The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.
If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.
Yes, scare mongering for panels and batteries which last 25 - 50 years or forever with zero input fuel needed after the install. Yay to fossil fuels which are needed continuously, billions of tons per year.
Nobody can prevent your country/region from developing own solar or battery supply chains. Alternatively, buy from other countries that are not China for a little bit more.
"
String Inverters: The most common residential choice, lasting 10–15 years on average and boasting impressive cost-performance.
Microinverters: Mounted directly on individual solar panels, these often reach 25 years—nearly matching the lifespan of solar panels themselves. Industry data highlights lower failure rates for microinverters, though they come with a higher upfront cost.
Central Inverters: Typically used for larger residential or commercial and industrial systems, central inverters last 10–15 years.
"
Without an solar invertor a solar panel is just a black panel.
"Generally, lithium-ion batteries used in ordinary consumer electronics have a cycle life of about 300 to 500 times. After reaching this number of cycles, the battery capacity will drop to about 80% of its initial capacity. For example, if the lithium-ion battery of a smartphone undergoes a full charge-discharge cycle every day, its performance will significantly decline after approximately 1 to 1.5 years.
In contrast, lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, due to advancements in technology and craftsmanship, can achieve 1,000 to 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, with a correspondingly longer service life of 5 to 8 years or even more. Lithium-ion batteries for data centers have an even longer cycle life of approximately 5,000 cycles and a service life of up to 10 years, meaning there’s no need to replace batteries during the UPS’s full lifecycle. However, these are only theoretical estimates, and the actual service life is affected by various factors."
Damn, those li-ion sure seem like a bad long-term solution. Very convenient that you use lifepo4 for at-home battery storage, and either lifepo4 or possibly sodium for grid scale.
Inverters aren’t a problem. China produces roughly half of them worldwide iirc. They’re dominant but you can source from elsewhere without an issue.
LiFePO4 is almost purely China, but those will last you 20 years, which is roughly 365 times as long as if you’re cut off from oil.
Heck China has been in this exact predicament for decades. They imported all the foreign technology they can, while simultaneously learning all they can to make things themselves and stop being dependent. After 50 years it's finally paying off. They could not be where they are now had they blocked all foreign imports from the start.
> solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem
What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
> Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from?
Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.
Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.
Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if
The EU has the talent to ramp local production of panels and batteries in years, which as the parent said is how long a panel or battery embargo would take to really cause a crisis.
I mean the EU has ASML, the Large Hadron Collider, and ITER, among other things. There is no engineering talent problem.
I’m more concerned that we do not have the supply chain. Like, sure, we have people who can build solar panels, but are the components local? I wouldn’t expect so, we would very likely import from china. Developing effective supply chains takes decades, it’s not really something you can do right away with the level of precision required by modern technology
Look at how fast various nations ramped up advanced (for the time) military production before and during WWII, or the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo program, or China's rapid rise.
Engineers who know how to build factories, batteries, and solar panels could sit down and create a "war plan" to build out and scale infrastructure quickly if you asked them to do it and then got out of the way.
The EU has plenty of talent with the know-how to do this. If it couldn't be done even in a crisis situation, that's a political problem.
panels themselves are highly simplified chip-like production. silicon crystals and some dopants. anyone can make extruded aluminum. anyone can build power electronics, make copper or aluminum wire.
the only interesting parts here from a supply chain perspective are power transistors. europeans have been known to design these, but idk how easy it would be to start producing them locally. they have macroscopic feature sizes though.
it would take several years of iteration to get a functioning pipeline that ran at volume, but none of this is hugely complicated. certainly not decades.
the real problem is financialization. you have to float that plant with the understanding that its not going to be competitive.
Power electronics shall never be connected to the "Internet".
Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access.
For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection.
For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed.
If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.
My Chinese built inverter functions just fine without Internet, but I'd have to take over doing what Amber Energy are doing if I lost access to the cloud.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
and what if they can use your inverter to destabilize not only your netwrok, but the local grit as well? and how far it can go if sychrnoized with malicious intend?
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
"However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.
Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said."
It would not suprise me if not only Chinese manufacurers did this. Cellular modems are cheap and and the capability to cause blackout is very usefull.
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
Chinese industrial policy: dominate world of manufacturing (consumer goods, light industry, heavy industry, hardware, software , everything), aquire technology and know-how by any means necessary (buy technology, companies, joint-ventures, espionage, send students abroad and return them), move supply chains as much as possible to China (buy raw minerals, mines, mining rights, ship ores back to China for refining and processing), become independent of other countries as much as possible (prefer domestic coal, gas, oil, domestic synthetic fuels, in the long term minimalize all imports).
