20 years ago I shared all the same concerns you probably have today about renewables. EROEI, cost to Overbuild to offset intermittency, how to build renewables without oil, etc. I became a nuclear advocate as a result.
To my utter surprise I found myself embracing renewables a while back. One day I was asking my pro-nuclear buddies online about some claims from the renewable camp, and found my nuclear mates to be responding to caricatures of what the peer-reviewed renewable papers were actually saying. Their attacks were falling short, and the renewable plans for Australia were being promoted by a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering no less! (It's the equivalent of a Nobel prize for engineers.)
All my old objections eventually melted away. Solar used to require 3 TIMES the silicon - all that highly processed, very high embodied energy. Now it's so efficient to make it returns vastly more. Any conspiracy theory paper around this ignores the sheer economics: all that extra energy cost in the manufacturing processes proposed by the critic would HAVE to show up in the price, especially with today's super-high electricity prices. But it doesn't. Solar is incredibly cheap - so cheap we can Overbuild it to offset intermittency.
SUNSHINE BELT: the seasonal issue is over-hyped as 3/4 of us live in the “Sunshine Belt” (from the equator out to the 35th parallels.) So most of the human race live where winter isn’t really a thing.
SUPER-GRIDS to the SUNSHINE BELT: Now that HVDC only loses 1.6% per 1000 km - you could have solar power at the equator hypothetically running a base at the North Pole 10,000 km away and only lose 16% of your power. So regional super-grids are now popular with renewables ISP designers. (Integrated Systems Planners.) That is - the UK could get power from the EU and the EU power from the Sunshine Belt with today's super-grid technologies. No where on the planet needs to think winter spells the end of reliable power.
SODIUM BATTERIES are getting cheaper and cheaper - and can be made from sea-salt, agriwaste, and aluminium. (Indeed, aluminium can replace 90% of the functions of copper if copper ever runs low - and aluminium is 1200 times more abundant than copper. Indeed - it's 8% of the earth's crust - iron ore is only 5% so there's more potential aluminium than iron ore!)
Our grids only need a few hours of battery anyway. If one region wants days of storage - then the world has about 100 TIMES the potential OFF river pumped hydro sites it could need. Off river is faster and cheaper to build. (Professor Blaker's Atlas - that Queen Elizabeth prize recipient I was talking about.) https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Then there's the sheer speed of this! Most climate activists do not realise what is happening - and Greta has no business speaking the way she does. From my POV - we won decades ago when Germany first started to subsidise renewables. From that moment on, today was almost inevitable as the scaling ramped up and the prices crashed down. Once China came on board, the result was unavoidable. Check these stats! With the rise of EV’s, oil demand will peak and start to decline by 2028.
In a world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of coal was built. 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
Not only that - as we “Electrify Everything” in transport and mining and smelting and industrial heat, everything will be so much more efficient they get the SAME WORK DONE with 60% LESS energy. Burning stuff like cave-men is just that inefficient. A modern all-electric civilisation will run on 40% of today's thermal systems like oil and coal and gas. Now that will be a LOT more electricity and electric infrastructure. But don't fall for the argument that we currently mine 5 cubic km of oil, and need to replace the THERMAL value of all that energy with an equal or greater amount of wind and solar. That's false accounting. What we want is an equal amount of forward motion in vehicles - and solar panels on an Australian rooftop or wind towers off a UK shore straight into EV's is vastly more efficient than burning oil in a car and only having 12% of it turn into forward motion. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
Here is my counter to Dark Mountain. What do we do about societal norms and culture in a Bright Green future? What if we DO have all the energy we want, global development needs are met, and even the population stabilises and starts to decline after 2050 due to economic pressures of the developed lifestyle - not any ecological collapse. What if we meet all human needs and still have nature thriving because we're getting all the protein we need from seaweed farms producing protein powder 'flour' that can go in everything from bread to dairy - or even a mix of Precision Fermentation feeding us all. What if we're almost living in a post-scarcity economy - yet people are still alienated and lonely due to a car based suburban lifestyle? What should we be telling our culture then?
