2023 France's
| Parliament formally approved the government's nuclear
| investment plan - by 402 votes in favor and 130 against -
| which considers the EUR52 billion construction of six new
| EPR-2 PWRs at three sites." That's not operations that's
| just for construction of 6 reactors when they have 56 in
| operation _and_ that's interest free unlike US reactor
| where interest is included with construction costs. One
| year later that's already been increased to 67.4 billion
| euros: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-
| utility-edf-l....
|
| France operated as a pay as you go system so they didn't
| set money aside for the full cost of decommissioning
| their reactors etc. Last I checked there was some talk in
| 2017 of them setting aside 27 billion based on some
| ridiculously optimistic estimates but mostly the plan is
| just foist the costs onto future taxpayers.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Soviet Union as well. RBMK wasn't a _good_ design but it
| was a _standard_ design and they built many of them
| rather affordably.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| And still ended up with negative learning by doing where
| every additional reactor became more expensive than the
| previous.
|
| _The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of
| negative learning by doing_
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03
| 014...
| mpweiher wrote:
| But the "negative learning" was exactly because they
| abandoned the standardized approach.
|
| "Conversely, the gradual erosion of EDF's determination
| to standardize (caving in to proposals of numerous design
| changes in the wake of the ''frenchifying'' of the
| Westinghouse de- sign--the P'4 reactor series--and above
| all to the new N4 reactor design pushed by the CEA), as
| well as the abrupt slowdown of the expansion program
| after 1981, paved the way towards a gradual demise of the
| French success model, as borne out in lengthened
| construction times and ever higher cost escalation
| towards the end of the program (cf. Section 4 below)."
|
| https://endexiresearch.wordpress.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020...
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| I don't get the need to lie?
|
| If you read the article you will clearly see that for all
| generations it got more expensive over time.
|
| The first, the second, the third and fourth.
|
| All of them. Standardization did not make it cheaper.
| qball wrote:
| >They can't be made in a factory
|
| All nuclear power plants made since around 1980s or so have
| been made in factories. The US (and other nations) use them
| all the time for their submarines- defense concerns correctly
| override environmentalists (and the oil companies backing
| them financially).
|
| The problem is a solved one. We're rich enough to afford to
| tilt at windmills instead- for now, anyway.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Doesn't make sense if there are alternatives that are at least
| as cheap without the hassle.
| Arnt wrote:
| It's not infinitely generalizable, only to tech production
| issues and maybe not to all of those. Nuclear isn't expensive
| because of production.
|
| https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-...
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Even if it wasn't the case that PV's could have replaced fossil
| fuels back then because they weren't advanced enough nuclear
| was more than capable of doing so and readily available. Indeed
| investing in various different types of reactors might very
| well have produced a similar curve of progress and finding ways
| to make them less dangerous and requiring less regulation all
| of which would have sped up deployment and reduced the cost.
|
| We will never know, we just know now that its cheaper to do
| solar and power storage than nuclear.
| mpweiher wrote:
| It is. They do. And did.
|
| Both France and Germany figured out how to do this.
|
| And then stopped building.
|
| <facepalm>
|
| You build a standardized design, and you build a bunch of them,
| and you overlap the construction.
|
| Germany's Konvoi reactors were built for DM 4 billion a piece
| in the late 80s. At the same time, non-Konvoi reactors cost
| more than twice as much, DM 9.5 billion.
|
| Apply the 88% cumulative inflation between then and now and
| you'd be at DM 7,52 billion, or EUR 3.9 billion.
|
| Fortunately we are starting to build more again, so prices
| should begin to fall.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Article misses the fact that a lot of governments in the 70s and
| 80s (shoutout to Germany especially) put a lot of investment into
| solar panel adoption, which is part of why the cost dropped so
| much in the 80s and 90s and 2000s.
| ant6n wrote:
| I thought German investment started with the first green
| partnered government in 1998.
| nomel wrote:
| Are these dates correct? Germany had only 2MW in 1990 and 91
| [1]. It looks like solar interest didn't really start until the
| 80's [2].