In a snap of a finger, Big C will absolutely cut your fingers off and the technology you love off in order to fuel its imperialistic whims. Anything bordering the South China Sea is in their mind, already theirs, you know because of ancient empires or something.
I'm happy the OP was able to take advantage of the current prices, cheap technology, and the amicable perfidious relationship. I would avoid anything internet-connected for good reason, and of course, burying anything in our infrastructure.
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
Yes, it’s amazing the things you can see fitting into this same mold once you realize that many of our issues in this country are due to old men (and old companies) holding onto power when they should really let the next generation take control.
What exactly can China do after you buy their solar panels and batteries? Tell you that you should stop using them to turn sun into electricity and batteries to store them?
By all means, it would be great if EU countries ramp up their own production of batteries and solar panels. But this is worlds apart of depending on fuel from Russia.
How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?
Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.
My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.
Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.
sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand
which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid.
lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech
so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!
If you buy a solar panel, it produces power for the next 20-50 years. It doesn't require constant flow from China. If China suddenly decides to stop buying solar panels (why would they?) then what? Nothing. Your solar panels still produce power.
It's particularly bizarre when the alternative is supply lines to countries like Russia and the GCC countries. Russia tried to use Europe's natural gas dependency to invade Ukraine. That's still ongoing.
And what has China done that warrants a similar kind of fear? Absolutely nothing other than the US has declared China an enemy for some reason.
I mean, it's the backbone of the American economy and the reason most people here live comfortable lives. If we wanna virtue signal for upvotes sure, but if we pull the numbers pretty much everyone here is pressing buttons indoors all day and getting ~$200k for it.
Except our European counterparts, they still get ~$75k for it. But I guess "progress" because if they lose their job and bake bread instead not much in their life will change...
That's a different point to the on you originally made. Yes, the tech industry provides a lot of activity (and profit, and therefore livelihoods), but it hasn't actually produced much innovation.progress with all of that activity.
I'd much rather live in europe, having experienced both cultures. I don't have any problem with people earning wealth from selling goods and services, but I could do without people who want to be billionaires simply to be a billionaire.
After the 2022 energy crisis we renovated our house and moved fully electric. Heatpump, induction cooking, battery, etc...
It was already a easy financial case to be made, let alone the extra comfort. But now it's a no-brainer. I get €100 back every month now, while others around me pay up to €300 per month.
The way the Chinese manufacturers are scaling production of batteries is something to behold.
In 2022 I bought 20kWh + 10kW inverter + installation for €7500.
My buddy just ordered a 54kWh battery for €6500... And it's not slowing down, they're only gaining speed with the introduction of over cheaper materials like Sodium batteries.
The Chinese are the only reason I remain somewhat optimistic of our chances of combatting climate change.
I'm curious as to how low a temperature your heat pump will operate. I live in New England and replaced a whole-house air conditioner with a heat pump, but the heat pump works only to 35F. Much colder than that, and an auxiliary electric heater kicked in. The first Winter cost me about $800 over my gas-fired forced hot water heating system. I had the contractor disable the electric heat in the Spring and rewire the thermostats to start the (high efficiency) furnace when the outdoor temp got too low.
Keep in mind that heat pumps have a limit how much they can pump (it also depends on temp., there is less heat in 35F air). If your house is not well insulated, at a lower temperature it would be loosing more energy and eventually it would reach the threshold where it's performance is not enough to keep up.
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
Probably not. The man has no charisma. Don Jr seems like an idiot. Possibly Rubio, which would definitely be an upgrade from Trump. Or someone who isn't on anybody's radar yet.
I suspect people are going to be pretty sick of Republicans after another two years of this idiocy.
The world’s dependence on China for solar panel manufacturing is troubling, but unlike oil, once the generating facility is installed you’re no longer dependent on your supplier (at least for a decade or two). I would be more concerned about batteries if I was in government
India has huge surplus capcity of solar panels. Sadly Trump put 100-200% tariffs on Indian solar panels. Its very easy and cheap to produce these outside China.
We can thank the big oil and western governments for that. For years they have been working against stable democratic governments in these places, because it's easier to get cheap resources from corrupt governments than from stable democratic governments with functioning legal systems and limited corruption. It's something we can see all over the world, pretty much all resource rich countries in the world have been destabilised systematically.
e.g. they've cultivated / funded and basically created a formerly extremely fringe "Alberta separatism" movement and are actively trying to disassemble the Canadian state. Things have gotten to the point that they're willing to light fires of instability right in the heart of the "stable" heartland of North America.
Formerly international capital benefited from stability. But the fossil fuel sector sees the writing on the wall and is trying to make as much hay while the sun shines as it can. They profit from the chaos, as we've seen from the last two months.