It's the social ramifications of car-dependent suburbia - indeed - the mental health ramifications that make me really cranky! Yes - I believe climate change is real - but so are the solutions. Yes - anything could happen to civilisation - whether due to modern threats like global nuclear apocalypse or some weaponised super-virus. We are mortal - and our empires appear prone to collapse periodically as well. This has always been true since we started agriculture and building cities. The ancient Mesopotamian farmer feared the Assyrians might rampage across their farms, salt their earth, take their women and children and leave them to bleed out into their own soil. We have modern equivalents of this. It might happen. By accident even. Then again - it might not.
But I just do not accept that this is inevitable - not based on 'peak energy' stories being sold today. 20 years ago the technical and economic realities were vastly different - and drove me a little manic. But today such scepticism of the potential for renewable grids to work sound like 9/11 Troofers to my ears. So what then? Are we left in the hands of modern developers that want to spit out cookie-cutter suburbs like we see in "Neighbours"? If there's no collapse - are we doomed to wall to wall suburbia with the plasticisation of our lives, like some kind of corporate neoliberal 3 ringed binder philosophy taking over every compartment of family and cultural life 'for the good of the consumer' rather than treating us as adult citizens? What do we think about all this? Is there a better way to live?
It's one reason I'm still passionate about recapturing a more walking-distance town plan of the Ecocity or New urbanist movement. Even though I'm convinced the earth's endowment of mineral abundance is so vast we could build the modern world's 1.4 billion cars a few times over. 95% of our driving is within city limits - even lower energy density sodium batteries would do. BYD offer those in their "Dolphin Mini" which I predict will overtake the Corolla as the world's most popular family car. Soon!
The Christian in me wails at the alienation of all this though. What is technically possible is not necessarily desirable. As Jeff Goldblum (as Ian Malcolm) so famously said in Jurassic Park - "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." So what if we can build billions of cars? Should we? Should we design a lifestyle around them that alienates us from each other, drives the poor to the edges of vast suburban sprawl, and creates an even more individualistic self-centred mindset than the modernism since the industrial revolution? For if I do not have to walk past 'those people' on my way to the Metro, but can just drive past them and up into my individual driveway - will I ever meet 'those people'? Those other, inconvenient, awkward types that stretch my social capacities and make me remember there are actually others out there? People with needs and quirks and different views to mine? Let alone what just driving everywhere does to our sense of place, of belong to a community. That's why I still say - REZONE! Let's ask our governments to consider how we might rezone around a local town square. And if these things do not even exist where we are - how can we rezone a master plan that enables them to emerge from the natural attrition rate as older homes are demolished? https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/
How can we inhabit the virtual places of our lives online in a more meaningful, truly connected way without damaging our mental health or political processes? I'm thinking of "Social Dilemma" on Netflix and the role of social media in our lives. Let alone the intoxicating powers of AI - and the dangers of that as well.
I said to a friend the other day that I basically think we're passing through a bottleneck right now, but those who get through it have a lot to look forward to
Bottleneck is exactly how I think of it - and conservationists need to get conserving! We have a duty to our descendants to bring as much of the biosphere through that bottleneck as we can.
Several years ago I wrote a novel, “Metanoia : a short history of the 21st Century” (available on lulu.com), which has proved quite prescient, so far. My epidemic happened in 2020 (novel written in the 2000s) and actually killed people, unlike the scamdemic. Whether the coming decline is gradual or sudden, it will provoke precisely what you are calling for - small, self sufficient communities that have the spiritual and material resources to survive the deluge. In that sense it may be a good thing, an evolutionary forcing, freed from the suffocating burden of a sclerotic and corrupted “empire” of materialism, relativism and nihilism.
Hi mate,
20 years ago I shared all the same concerns you probably have today about renewables. EROEI, cost to Overbuild to offset intermittency, how to build renewables without oil, etc. I became a nuclear advocate as a result.