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Generat...
|
| [2] https://wiki.energytransition.org/wiki/history-of-the-
| energi...
| logtempo wrote:
| Germany did investing, but China ate the market. It's
| basically what happened in the 21th.
|
| It's also interesting that we're talking about 1980/90. 25
| years ago is 1999.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details.
| Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few
| decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may
| have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that
| solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel
| technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a
| performance edge at different times in solar tech development.
| Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not
| worth the short-term savings.
| drcross wrote:
| You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping
| out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency,
| as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't think that's the case. Pumping them out might well
| mean free money, which means there's no incentive to do
| better.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Industries which receive subsidies today and still have
| incentives "to do better" are counter-examples to your
| statement.
|
| " Pumping them out might well mean free money"
|
| The article talks about this, Wrights law. The "pumping
| them out" leads to economies of scale and production
| efficiency in of itself.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You never know what unintended consequences you have with
| subsidies
|
| Central Planning is never free.
| digging wrote:
| > You never know what unintended consequences you have
| with subsidies
|
| We already have subsidies _and_ catastrophic climate
| change.
| observationist wrote:
| Much of the forced and child labor used in solar panel
| production, mining, and transport, as with everything
| else in China's production systems, goes completely
| unacknowledged and unaccounted for in these navel gazing
| expeditions.
|
| With all those corners cut to mass produce cheap
| materials like batteries and solar panels and computers
| and so forth, China is able to undercut production that
| utilizes ethical and sustainable production. I don't
| think you can look at China's production "costs" as
| legitimate data, and the problem doesn't seem to be one
| that anyone outside of China will ever fix. The extent of
| the influence the rest of the world has over the problem
| lies entirely in our ability to not do business with
| China.
|
| When you look at all the savings you get when buying
| electronics and solar panels and infrastructure related
| products coming out of China, you're getting a human
| suffering discount. I don't think it's a good thing to
| include those numbers when considering long term things
| like fossil fuel dependencies and so forth - let's not
| bake in the human suffering discounts and at least _try_
| to price in human rights and humane labor practices.
|
| It turns out a lot of things are way more expensive when
| factory workers and shippers and everyone in a supply
| chain get paid fair wages and work fair hours.
|
| This isn't to say anything in favor of fossil fuels, I
| just think the immediate plight of China's factory
| workers might be an important factor relevant to the
| actual costs in play.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Yes, things would be more expensive if workers had more
| rights. I don't see how that is an argument against or in
| favor of any particular energy source.
|
| Further, if workers' well-being are your main
| consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from
| coal as quickly as possible.
| hateover9000 wrote:
| Proponents of renewables often cite the price and use it
| as an argument against nuclear energy. Nuclear energetics
| uses highly regulated local labor, giving it an inherent
| disadvantage against unregulated foreign labor. If
| renewables rely on underpaid or even child labor, it's
| not sustainable nor realistic, the numbers in that
| calculation have to be updated and the decisions
| reconsidered.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Do you know of any credible sources/references that have
| attempted to quantify that "human suffering discount?"
| I'm genuinely curious.
|
| My impression is that China simply has the Solar industry
| established. It's a bit like semi-conductors in Taiwan,
| the knowledge, practice, and facilities are present. It
| takes a significant investment to build factories. To
| that extent, it also raises the question what percentage
| of solar panel costs is labor, vs capital investments, vs
| raw material.
|
| I do not discount the statement/concern. At the same
| time, I don't think the other end of the spectrum is true
| where we could say "we could do it too if we also used
| child labor." I do think it's the case where Chinese
| manufacturing capacity of solar panels is simply superior
| compared to any other country.
|
| From what I could find (none of which was satisfying
| conclusive), it looks like there is a very considerable
| raw material cost for solar panels, and the manufacturing
| process is also complicated. [1][2]
|
| I am not convinced that if other countries used the same
| labor practices that the production costs would equalize.
| China today is making 80% of all solar panels, that is
| simply a lot more factories that are built and producing
| compared to what other countries have. Further, the
| article discusses "wright's law", simply building
| something at scale leads to economies of scale.
