kublikhan wrote:All work is powered by fossil fuels, true. However not all work consumes fossil fuels at the same rate. Work that consumes fossil fuels at a higher rate(such as a coal or natural gas plant) than other work(such as solar PV) will be at a competitive disadvantage when fossil prices rise.
To do any work requires energy. And practically all energy today is provided by fossil. The carpenter that drives a nail into your 2-by-4 requires food. That food is grown at a cost of 10 calories of fuel for 1 calorie of food. Same for the paper pushers, same for anything that is built, done or made. Including solar and windmills and the coffee you drink. So once general inflation follows the cost of renewables instead of the cost of fossil fuel I will know renewables can carry their weight and then some. But we're not there yet and till then all claims are speculation.
We don't have to sit around and see if this is true or not because we have already seen the results with a huge surge in renewable construction.
Yes, can't disagree. But that is no proof for renewables able to carry their own weight.
This is the conclusion of people who study these systems for a living.
I think that is probably the best argument to be suspicious of it all. Too-cheap-to-meter and other wild claims by attention seeking paper producing pseudo university types.
First they claim in endless studies how cheap renewables are. Yes Lazard, I'm talking to you!! and once it didn't work out that well, they start to rationalize this gem:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianmurra ... 873ea061d5The Paradox of Declining Renewable Costs and Rising Electricity Prices
In fact, I said the opposite. You asked me where the US would be at in 2040. I said 70% of our energy would still come from fossil fuels. This to me does not say 'decoupled'. It seems to me you took a simple observation I was making on the price competitiveness of renewables and took it much farther than I did. Just as fossil fuels have hidden costs(climate change, pollution, depletion, etc), so too do renewables have hidden costs. Their intermittent nature being one of the biggest, IMHO. To me it seems a bit unfair to compare price competitiveness on levelized costs alone when fossil fuels and nuclear provide stable baseload power while most renewables provide less value per GW because of their intermittent nature. And then you have to compensate for that by adding energy storage and backup power. Did you know that unlike the US which largely uses natural gas for backup power, China is using coal power plants for backup power? China says they need lots of coal backup for renewables. This creates a perverse incentive for China to add more coal power plants the more solar and wind it has. Now China also has a fragmented grid that exacerbates this problem, but it is still and issue and very far from 'decoupled' from fossil fuels.
Again, I agree with you. However, the complexity of it all does prevent me to come to a conclusion. That's why I say we have to wait and see. Once a large geographic region including mining and old-skool heavy manufacturing and high tech is powered by a significant amount of renewables (let's say 50%) while maintaining an expected standard of living, at that point I will sway to your direction. A blurp like germania that outsources most of it's heavy industry while relying on backup electricity from france/poland/bulgaria and charges 40 euro cents for 1kWh don't count.