To my utter surprise I found myself embracing renewables a while back. One day I was asking my pro-nuclear buddies online about some claims from the renewable camp, and found my nuclear mates to be responding to caricatures of what the peer-reviewed renewable papers were actually saying. Their attacks were falling short, and the renewable plans for Australia were being promoted by a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering no less! (It's the equivalent of a Nobel prize for engineers.)
All my old objections eventually melted away. Solar used to require 3 TIMES the silicon - all that highly processed, very high embodied energy. Now it's so efficient to make it returns vastly more. Any conspiracy theory paper around this ignores the sheer economics: all that extra energy cost in the manufacturing processes proposed by the critic would HAVE to show up in the price, especially with today's super-high electricity prices. But it doesn't. Solar is incredibly cheap - so cheap we can Overbuild it to offset intermittency.
SUNSHINE BELT: the seasonal issue is over-hyped as 3/4 of us live in the “Sunshine Belt” (from the equator out to the 35th parallels.) So most of the human race live where winter isn’t really a thing.
SUPER-GRIDS to the SUNSHINE BELT: Now that HVDC only loses 1.6% per 1000 km - you could have solar power at the equator hypothetically running a base at the North Pole 10,000 km away and only lose 16% of your power. So regional super-grids are now popular with renewables ISP designers. (Integrated Systems Planners.) That is - the UK could get power from the EU and the EU power from the Sunshine Belt with today's super-grid technologies. No where on the planet needs to think winter spells the end of reliable power.
SODIUM BATTERIES are getting cheaper and cheaper - and can be made from sea-salt, agriwaste, and aluminium. (Indeed, aluminium can replace 90% of the functions of copper if copper ever runs low - and aluminium is 1200 times more abundant than copper. Indeed - it's 8% of the earth's crust - iron ore is only 5% so there's more potential aluminium than iron ore!)
Our grids only need a few hours of battery anyway. If one region wants days of storage - then the world has about 100 TIMES the potential OFF river pumped hydro sites it could need. Off river is faster and cheaper to build. (Professor Blaker's Atlas - that Queen Elizabeth prize recipient I was talking about.) https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Then there's the sheer speed of this! Most climate activists do not realise what is happening - and Greta has no business speaking the way she does. From my POV - we won decades ago when Germany first started to subsidise renewables. From that moment on, today was almost inevitable as the scaling ramped up and the prices crashed down. Once China came on board, the result was unavoidable. Check these stats! With the rise of EV’s, oil demand will peak and start to decline by 2028.
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
In a world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of coal was built. 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
It could be 2 to 3 times FASTER than the IPCC’s Paris goals by 2030! https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
Not only that - as we “Electrify Everything” in transport and mining and smelting and industrial heat, everything will be so much more efficient they get the SAME WORK DONE with 60% LESS energy. Burning stuff like cave-men is just that inefficient. A modern all-electric civilisation will run on 40% of today's thermal systems like oil and coal and gas. Now that will be a LOT more electricity and electric infrastructure. But don't fall for the argument that we currently mine 5 cubic km of oil, and need to replace the THERMAL value of all that energy with an equal or greater amount of wind and solar. That's false accounting. What we want is an equal amount of forward motion in vehicles - and solar panels on an Australian rooftop or wind towers off a UK shore straight into EV's is vastly more efficient than burning oil in a car and only having 12% of it turn into forward motion. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
Here is my counter to Dark Mountain. What do we do about societal norms and culture in a Bright Green future? What if we DO have all the energy we want, global development needs are met, and even the population stabilises and starts to decline after 2050 due to economic pressures of the developed lifestyle - not any ecological collapse. What if we meet all human needs and still have nature thriving because we're getting all the protein we need from seaweed farms producing protein powder 'flour' that can go in everything from bread to dairy - or even a mix of Precision Fermentation feeding us all. What if we're almost living in a post-scarcity economy - yet people are still alienated and lonely due to a car based suburban lifestyle? What should we be telling our culture then?