| Therefore, my thinking is China is quite far ahead even
| accounting for the equivalent of slave labor, that the
| labor is not the difference (and if we want to look at it
| from a different angle, lots of labor in the USA is not
| much better, thinking meat packers, wait staff making
| minimum wage of like $6/hr, illegal migrant workers who
| work for even less and have no legal recourse when abused
| by their employer). We can also look to labor practices
| in other South Asian countries, or middle eastern
| (thinking India and places like Saudi & Dubai), where
| labor is more equivalently abused yet there is a big
| difference in solar production compared to China. Through
| these examples, it seems more clear that it's really not
| just labor, but perhaps the fact that China has built
| dozens of solar panel producing factories and has
| established the supply chains to enable that level of
| production.
|
| IMO, it's all of the above for why China is where it is.
| Other countries maybe tick one or two boxes, but did not
| tick them all in order to compete in this space the same
| way China has.
|
| [1] https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-
| analysis/solar-ma... [2]
| https://solarlivingsavvy.com/why-are-solar-panels-so-
| expensi...
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| As opposed to the unintended consequences of unregulated
| capitalism? Nothing is free - if you think it is, you're
| just ignoring some of the costs.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Climate change itself is an unintended consequence of
| pricing the well-being of the commons at zero.
|
| There is a fair discussion regarding regulated vs free
| market to be had, but people at least need to understand
| market failures first (externalities being one of them).
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| Good to know that our reliance on fossil fuels is a
| result of "central planning".
|
| _Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $5.9 trillion in
| 2020 or about 6.8 percent of GDP_
|
| https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/
| Sti...
| janalsncm wrote:
| The entire U.S. tax code is one big Central Planning
| committee. Who should get subsidies? Who should get
| taxed? The capitalists who celebrated the luxury of
| American supermarkets over Soviet grocery stores failed
| to mention the significant farm subsidies given then (and
| still given).
| username135 wrote:
| Maybe a little of column A and a little of column B
| sophacles wrote:
| Of course there is. The subsidy would be on watts output,
| not on number if panels. Therefore any way to make the
| panels cheaper to produce and/or more efficient brings more
| revenue and more profit margin.
| plorg wrote:
| Assuming you mean (kilo)watt-hour output, but I don't
| think that changes the argument.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Building external combustion cars in the 1880s might have
| given Britain an economic edge over the US in the period, but
| the market would have still collapsed when internal
| combustion matured enough. And being a specialist in one
| technology usually means you're not able to move to a
| different one when it becomes obsolete.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have
| stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar
| could have been deemed as non-viable._
|
| When has ramping up an industry from expensive luxury to
| commodity ever stunted the progress? Lithium ion batteries,
| liquid crystal displays, oled displays, integrated components,
| computer memory, the list where exactly the opposite happened
| is enormous.
|
| This seems like a 'everything happens for a reason'
| rationalization. Solar panels even more than everything else
| have just been about cost effectiveness over their life span.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few
| decades.
|
| Yes. And the _reason_ that innovation happened is because of
| the combination of people seeing the importance and potential
| profits, policy drivers, and funding and interest (it became
| cool, not just niche) in the field of solar.
|
| When people see that there is money and fame to be made, they
| get motivated, reallocate resources, which attracts
| researchers, which make discoveries, which generates an
| accelerating pace of discovery as more new available knowledge
| forms the base of exponentially more new
| connections/discoveries.
|
| It is a feed-forward system, and all it takes is a close-to-
| ready field of study and the pump being primed. This could
| definitely have happened earlier.
| supportengineer wrote:
| As an intermediate step to electric, I don't know why we
| couldn't have gotten by with smaller, less powerful engines.
| Our huge vehicles are so wasteful. Simply putting vehicles
| (across the board) on a massive diet in a short span of time
| would have made a huge reduction in fossil fuel use for
| transportation.
| ghaff wrote:
| And many people aka customers in the US didn't want that.
| qball wrote:
| >I don't know why we couldn't have gotten by with smaller,
| less powerful engines.
|
| CAFE standards made cheap light trucks illegal; to a point,
| they also make cheap small cars illegal (ignoring the absurd
| collision standards- 2005 cars and 2020 cars are not
| meaningfully different; but in 2005 the average car on the
| road was still under 3000 pounds).