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
No (I think?), but every ICE sold today will still be on the road in ten years. The average car in Germany is about nine years old for example. And the vast majority of new cars sold are still not electric. If you want the majority of the cars on the road be electric in ten years you really need to stop selling ICEs today.
Cars on the road is less relevant than electric miles driven.
Newer cars are driven further than older cars. There's a site with data on the Norweigen transition. That shows the average EV is now driving more miles per year than the average gas/petrol, phev or diesel car.
Replacing cars that don't get driven much is less important than replacing taxis and delivery vehuckes and super-commuters. Luckily the economics seems to already be there for that.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
That’s still important. GenX is smaller than the boomers or millennials.
If millennials and young men continue supporting maga and Trump’s party as they did last election, it won’t help much if Boomers expire.
Boomers also surprisingly voted slightly less for Trump than previous elections, his coalition in 24 expanded a bit to Hispanics and young men etc. he won due to inflation and covid imo, and probably due to sexism and only 107 days for Kamala to campaign (thanks Biden).
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
It is very funny that Nord Stream had to be sabotaged while all the Nord Stream money was wasted (Russia had a weak army while the pipeline was operational).
Now we are supposed to buy solar panels from China while the US is depicting China as the greatest threat, senate hearings demand usage of US bases in Asia without the approval of the host countries and the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China.
I wonder if Bilderberg group member Radoslav Sikorski will be gloating on Twitter when secondary sanctions will be imposed on the EU if they import Chinese solar panels.
You won't find it in the mainstream press. This administration is about "pivoting to China" (i.e., controlling China more). Elbridge Colby, who is a main China hawk, is undersecretary of defense now.
For broader geopolitical chess games the "Path to Persia" and "Extending Russia" papers are all time favorites.
The EU part isn't that explicit. It is a mixture of the US wanting to take the Greenland Arctic Sea route, sabotaging energy deliveries from Russia and making the EU dependent on US LNG. Now the EU is even more dependent on the US and there is no sign that the US wants Hormuz open. It is stalling, in my opinion deliberately.
I think it's stalling because there is no support for the war in the US, and the political cost of actually opening the straight is higher than they are willing to pay. Notice the US is now declaring that the war is over, so they don't have to go justify it in Congress.
Unlikely to be even the bulk of the explanation. There has been zero cost to them (both administration and congress) in pursuing what they're pursuing and keeping the conflict hot, so no reason to stop. And congress is in on the act, they don't give a crap.
Were you under the illusion your house of representatives was representing you?
Oil per-barrel price is up so American energy exporter profits are up. At the same time, total quantity of exported barrels from the US and Canada are up as well because they have become the most "stable" supplier.
Stock market is also up, or at least flat, but "predictably" up where it needed be to keep the right people happy. Insider trading and a cycle of "taco-tuesdays" has allowed key parties to make absolutely insane amounts of money at the same time.
Trump is boldly incompetent and bumbling as a person. But the people telling him what to do are not. He's there to make them rich and he's doing a fabulous job of it.
It's clear the net effect is a subsidy to the North American hydrocarbon sector at the expense of Europe and China and India. Oil prices were falling, now they're not. Places like Alberta were going to run a deficit because oil prices were low. Now they're not. People were buying from the middle east. Now they're less-so.
Stated goals and whether this was accidental is a whole other question.
I'm not sure why people as a whole don't seem to have absorbed the fact that North America is an energy exporting economy now, not a net importer.
The question is whether North American consumers really like that they're paying so much more at the pump (and, shortly, for food prices) on account of oil executives making off like bandits.
Going to war with Iran has been the unambiguous goal of Israel for decades. In absence of strong evidence to the contrary, the default assumption should be that that was the motivation.
Both things can be true -- but why is it so hard to absorb that when you have heavy stock market investors and people connected to the energy sector literally running the largest military on earth that they'd be working on behalf of their own financial interests and those of their patrons, rather than on some vague ideological or religious motivations?
We are not dealing with detached neo-liberal political bureaucrats from 20 years ago. The American people explicitly elected the foxes to run the hen house. This is the result.
Also, I am an opponent of the Israeli state and its domestic and foreign policy. But seeing its wishes as some sort of puppet master over the United States verges into anti-Semitic conspiracy theory territory.
I prefer material, economic explanations. It's just as likely that elites in Israel have the same economic interests as well.
Funny, physics and economics don't just behave the way we want. The reason we use liquid and gaseous fossil fuels is not a cultural quirk but a function of energy density and fungibility. Each barell of crude pumped from the ground is a natural battery storing energy from hundreds, maybe thousands of years of biosolar collection millions of years ago. Until something is cheaper at scale and of comparable density there is no economic alternative to hydrocarbons. Maybe massive nuclear investment or ocean thermal extraction will be away out. Oil is literally solar power comprrssed in carbon hydrogen bonds and stored for aeons.
