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The World's Astonishing Dependence On Fossil Fuels Hasn't Changed In 40 Years (qz.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Quartz, adding: "Maybe 'dependence' is a poor description of poor people using the ready availability of cheap energy to help lift themselves out of poverty": There are few ways to understand why. First, most of the world's clean-energy sources are used to generate electricity. But electricity forms only 25% of the world's energy consumption. Second, as the rich world moved towards a cleaner energy mix, much of the poor world was just starting to gain access to modern forms of energy. Inevitably, they chose the cheapest option, which was and remains fossil fuels. So yes, we're using much more clean energy than we used to. But the world's energy demand has grown so steeply that we're also using a lot more fossil fuels than in the past.
The headline is false, of course. There is still a dependence, but "unchanged in 40 years" is bullshit.
I doubt that. Can anyone provide numbers?
It's definitely cheapest if you ignore the cost of the damage done, because it requires less infrastructure than anything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
only number that matter to consumer, is the price directly paid by consumer.
every other number is selected subjectively, thus open to interpretation.
"lies, dammed lies and statistics"
Wind and solar are at #1 because both require a base load.
That is a lie...
If you exclude nuclear, then you're left with fossil fuels.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
there are a few (very) interesting speeches on youtube from Vaclav Smil where he explains that energy transitions (wood to fossil fuel, fossil fuel to solar )are a slow process, completely contrary to the speed of innovation. For instance here https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's no 'law of energy transitions' forbidding fast transitions, but it's very hard and it's worth understanding why it's hard.
Storage costs money to implement
Every other source of energy also costs money. Storage could very well be cheaper than alternatives.
There is some storage but not nearly enough.
So you build more storage.
Storage costs money to implement and doesn't create energy in itself
No shit, you condescending fuck?
it just buffers supply and demand, it wastes energy on the round-trip and requires oversupply of capacity to top it up.
But let's just give nuclear a free pass on all the ways that it is shit?
The only scaleable always-there non-fossil power is nuclear, but it's Scary!
No, it's shitty. It's economically nonviable, which should be enough to make it a nonstarter for all you libertarian types who don't care what happens to anyone else as long as you can flick the lights on at will, but even that fact seems to have escaped you. It's actually cheaper to build renewables plus storage than it is to build nuclear plants.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And recently I am hearing news that "gas" is a fossil fuel which should be phased out.
Correct. In fact, we should probably phase it out before coal and oil, because the production levels we're seeing now are predicated upon fracking, which compromises the planet's clean water supply in the future for energy company profits in the present.
Guess what? We don't need that gas either if we just keep putting more storage online.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why has demand increased while global energy efficiency has also increased?
population increased!
Why do people tiptoe around the true cause like it's taboo or something?
It costs money to install plenty of wind and solar. A rough thought-experiment -- a grid needs a peak capacity of 10GW (winter evening in Europe, summer A/C load in America). During low demand it needs about 5 or 6GW. Assume it's all renewables, half solar, half wind at 15% load for solar and 30% for wind that means peak load capacity (10GW) will need 30GW of solar and 15GW of wind or about 45GW of capacity in terms of hardware. That capacity also has to top up storage as well as meet the instantaneous demand. A long winter calm with little wind could cut hard into storage as well as reducing the amount of electricity to keep the lights on so building out a lot more than the 45GW of renewables would be a prudent but expensive move.
Storage costs are in the $200 million/GWh region whether battery or pumped hydro, the two real deliverable storage alternatives. Assume a 12-hour capacity for the 10GW peak demand, that's $24 billion just for storage. The bad news is that high pressure calms can sit over an area for days at a time, reducing the assumed wind power output to a few hundred MW at best (I've seen Britain's 10GW of installed grid wind generators produce as little as 50MW for half a day during a calm).
To meet that 10GW demand purely with nuclear would require 12-14GW of online capacity, maybe even less as refuelling downtimes for individual reactors can be scheduled for low periods of predictable demand throughout the year. Winter or summer, there's 10GW available. Windy or calm, 10GW available. Sun up, sun down, 10GW available. The lights always come on, the electric car always gets charged and no CO2 gets added to the atmosphere.
When you think about just how much energy it takes to simply feed 7+ billion people and then the portable energy density in fossil fuels, there should be no astonishment.
We should compare things like micro-hydro power with fossil fuels.
Compare them for what? Subsistence living? Small scale hydro is a Good Thing but for most people it's hardly going to be enough to meaningfully displace fossil fuels except as a very small part of a larger energy portfolio. Solar and wind are far more practical in most circumstances, even for local generation. I couldn't use micro-hydro anywhere close to my house because it's so geographically dependent and it's not an option at all for almost anyone not living in a fairly remote area.
Fossil fuels put the poor at the mercy of global markets, disappearing and becoming more expensive every time there is a war or the wrong kind of financial crisis.
No reasonably foreseeable amount of small scale local power generation is going to change that fact. Even if I put enough renewable energy into my house to power all my needs (including an EV), that still won't affect the impact on of fluctuating energy costs on manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. Modern agriculture is basically the process of turning diesel fuel into food and nearly all our transport systems are tied to fossil fuels currently. What needs to be emphasized is that we need a diverse portfolio of energy sources to mitigate economic disruptions from geopolitics. An important part of this will be local generation (solar roofs, etc) but we'll also need technologies for transport that aren't tied to fossil fuels (EVs) and for fossil fuels to actually have to bear the full cost of the pollution they generate.
And yes you are quite right about one use plastics. That's a much bigger problem than most people realize.
People use coal, gas and oil because they deliver more power for the money than alternatives in many applications. We'll switch when the cost curves cross, the same way we shifted from wood to coal.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If greenhouse gas emissions are indeed a global problem, why do developing countries get a pass on emission limits? Because they're poor? Gotta do better than that.
Nuclear can't easily throttle back to 50% output during the day, so an all-nuclear solution doesn't work either.
Actually modern operations of older PWRs and BWRs and all new-build versions of such can swing output down to 75% and back up in about thirty minutes or so. Myself I'd run them at 100% and use the surplus power to decarbonise the atmosphere and stave off the increase in global surface temperatures as it doesn't cost much more to keep the reactors running at 100% since fuel is cheap. OTOH there's usually a Solartopia next door that could import the surplus power to keep its lights on at night when the wind dies down.
Oh, and 9 hours of sun in the winter? I wish. Today in my home town sunrise was at 08:26 and sunset at 15:42 for a total of 7.5 hours, and it's not quite midwinter yet. For a lot of today the sun was low to the horizon producing little solar power even from panels that can be angled to best effect all day, assuming no cloud which in midwinter here is a rare event.