It's the social ramifications of car-dependent suburbia - indeed - the mental health ramifications that make me really cranky! Yes - I believe climate change is real - but so are the solutions. Yes - anything could happen to civilisation - whether due to modern threats like global nuclear apocalypse or some weaponised super-virus. We are mortal - and our empires appear prone to collapse periodically as well. This has always been true since we started agriculture and building cities. The ancient Mesopotamian farmer feared the Assyrians might rampage across their farms, salt their earth, take their women and children and leave them to bleed out into their own soil. We have modern equivalents of this. It might happen. By accident even. Then again - it might not.
But I just do not accept that this is inevitable - not based on 'peak energy' stories being sold today. 20 years ago the technical and economic realities were vastly different - and drove me a little manic. But today such scepticism of the potential for renewable grids to work sound like 9/11 Troofers to my ears. So what then? Are we left in the hands of modern developers that want to spit out cookie-cutter suburbs like we see in "Neighbours"? If there's no collapse - are we doomed to wall to wall suburbia with the plasticisation of our lives, like some kind of corporate neoliberal 3 ringed binder philosophy taking over every compartment of family and cultural life 'for the good of the consumer' rather than treating us as adult citizens? What do we think about all this? Is there a better way to live?
It's one reason I'm still passionate about recapturing a more walking-distance town plan of the Ecocity or New urbanist movement. Even though I'm convinced the earth's endowment of mineral abundance is so vast we could build the modern world's 1.4 billion cars a few times over. 95% of our driving is within city limits - even lower energy density sodium batteries would do. BYD offer those in their "Dolphin Mini" which I predict will overtake the Corolla as the world's most popular family car. Soon!
The Christian in me wails at the alienation of all this though. What is technically possible is not necessarily desirable. As Jeff Goldblum (as Ian Malcolm) so famously said in Jurassic Park - "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." So what if we can build billions of cars? Should we? Should we design a lifestyle around them that alienates us from each other, drives the poor to the edges of vast suburban sprawl, and creates an even more individualistic self-centred mindset than the modernism since the industrial revolution? For if I do not have to walk past 'those people' on my way to the Metro, but can just drive past them and up into my individual driveway - will I ever meet 'those people'? Those other, inconvenient, awkward types that stretch my social capacities and make me remember there are actually others out there? People with needs and quirks and different views to mine? Let alone what just driving everywhere does to our sense of place, of belong to a community. That's why I still say - REZONE! Let's ask our governments to consider how we might rezone around a local town square. And if these things do not even exist where we are - how can we rezone a master plan that enables them to emerge from the natural attrition rate as older homes are demolished? https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/
That's just ONE area of discussion.
The other? IF civilisation doesn't collapse but morphs into a Bright Green population decline past 2050 - what does post-growth economics look like in a world where the population could decline from 9 or 10 billion back to 8, 7, or 6 billion by 2100? https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s/
How can we inhabit the virtual places of our lives online in a more meaningful, truly connected way without damaging our mental health or political processes? I'm thinking of "Social Dilemma" on Netflix and the role of social media in our lives. Let alone the intoxicating powers of AI - and the dangers of that as well.
Complicated times to live purposefully!
My heart wants bright green, the intellect is pessimistic! Do you read Casey Handmer? I thought this was fascinating (and very much in tune with what you say here - and on your blog - which I read by the way ;) ) https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/the-solar-industrial-revolution-is-the-biggest-investment-opportunity-in-history/
I said to a friend the other day that I basically think we're passing through a bottleneck right now, but those who get through it have a lot to look forward to
Bottleneck is exactly how I think of it - and conservationists need to get conserving! We have a duty to our descendants to bring as much of the biosphere through that bottleneck as we can.
Several years ago I wrote a novel, “Metanoia : a short history of the 21st Century” (available on lulu.com), which has proved quite prescient, so far. My epidemic happened in 2020 (novel written in the 2000s) and actually killed people, unlike the scamdemic. Whether the coming decline is gradual or sudden, it will provoke precisely what you are calling for - small, self sufficient communities that have the spiritual and material resources to survive the deluge. In that sense it may be a good thing, an evolutionary forcing, freed from the suffocating burden of a sclerotic and corrupted “empire” of materialism, relativism and nihilism.
As in revelation, presumably