All of this can be true and at the same time it's massively harmful to use.
It remains true that the actual total costs of using hydrocarbons are not factored into their actual real world market exchange rate. And every time we've made modest steps to try to make that happen (carbon taxes, regulation) the resistance has been swift and brutal.
I never said HC economy is not without externality. However I do believe forcing HC substitutes before nature (depletion) forces them may be a net utility loss. The evidence is very thin a little sea level rise and a little temperature rise is worse for humanity in net than losing tecnological society.
I think the Natural Gas producers in the US are missing a massive opportunity by not fully pushing Fuel Cell technology. The industry (Nat Gas) has two main issues, 1) Production ie fracking and 2) Emissions.
Fuel Cells take care of #2 completely and for #1 the argument is easily made that since you solve the emissions problem, you have to accept a certain amount of impact on any extraction of energy (lithium, etc). We however control the production within our borders (national/energy security) and are not pushing the messy extraction on third world countries (dealing with our own trash - similar to dealing with nuclear waste)
Bloom has done a good job of late and Watt Fuel Cell is another company I am keeping an eye on. I truly believe that this is a major path forward in the US as the infrastructure already exists and we are the best in the world at gas extraction.
The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
> thanks to China
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Stock vs flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow
Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.
If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.
Thanks for that link, this says what I've had to explain so many times.
Yes, scare mongering for panels and batteries which last 25 - 50 years or forever with zero input fuel needed after the install. Yay to fossil fuels which are needed continuously, billions of tons per year.
Nobody can prevent your country/region from developing own solar or battery supply chains. Alternatively, buy from other countries that are not China for a little bit more.
https://www.auxsol.com/blog/how-long-do-solar-inverters-last...
" String Inverters: The most common residential choice, lasting 10–15 years on average and boasting impressive cost-performance.
Microinverters: Mounted directly on individual solar panels, these often reach 25 years—nearly matching the lifespan of solar panels themselves. Industry data highlights lower failure rates for microinverters, though they come with a higher upfront cost.
Central Inverters: Typically used for larger residential or commercial and industrial systems, central inverters last 10–15 years. "
Without an solar invertor a solar panel is just a black panel.
https://digitalpower.huawei.com/en/blogs/how-long-will-a-lit...
"Generally, lithium-ion batteries used in ordinary consumer electronics have a cycle life of about 300 to 500 times. After reaching this number of cycles, the battery capacity will drop to about 80% of its initial capacity. For example, if the lithium-ion battery of a smartphone undergoes a full charge-discharge cycle every day, its performance will significantly decline after approximately 1 to 1.5 years.
In contrast, lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, due to advancements in technology and craftsmanship, can achieve 1,000 to 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, with a correspondingly longer service life of 5 to 8 years or even more. Lithium-ion batteries for data centers have an even longer cycle life of approximately 5,000 cycles and a service life of up to 10 years, meaning there’s no need to replace batteries during the UPS’s full lifecycle. However, these are only theoretical estimates, and the actual service life is affected by various factors."
Damn, those li-ion sure seem like a bad long-term solution. Very convenient that you use lifepo4 for at-home battery storage, and either lifepo4 or possibly sodium for grid scale.
Inverters aren’t a problem. China produces roughly half of them worldwide iirc. They’re dominant but you can source from elsewhere without an issue.
LiFePO4 is almost purely China, but those will last you 20 years, which is roughly 365 times as long as if you’re cut off from oil.
> resulted out of depending on an adversary
being from a 3rd world country and having lived in Europe & the US.
you quickly learn there's nothing called an adversary when adopting technology.
you adopt what works - ruminating about where something comes from, is a luxury.
then after you can either work towards self-sufficiency or keep being vulnerable.
Europe has been kept in this loop of talking about problems while not solving them.
the US - knowin' about the problems, but actively ignoring them due to politics.
Heck China has been in this exact predicament for decades. They imported all the foreign technology they can, while simultaneously learning all they can to make things themselves and stop being dependent. After 50 years it's finally paying off. They could not be where they are now had they blocked all foreign imports from the start.
Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
> solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem
What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
> Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from?
Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.
Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.
Where do you get the uranium processed so you can use it your reactors...
Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if
The EU has the talent to ramp local production of panels and batteries in years, which as the parent said is how long a panel or battery embargo would take to really cause a crisis.
I mean the EU has ASML, the Large Hadron Collider, and ITER, among other things. There is no engineering talent problem.
If they couldn’t do it it’s a political problem.
I’m more concerned that we do not have the supply chain. Like, sure, we have people who can build solar panels, but are the components local? I wouldn’t expect so, we would very likely import from china. Developing effective supply chains takes decades, it’s not really something you can do right away with the level of precision required by modern technology
Look at how fast various nations ramped up advanced (for the time) military production before and during WWII, or the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo program, or China's rapid rise.
