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The Road to Deep Decarbonization (bnef.com)
Michael Liebreich, writing for Bloomberg New Energy Finance: In the past fifteen years we have witnessed several pivotal points along the route towards clean energy and transport. In 2004, renewables were poised for explosive growth; in 2008, the world's power system started to go digital; in 2012, it became clear that EVs would take over light ground transportation. Today I believe it is the turn of sectors that have resisted change so far -- heavy ground transportation, industry, chemicals, heat, aviation and shipping, agriculture. One after the other, or more likely as a tightly-coupled system, they are all going to go clean during the coming decades.
Astonishing progress is being made on super-efficient industrial processes, connected and shared vehicles, electrification of air transport, precision agriculture, food science, synthetic fuels, industrial biochemistry, new materials like graphene and aerogels, energy and infrastructure blockchain, additive manufacturing, zero-carbon building materials, small nuclear fusion, and so many other areas. These technologies may not be cost-competitive today, but they all benefit from the same fearsome learning curves as we have seen in wind, solar and batteries. In addition, in the same way that ubiquitous sensors, cloud and edge-of-grid computing, big data and machine learning have enabled the transformation of our electrical system, they will unlock sweeping changes to the rest of our energy, transportation and industrial sectors.
Astonishing progress is being made on super-efficient industrial processes, connected and shared vehicles, electrification of air transport, precision agriculture, food science, synthetic fuels, industrial biochemistry, new materials like graphene and aerogels, energy and infrastructure blockchain, additive manufacturing, zero-carbon building materials, small nuclear fusion, and so many other areas. These technologies may not be cost-competitive today, but they all benefit from the same fearsome learning curves as we have seen in wind, solar and batteries. In addition, in the same way that ubiquitous sensors, cloud and edge-of-grid computing, big data and machine learning have enabled the transformation of our electrical system, they will unlock sweeping changes to the rest of our energy, transportation and industrial sectors.
Gasoline still has an order of magnitude more energy per unit weight than batteries.
Gasoline engines are an order of magnitude less efficient than battery powered cars.
I have an electric car and range is not a problem. My daily commute uses less than 20% of the capacity. Once or twice a year I need to drive beyond the range of the car, so I either recharge enroute (usually while eating lunch or dinner) or I drive a different car.
I have made myself rich (well, seven figures rich, so that's open for debate) on energy stocks and pretty much doing whatever anti-carbon folks say to NOT DOl I will happily continue because this is my retirement.
The S&P 500 has returned about +93% accumulated over the last 5 years. Investment in a broad energy sector ETF (VDE) would have made you a loss of about 8% it gets worse if you invested in coal (KOL) -20% or shale oil (FRAK) -41% oil and gas (XOP) -41% . You simply haven't made money in the energy sector for the last five years unless you've invested in solar (TAN) +43% or wind (FAN) +93% or nuclear (NLR) +31%. (ETFs randomly picked from the most popular at etfdb.com).
That only ever sounded reasonable to the very few people who live in Canada, Siberia and Alaska. It never sounded reasonable to the billion people who've build their cities at sea level, who would much rather deal with the lowering sea levels of an ice age (which is an economic problem to be sure but one they can expand the city to adapt to) than rising sea level (a much much bigger economic problem).
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