|
| As always, power without accountability. No bureaucrat or
| lawmaker is getting fined or voted out for these stupid
| standards that have done untold economic damage, and this
| crap will continue until they are.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Find the problem in the aggregate.
|
| If we have these powerful motors working less, then the
| inefficiencies of the entire life cycle will reveal
| themselves.
|
| Perhaps there is a specific section of vehicle infrastructure
| near you that requires more turnovers to navigate.
|
| I bet most town halls are amenable to data given their civil
| engineering capacity.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Personal transportation only accounts for ~13% of oil usage
| in the US, which is easily the most car-centric country.
| ghaff wrote:
| There was something of a solar power winter in the late
| 70s/early 80s. Professors were often not getting tenure in that
| area. Research funding was thin. Etc.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Speaking based on a part of south India, almost ever medium to
| large size house had a solar panel in the 90s. They were
| however horrible and could barely power a few lights so fell
| out of favor and never used. I think if we had current 250W
| panels up, people there would think differently about them.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| For electricity generation alone (which is also what TFA talks
| about) we could even have done it 30 years ago. In fact France
| did, so this is not pure speculation, it's just a terrible missed
| opportunity.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > In fact France did, so this is not pure speculation...
|
| France did what!? France's electricity mainly comes from
| nuclear, oil and gaz. Solar is nowhere sizeable compared to
| these three yet. Oil is fossil.
| sl-1 wrote:
| It decarbonized its electricity production by building a lot
| of nuclear (eg. left fossil fuels in the dust). Of course
| only partly, as the nuclear fleet still depends on fossil
| fuels, but still a great achievement.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > France's electricity mainly comes from nuclear, oil and
| gaz.
|
| No, nuclear, hydro and then a fraction of fossil (which is
| still among the lowest in the world as of today).
| refulgentis wrote:
| Smart people's disease: "I read about Wright's Law, which says
| the more $X you make the cheaper it gets. Therefore for all
| manufactured products $X, the more we make, the cheaper they'll
| get."
|
| STEM helped me a ton in college, when I move from physics to
| economics, everything was "just a curve" instead of something
| that needed to be approached and memorized individually
|
| Here, instead of feeling put out that ex. government won't just
| throw more money at carbon capture, I can say "well, we're just
| describing a power curve, which is not a law"
| iknowstuff wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's me or if your point is difficult to
| understand
| refulgentis wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by my point, I'll assume you're
| referring to the STEM reference.
|
| I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for a
| power law function. If a power function has different
| parameters, it has a different output".
|
| I would be more easily blinded if I was encountering Wright's
| Law - spending more on things make things insanely cheap
| insanely quick - without knowing what a power law is and
| knowing it was just arguing from that.
| krisoft wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you mean by my point
|
| I will put it as simple as I can: I have read your comment.
| Multiple times. I have no idea what you are saying.
|
| > I need more from an argument than "Here is a synonym for
| a power law function. If a power function has different
| parameters, it has a different output".
|
| That's your re-phrasing, and I don't find it accurate. What
| the article questions is what is the parameter of the power
| function. If it is merely time, you can sit on your hands
| and solar panels get magically cheaper. You can't make the
| clock tick faster, therefore it would be foolish to want to
| speed the process up.
|
| But if the input to the function is "cumulative production"
| rather than time (as the article argues it is) then by
| sitting on your hands you slooow the function down.
| wmf wrote:
| Solar panels and batteries getting cheaper already happened.
| It's not hypothetical. It's a pretty small leap to say that it
| would have gotten cheaper earlier if we started earlier.
| seventyone wrote:
| We should use the infinite money hack to print all the money
| we need to fund everything we wish to exist, right?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Because Wrights Law, it may have gotten cheaper earlier is
| true, but not illuminating, is the way I'd put it concisely.
|
| We're saying "what if power curve was evaluated at f(x + N)
| instead of f(X), where N is govt expenditure."
|
| I'm listening, but not learning, and am just left with
| questions, because it begs questions.
|
| N wasn't and isn't 0, so there's innumerable questions about
| N and it's magnitude relative to X, and Fs change.