Engineers who know how to build factories, batteries, and solar panels could sit down and create a "war plan" to build out and scale infrastructure quickly if you asked them to do it and then got out of the way.
The EU has plenty of talent with the know-how to do this. If it couldn't be done even in a crisis situation, that's a political problem.
panels themselves are highly simplified chip-like production. silicon crystals and some dopants. anyone can make extruded aluminum. anyone can build power electronics, make copper or aluminum wire.
the only interesting parts here from a supply chain perspective are power transistors. europeans have been known to design these, but idk how easy it would be to start producing them locally. they have macroscopic feature sizes though.
it would take several years of iteration to get a functioning pipeline that ran at volume, but none of this is hugely complicated. certainly not decades.
the real problem is financialization. you have to float that plant with the understanding that its not going to be competitive.
But there is some valid concern around internet-connected PV / battery power electronics getting bricked remotely.
Power electronics shall never be connected to the "Internet".
Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access.
For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection.
For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed.
If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.
It can stop working properly if the chinese panel is encryption locked to a chinese cloud which is the case with many residential installations.
Panels can be opened and are simple enough for a tech to bypass the encryption.
My Chinese built inverter functions just fine without Internet, but I'd have to take over doing what Amber Energy are doing if I lost access to the cloud.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
and what if they can use your inverter to destabilize not only your netwrok, but the local grit as well? and how far it can go if sychrnoized with malicious intend?
Source?
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
The panels and controllers are mostly interchangeable are they not?
They've found some of those in the wild. They weren't that deep.
Source?
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
"However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said. Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said."
It would not suprise me if not only Chinese manufacurers did this. Cellular modems are cheap and and the capability to cause blackout is very usefull.
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
Germany was a pioneer in manufacturing solar panels ans has let China take over. Their Maglev train is also only running in China.
German industry does not want to pay anyone, imports cheap foreigners for tasks that have to be done in Germany and outsources the rest.
China copied the US. Now the US should copy China. At least with some things, like industrial policy.
The US had copied lot of British technology in late 18th and 19th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_the_U...
Chinese industrial policy: dominate world of manufacturing (consumer goods, light industry, heavy industry, hardware, software , everything), aquire technology and know-how by any means necessary (buy technology, companies, joint-ventures, espionage, send students abroad and return them), move supply chains as much as possible to China (buy raw minerals, mines, mining rights, ship ores back to China for refining and processing), become independent of other countries as much as possible (prefer domestic coal, gas, oil, domestic synthetic fuels, in the long term minimalize all imports).
In a snap of a finger, Big C will absolutely cut your fingers off and the technology you love off in order to fuel its imperialistic whims. Anything bordering the South China Sea is in their mind, already theirs, you know because of ancient empires or something.
I'm happy the OP was able to take advantage of the current prices, cheap technology, and the amicable perfidious relationship. I would avoid anything internet-connected for good reason, and of course, burying anything in our infrastructure.
This is _completely_ different.
If Russia stops gas deliveries you are immediately without energy.
If China stops exporting your PV and battery while just continue to work for 20 years.
This really seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
Sure, it's great to be independent when you can, but of all the groups you depend on, and all the ways you depend on them, this doesn't rank high!
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
Yes, it’s amazing the things you can see fitting into this same mold once you realize that many of our issues in this country are due to old men (and old companies) holding onto power when they should really let the next generation take control.
it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources
What exactly can China do after you buy their solar panels and batteries? Tell you that you should stop using them to turn sun into electricity and batteries to store them?
By all means, it would be great if EU countries ramp up their own production of batteries and solar panels. But this is worlds apart of depending on fuel from Russia.
How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?
Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.
My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.
Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.
sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid. lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!
The fearmongering around China is truly wild.
If you buy a solar panel, it produces power for the next 20-50 years. It doesn't require constant flow from China. If China suddenly decides to stop buying solar panels (why would they?) then what? Nothing. Your solar panels still produce power.
It's particularly bizarre when the alternative is supply lines to countries like Russia and the GCC countries. Russia tried to use Europe's natural gas dependency to invade Ukraine. That's still ongoing.
And what has China done that warrants a similar kind of fear? Absolutely nothing other than the US has declared China an enemy for some reason.
All Europe has to do is let young people become billionaires with limited liability and an unencumbered team selection.
I know it sounds like satire, but there is a good reason tech exploded in the US 30 years ago while Europe is still making cars like it's the 1960's.
And how incredibly beneficial that has been to society at large, oh boy. Definitely something we need more of!
Ironically HN itself is a marketing campaign for VC billionaires.
So boycott HN?
Tech exploding in the US brought us lots of activity, but arguably not that much progress.
I mean, it's the backbone of the American economy and the reason most people here live comfortable lives. If we wanna virtue signal for upvotes sure, but if we pull the numbers pretty much everyone here is pressing buttons indoors all day and getting ~$200k for it.
Except our European counterparts, they still get ~$75k for it. But I guess "progress" because if they lose their job and bake bread instead not much in their life will change...
That's a different point to the on you originally made. Yes, the tech industry provides a lot of activity (and profit, and therefore livelihoods), but it hasn't actually produced much innovation.progress with all of that activity.
I'd much rather live in europe, having experienced both cultures. I don't have any problem with people earning wealth from selling goods and services, but I could do without people who want to be billionaires simply to be a billionaire.
After the 2022 energy crisis we renovated our house and moved fully electric. Heatpump, induction cooking, battery, etc...
It was already a easy financial case to be made, let alone the extra comfort. But now it's a no-brainer. I get €100 back every month now, while others around me pay up to €300 per month.
The way the Chinese manufacturers are scaling production of batteries is something to behold.
In 2022 I bought 20kWh + 10kW inverter + installation for €7500.
My buddy just ordered a 54kWh battery for €6500... And it's not slowing down, they're only gaining speed with the introduction of over cheaper materials like Sodium batteries.
The Chinese are the only reason I remain somewhat optimistic of our chances of combatting climate change.
Europe is too lazy, the US just gave up, really.
I love my induction stove. You will pry it out of my cold dead hands. I wish I could do all the other things you did, but rent ...
But induction is a game changer. It makes everything else (including gas) seem weak. I can make my steel wok glow red within 20 seconds.
I'm curious as to how low a temperature your heat pump will operate. I live in New England and replaced a whole-house air conditioner with a heat pump, but the heat pump works only to 35F. Much colder than that, and an auxiliary electric heater kicked in. The first Winter cost me about $800 over my gas-fired forced hot water heating system. I had the contractor disable the electric heat in the Spring and rewire the thermostats to start the (high efficiency) furnace when the outdoor temp got too low.
Keep in mind that heat pumps have a limit how much they can pump (it also depends on temp., there is less heat in 35F air). If your house is not well insulated, at a lower temperature it would be loosing more energy and eventually it would reach the threshold where it's performance is not enough to keep up.
Mine can go until -25c they say: https://www.nibe.eu/en-eu/products/heat-pumps/air-water-heat...
We don't ever get those temps so I should be fine.
My biggest issue is not cold but mist. I live near a river in a valley and have underestimated how much mist hurts performance around ~1c outside.
It needs to defrost often, because of the high moisture content in the outside air where I live.
But it also has a normal, resistive heating 9kW backup. But for financial reasons this is considered 'emergency only'.
That depends on the refrigerant, the new Mitsubishis are effective at that and lower temperatures.
We got a heat pump in BC Canada, it’s rated down to -30C.
We also got solar, our entire power bill (all heating, cooking, lights, computers, etc) is $500 for the year. Best decision ever.
Would you mind sharing some details on the 54kWh battery for €6500? I'm looking for one and this sounds like a crazy deal.
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
> Europe is obsessed with green energy
I wish that was true…
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
That used to be true, but things have really settled down. Notice the lack of rushing to start more fracking or refining projects during this crisis.
I don't know that I would hear about it. How would I know?
This is probably the most relevant metric:
https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/
Not seeing a bunch more rigs operating means there new drilling isn’t ramping up.
Typical commodity cycle...most commodities work like this
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
Panasonic has a big US battery plant.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
not at a meaningful scale, and the environment for this under the current administration is increasingly hostile so it won't be for years
There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
The US president and administration are very vocally against it. And are responsible for the ongoing crisis, with no sign of change
The US president will be gone and the Republicans will have to replace him. I dont know if Vance is up to the task of being "The New Trump."
But whoever takes his place will inherit a party that is very strongly against anything renewable and is financed by the fossil fuel industry
But also a party which famously is willing to play follow-the-leader at the hint of an election win.
Probably not. The man has no charisma. Don Jr seems like an idiot. Possibly Rubio, which would definitely be an upgrade from Trump. Or someone who isn't on anybody's radar yet.
I suspect people are going to be pretty sick of Republicans after another two years of this idiocy.
I agree, but im not American.
> Don Jr seems like an idiot
I mean.. doesn’t seem to matter, right?
It kind of does. Don Jr is just a professional son. The moment his father is gone, nobody will take him seriously.
If anyone was serious about energy security in North America or Europe they would be building polysilicon, ingot, and wafer capacity.