|
| "This is myopic solar propaganda, Wrights Law means we should
| have put every dollar into fusion" is similarly, true, but
| not illuminating, perhaps even shading.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder how much of the momentum is due to panel manufacturing,
| and how much is due to advances in inverter and battery tech.
| wmf wrote:
| Those should also benefit from scale.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Imho the real problem that will be harder to reverse on is the
| city planning. Car-oriented cities will be intrinsically far more
| difficult to green than urban density.
|
| Late 20th and early 21st century city planners will be remembered
| as an entire profession of Thomas Midgley Juniors.
| tsudounym wrote:
| Agreed, cities oriented around the car can't be saved. The cost
| of maintaining 12, 16 lane highways is so exorbitant that
| they'll have to maintain the sprawl ponzi scheme or go
| bankrupt.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The author makes some big leaps, both in logic and execution,
| including the fact that you need some level of concensus to go
| "all in" on anything new - or to be an autocratic dictator who
| "knows best".
| more_corn wrote:
| And the one big thing that prevented this from happening was that
| fossil fuel companies gas lit is for years pretending that
| climate change wasn't real.
| hoosier_daddy wrote:
| much of recent production cost reductions are due to Chinese
| manufacturing which trade significant environmental damage for
| increased productivity.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Do you have citations for how Chinese solar panel production
| causes undo environmental damage?
|
| My impression is that China subsidized their solar panel
| industry and gave that industry grants. Basically they did
| "Solyndra" a couple dozen times over and then found some
| winners. The US instead took the Solyndra example and divested.
| I don't think lax environmental laws was the difference, but
| instead government investment.
| geph2021 wrote:
| governments should have been falling over themselves to buy or
| otherwise subsidise expensive solar PV, because the more we
| bought, the faster the price would fall
|
| That's quite a stretch, especially considering that there are
| plenty of examples where government subsidies and intervention
| distorts markets and makes them less efficient and more
| dysfunctional. I don't disagree with the general premise of the
| article: more could have been done to transition to renewable
| energy sooner. But it's really simplistic to say there was a
| clear, easy answer to this, and it simply involved more
| government spending on solar energy.
| elwebmaster wrote:
| Just another spin on communism and central planning. Why don't we
| let the market decide? Why don't we let people decide what is
| best for them instead of forcing one technology or another?
| Inflation is ultra high yet we are ignoring the root cause:
| increasing cost of inputs due to new taxes and tariffs, and
| instead hoping that by also increasing the cost of capital all
| will be good again.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I can't tell if you're serious or not. We can't let "the
| market" decide on things like this because the market is a
| small number of very large companies that have natural
| monopolies and also doesn't care whether or not it completely
| consumes the planet for profit.
| CMay wrote:
| Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can
| probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too
| doesn't really account for many of the nuances.
|
| Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and
| some countries or parts of countries are just in different places
| on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of
| weather and some places just have worse weather.
|
| You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect
| energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance
| high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient
| and lose energy along the way.
|
| What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather
| event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What
| if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while?
|
| Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they
| were even worse 25 years ago.
|
| Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs
| and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much
| land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events,
| handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations
| (where are we relative to where we can be), etc.
|
| In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't
| produce as much of their own food and the population starts
| increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a
| country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk
| terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down.
|
| If the government had artificially pushed for the production of
| massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too
| many people dependent on something less reliable. When the
| government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs
| can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the
| market.
|
| You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard
| for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and
| soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply
| in the political sphere or even among the population who have
| memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems
| they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar
| panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can
| potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost
| principles.
|
| The question has to be asked if something is truly effective
| altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the
| problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem,
| these are just outside observations. It's probably even more
| complicated than this.
| drtgh wrote:
| > Gordon Moore's famous prediction about computing power must
| count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in
| history
|
| IMHO, because it's been used as a road map, not due anything
| else. Like a drop-by-drop commercial service.
|
| On free will, by how the techniques advance, the computer power
| would experience abruptly big computing increases, with
| undetermined development periods occurring in between.
| mpweiher wrote:
| Last I checked, Moore's Law simply does not apply to
| photovoltaics.