The world’s dependence on China for solar panel manufacturing is troubling, but unlike oil, once the generating facility is installed you’re no longer dependent on your supplier (at least for a decade or two). I would be more concerned about batteries if I was in government
Our dependence on China for cars is even scarier.
India has huge surplus capcity of solar panels. Sadly Trump put 100-200% tariffs on Indian solar panels. Its very easy and cheap to produce these outside China.
Fossil fuels are also funding terrorism around the world. Getting rid of it is good for peace too
It is remarkable the way fossil fuels often seem to be found in violent, barbarous places like Iran, Venezuela, and Texas.
We can thank the big oil and western governments for that. For years they have been working against stable democratic governments in these places, because it's easier to get cheap resources from corrupt governments than from stable democratic governments with functioning legal systems and limited corruption. It's something we can see all over the world, pretty much all resource rich countries in the world have been destabilised systematically.
This is 'survivor' bias, I think. Or some other fallacy.
Oil is found in a lot of regions but the non-violent ones were obviously exploited first. They are now just emptied out, like the North Sea in Europe.
It's because the peaceful places where they're also found don't make the news.
Terrorism and political disruption and chaos.
e.g. they've cultivated / funded and basically created a formerly extremely fringe "Alberta separatism" movement and are actively trying to disassemble the Canadian state. Things have gotten to the point that they're willing to light fires of instability right in the heart of the "stable" heartland of North America.
Formerly international capital benefited from stability. But the fossil fuel sector sees the writing on the wall and is trying to make as much hay while the sun shines as it can. They profit from the chaos, as we've seen from the last two months.
Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
The US is investing in renewables. The president doesn't have nearly as much power as he thinks to stop it. He can slow things down
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
Did horses need to be banned for them to become irrelevant? The next car I buy voluntarily won't be ICE.
Heating is slower to change, but new homes and buildings could come with solar walls and ceilings.
No (I think?), but every ICE sold today will still be on the road in ten years. The average car in Germany is about nine years old for example. And the vast majority of new cars sold are still not electric. If you want the majority of the cars on the road be electric in ten years you really need to stop selling ICEs today.
Cars on the road is less relevant than electric miles driven.
Newer cars are driven further than older cars. There's a site with data on the Norweigen transition. That shows the average EV is now driving more miles per year than the average gas/petrol, phev or diesel car.
Replacing cars that don't get driven much is less important than replacing taxis and delivery vehuckes and super-commuters. Luckily the economics seems to already be there for that.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
[1] https://www.loriferber.com/amp/research/presidential-facts-s...
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
That’s still important. GenX is smaller than the boomers or millennials.
If millennials and young men continue supporting maga and Trump’s party as they did last election, it won’t help much if Boomers expire.
Boomers also surprisingly voted slightly less for Trump than previous elections, his coalition in 24 expanded a bit to Hispanics and young men etc. he won due to inflation and covid imo, and probably due to sexism and only 107 days for Kamala to campaign (thanks Biden).
It's hard to see how he can hold onto the anti inflation vote, given what he's done since them. Maybe the Republicans can gin up another covid.
That could make plastics even more cheaper. We need to encourage bio degradables before that happens
This is exactly what I came to post. It's like Trump was designed in a lab to destroy the US :-(
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
Vince may be.
Fossil fuels hopefully aren't going anywhere.
We should absolutely stop burning them, though.
For instance, modern medicine requires petroleum and there's no real alternatives at this time.
Doesn’t the term “fuel” imply they are burnt? Genuine question, I’m not native speaker
Fuel is simply a noun for a source of energy, it doesn't need burning for something to be fuel. Look at nuclear fuel - it doesn't burn.
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
So far that has emboldened other abusive narcissistic “parents”, unfortunately
It is very funny that Nord Stream had to be sabotaged while all the Nord Stream money was wasted (Russia had a weak army while the pipeline was operational).
Now we are supposed to buy solar panels from China while the US is depicting China as the greatest threat, senate hearings demand usage of US bases in Asia without the approval of the host countries and the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China.
I wonder if Bilderberg group member Radoslav Sikorski will be gloating on Twitter when secondary sanctions will be imposed on the EU if they import Chinese solar panels.
> the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China
Where are you getting this from? That’s not even remotely close to my understanding of the situation
You won't find it in the mainstream press. This administration is about "pivoting to China" (i.e., controlling China more). Elbridge Colby, who is a main China hawk, is undersecretary of defense now.
Here is a write-up on the China part:
https://www.hudson.org/national-security-defense/iran-strike...
For broader geopolitical chess games the "Path to Persia" and "Extending Russia" papers are all time favorites.
The EU part isn't that explicit. It is a mixture of the US wanting to take the Greenland Arctic Sea route, sabotaging energy deliveries from Russia and making the EU dependent on US LNG. Now the EU is even more dependent on the US and there is no sign that the US wants Hormuz open. It is stalling, in my opinion deliberately.