|
| The exponential increase in computing comes from being able to
| make smaller transistors, and the fact that a smaller transistor
| is able to perform the same computation as a bigger transistor.
|
| A smaller solar cell is not capable of converting the same amount
| of power as a larger cell, because its power output depends on
| the area. (Also on the efficiency, but that's a separate issue,
| and not subject to exponentials).
|
| It was also always something that was driven by demand, as you
| need ever more expensive fabs to create the smaller feature
| sizes. It is most definitely not something that happened just due
| to time passing.
| jmward01 wrote:
| The elephant in the room to answer the 'why' is that fossil fuels
| were already working and it took vision to see beyond them and
| the massive subsidies they get. When vision was available (Jimmy
| Carter and solar panels on the White House comes to mind) the
| people without vision, or people that understood how to make a
| buck today at the expense of tomorrow, put up roadblocks (Regan
| tearing them down...). The technology, because it is massively
| better, eventually caught up and passed fossil fuels (yes I am
| talking in the past tense) which has finally made it easy to see
| even without vision and finally made it able for people to make a
| buck today. Nothing has structurally changed that would have
| allowed us to make different choices in the 70s. We are only,
| finally, now seeing the solar wave because the same forces are at
| play now as then. This means we haven't learned anything and will
| do (are doing?) this again with other technologies and issues.
|
| The real question we should be asking ourselves is how to prevent
| this disastrous pattern from happening again and again. There is
| no point moaning that solar took so long to happen and there
| isn't a point to blaming 'big oil' since they will soon be
| replaced with ? (Big Tech? Big Solar? Big Ag? Big Space?). What
| are -actual- concrete changes can be made to avoid this type of
| mess in the future?
| jfengel wrote:
| Avoid?
|
| A few years ago there were memes about how the problem with
| zombie movies is that they never showed people running out to
| get zombified.
|
| Whatever kind of big mess we create in the future I guarantee
| we will find ways to make it worse rather than better. The US
| is preparing to elect a climate denialist to its highest
| office.
|
| This can't be fixed. It's not just some big corporate culprit.
| It's us. It's not all of us, but it's enough.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Not to be a complete pessimist, but there was an active
| disinformation campaign, not dissimilar to the tobacco
| companies lying about cancer rates going on. Mix in useful
| idiots and as Upton Sinclair pointed out, "It is difficult to
| get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
| his not understanding it," and you've got decades of outright
| denial and obstruction.
|
| The only choice is out organize and take direct action, because
| elections simply aren't enough.
|
| https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fossil_fuel_repo...
| briandw wrote:
| Think about what we could do with nuclear power if we had spent
| decades designing and building cheaper reactors. Small Modular
| Reactors out of a factory could solve the biggest problem of
| nuclear, that it's expensive and takes a long time to build.
| janalsncm wrote:
| We already have small modular energy producing units called
| photovoltaic cells. They can be installed anywhere with sun by
| anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver, don't explode, and
| don't contain a highly regulated material.
|
| In other words, even if we grant that nuclear is a good idea in
| the U.S. is it also a good idea in Mexico? What about
| Guatemala?
| martinclayton wrote:
| An aside: Tim Harford presents one of the very best programmes on
| BBC Radio 4: _More or Less_ [1].
|
| Each programme investigates the reality behind statistics used in
| the media and by politicians. It's quite UK-centric, of course,
| but simply one of the most informative shows there is.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qshd
| cladopa wrote:
| In Spain in 2007, the Government asked people to invest in solar
| panels guaranteeing a price that was outrageously high for a long
| time. Of course then it changed the price and 60.000 families
| were bankrrupted.
|
| Solar panel were ultra expensive and could not compete with other
| types of energy.
|
| Of course lots of the people in Government became rich as a
| result of the operation.
|
| Today we are having problems with solar panels network
| instability. Yesterday there was a 3 hour blackout in big parts
| of Spain because solar unbalance.
|
| So it is not that easy.
| logtempo wrote:
| We're not able to left it in the dust today, how could we have
| done so 25 years ago?
|
| "we" should have, but "we" could not.
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