I think it's stalling because there is no support for the war in the US, and the political cost of actually opening the straight is higher than they are willing to pay. Notice the US is now declaring that the war is over, so they don't have to go justify it in Congress.
Unlikely to be even the bulk of the explanation. There has been zero cost to them (both administration and congress) in pursuing what they're pursuing and keeping the conflict hot, so no reason to stop. And congress is in on the act, they don't give a crap.
Were you under the illusion your house of representatives was representing you?
Oil per-barrel price is up so American energy exporter profits are up. At the same time, total quantity of exported barrels from the US and Canada are up as well because they have become the most "stable" supplier.
Stock market is also up, or at least flat, but "predictably" up where it needed be to keep the right people happy. Insider trading and a cycle of "taco-tuesdays" has allowed key parties to make absolutely insane amounts of money at the same time.
Trump is boldly incompetent and bumbling as a person. But the people telling him what to do are not. He's there to make them rich and he's doing a fabulous job of it.
It's clear the net effect is a subsidy to the North American hydrocarbon sector at the expense of Europe and China and India. Oil prices were falling, now they're not. Places like Alberta were going to run a deficit because oil prices were low. Now they're not. People were buying from the middle east. Now they're less-so.
Stated goals and whether this was accidental is a whole other question.
I'm not sure why people as a whole don't seem to have absorbed the fact that North America is an energy exporting economy now, not a net importer.
The question is whether North American consumers really like that they're paying so much more at the pump (and, shortly, for food prices) on account of oil executives making off like bandits.
Ok, if we mean the effect I agree. But the parent was talking about intent, or at least that’s how I read it
What do we actually know about the intent of any of these lunatics?
At that level of decision making and power this is not something that is ever going to be clear.
You can only go based on material effect.
Going to war with Iran has been the unambiguous goal of Israel for decades. In absence of strong evidence to the contrary, the default assumption should be that that was the motivation.
Both things can be true -- but why is it so hard to absorb that when you have heavy stock market investors and people connected to the energy sector literally running the largest military on earth that they'd be working on behalf of their own financial interests and those of their patrons, rather than on some vague ideological or religious motivations?
We are not dealing with detached neo-liberal political bureaucrats from 20 years ago. The American people explicitly elected the foxes to run the hen house. This is the result.
Also, I am an opponent of the Israeli state and its domestic and foreign policy. But seeing its wishes as some sort of puppet master over the United States verges into anti-Semitic conspiracy theory territory.
I prefer material, economic explanations. It's just as likely that elites in Israel have the same economic interests as well.
Hm...I don't think the blockade is long-term feasible, so Im not sure I buy the logic there.
Seems to be an energy security trade, when oil goes up and geopolitics heats dependence gets priced again quickly
The North Sea has given us free fish, trade with all corners of the world and now it's one giant windmill farm.
Are you saying there is no trade anymore via the North Sea because of windmills?
…did the fish run away?
maybe the all died of windmill cancer
Funny, physics and economics don't just behave the way we want. The reason we use liquid and gaseous fossil fuels is not a cultural quirk but a function of energy density and fungibility. Each barell of crude pumped from the ground is a natural battery storing energy from hundreds, maybe thousands of years of biosolar collection millions of years ago. Until something is cheaper at scale and of comparable density there is no economic alternative to hydrocarbons. Maybe massive nuclear investment or ocean thermal extraction will be away out. Oil is literally solar power comprrssed in carbon hydrogen bonds and stored for aeons.
All of this can be true and at the same time it's massively harmful to use.
It remains true that the actual total costs of using hydrocarbons are not factored into their actual real world market exchange rate. And every time we've made modest steps to try to make that happen (carbon taxes, regulation) the resistance has been swift and brutal.
I never said HC economy is not without externality. However I do believe forcing HC substitutes before nature (depletion) forces them may be a net utility loss. The evidence is very thin a little sea level rise and a little temperature rise is worse for humanity in net than losing tecnological society.
I think the Natural Gas producers in the US are missing a massive opportunity by not fully pushing Fuel Cell technology. The industry (Nat Gas) has two main issues, 1) Production ie fracking and 2) Emissions. Fuel Cells take care of #2 completely and for #1 the argument is easily made that since you solve the emissions problem, you have to accept a certain amount of impact on any extraction of energy (lithium, etc). We however control the production within our borders (national/energy security) and are not pushing the messy extraction on third world countries (dealing with our own trash - similar to dealing with nuclear waste)
Bloom has done a good job of late and Watt Fuel Cell is another company I am keeping an eye on. I truly believe that this is a major path forward in the US as the infrastructure already exists and we are the best in the world at gas extraction.