cross-posted from: https://kbin.run/m/technology@lemmy.ml/t/553659
A decline in fossil fuel power is now ‘inevitable’, the report’s authors say.
We also use more energy total, namely more gas cars on the roads.
yeah and shift them to EV, and renewale elec gen share will go back down. It has fairly steadfastly been in the region of 25-30% for about 30-40 years.
It’s almost like more cheap energy induces demand . . .
This lemmy community is a thing? Saw it on the front page, got me excited.
As for the actual article, makes you wonder what the next 10-20 years will look like. We very well might be moving towards finally having the renewable-powered world we need.
It definitely is a thing! I hope to see renewables to over more and more. Even financially now it makes more sense, they’re cheaper and their price is more stable than fossil fuels. I’m lucky to be in an area where 100% of my electricity comes from renewables too. Hope it catches on more and more!
I know I’m being played, but when oil companies finally switched to renewables I’ll be so happy.
I wonder how the world would look like without fossil fuel below ground.Would we had less cars?
We would still be at a pre-industrial level of technology. Without having an easily accessible and highly energy dense fuel (coal) to kick us off, none of modern society, including renewables, would be possible.
That’s largely ahistorical.
The invention of the dynamo, combined with early industrial wind and water wheels, would have changed where and how we were able to efficiently industrialize. But we had the capacity even without discovering large coal fields in the American coal belt, Russia, and Australia. Hydroelectric dams and heavy investment in wind turbine engineering would have yielded steady surpluses in domestic electricity across a different distribution of domestic real estate.
What large cheap surplus deposits of coal gave us was an opportunity to put off investing in nuclear energy for the better part of a century. Nuclear power is generally cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant than coal. And we had industrial scale nuclear powered electricity plants by the 1950s, with nuclear shipping made possible through the prototype NS Savannah in 1961.
Coal’s biggest benefit wasn’t its energy density nearly so much as its portability. Unlike with wind and hydro, you weren’t geographically constrained in where you could build. And unlike with nuclear, you didn’t have these huge upfront engineering and R&D costs.
Coal boosted the efficiency of early industrial mass transit and allowed a rapid colonization of the frontier regions. But it required the same continual westward expansion to tap cheap labor markets and access new coal fields. Hydro was far more energy dense. Nuclear was late to the party. Wind was temperamental and needed significantly more engineering prowess to harness efficiently. But all of these were solvable problems within the span of decades.
Fuel would be extremely expensive because we’d drive either on plant oil or alcohol. Possibly at the expense of the food supply
Edit: Probably industrial revolution would be slowed into a crawl, and the high performance economies wouldn’t develop until the discovery of nuclear power
What you mean from the beginning there were no fossil fuels?
For the case we likely would be quite technologically hamstrung. I can’t see how something like the industrial revolution could have happened without coal, I suppose they would burn wood but I’m not sure the global forests would supply them enough.
I suspect we would be in a far worse position as practically all the forests would have vanished.
We would have come up with lots of ways to make Steam. Electricity still would have happened. So I am guessing a lot of steam generating electricity. Hydro power would still be a thing as would thermal.
Wind power seems like the real candidate for early supremacy though. It can be purely mechanical ( eg. Grinding or running pumps ), it could store energy in the form of water pressure, and it could be used to generate electricity.
If we had a reliable electrical grid and no fossil fuels, things like batteries and electric cars would have gotten a lot further ahead sooner.
A smaller Industrial Revolution was totally possible on wind and water power. The next step would be electricity. Once we had electricity, a lot of the road we went down would be possible. Nuclear power would probably have been added to the mix more or less on the same schedule.
Perhaps the biggest deference would not be energy but rather plastics. It is hard to say what the materials side of history would have looked like without oil.
Why? Cars will go away when cities are redesigned to make them unnecessary/inconvenient. Otherwise electric cars don’t care where energy comes from.
One thing to keep mind is that while the percentage share of renewables is growing, in absolute terms electricity production from coal and gas still increased. Looking at this data, which I assume to be the base of this article.
That’s not surprising. The amount of technologies that have come out recently that use up huge amounts of power are fucking us over. Especially Bitcoin and AI.
Yeah, without strong global cooperation (good luck on that), I would think reducing demand of fossil fuels (or, I guess we’re only reducing growth of demand right now), will just make fossil fuels cheaper, and some countries won’t hesitate to take advantage of that. I think “The Green Paradox” talks about this.
It’s interesting. If you look at the IEA report here: https://origin.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/executive-summary
Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables. I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure; however this is also something that is being looked at: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-working-cut-renewable-energy-costs-developing-world-2023-12-22/
Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables.
For coal the summary definitely seems to support the reduction in themand, but at least for the next few years gas and oil still seem quite stable to me.
I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure;
Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.
Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and ‘other’: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
Imo the recent events have made it a bit hard to judge trends just from a few years. 2021 you are right in the middle of covid screwing over global trade, following that you have russia invading ukraine and the subsequent shift in europe (will be interesting how that plays out once the conflict ends), and as the main article of this thread suggests hydro was heavily affected by recent droughts (although those might become the norm). Only nuclear might be somewhat easier to extrapolate, since new capacity doesn’t just magically appear, but involves long term planning.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.
Yeah, I would’ve thought that to, but according to the following report apparently not: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/renewables-are-the-key-to-green-secure-affordable-energy/
But in developing countries, lack of access to finance under reasonable terms makes the costly upfront investments in renewable energy unaffordable. In addition, macroeconomic and political uncertainties discourage private sector investors from supporting renewable energy.
Interesting. Now that you mention it, i remember listening to a podcast that mentioned financing being a big obstacle for wind turbines, particularly the offshore projects, due to exactly that upfront cost. And i can imagine that for developing countries that is even worse.
Still i’d have thought that solar wouldn’t quite have this same kind of problem, but i guess as the article suggests fossil fuels were cheaper, there’s a political angle, and things are slowly improving.
Yes and no. Yes there were big issues blamed on financing but I understood it as contracts that were profitable at low interest rates suddenly weren’t when interest rates rose quickly.
If the customer won’t re-negotiate when conditions change, since that’s the point of a contract, at some point it’s cheaper to just break the contract and take whatever the hit is.
Additinal bonus: Since both EU and China are shifting away from fossil fuels, this will fuck Russia forever
China are shifting away from fossil fuels,
China’s coal use has gone up every year since 2000 and is now 5 times what it was back then. They aren’t “shifting away”, they are steadily increasing its use.
Not for long - China has the fastst growing solar sector by far world wide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
Around half of global new PV instalations is deployed in China.
Article also says that 2023 had particularly nasty drought resulting in less hydro power, which they compensated by burning more coal
And Saudi Arabia, Iran and any number of disgusting fascist regimes that the West has coddled far too long just for cheap gas.
Saudis could turn their country into an industrial power house with dirt cheap energy, but they’re spending their wealth on skyscrappers instead…
The moment they would heavily invest in solar they signal their cash cow is ready for slaughter.
And the fact that they haven’t tells you all you need to know about their motives.
If they’re smart they will have diversified by then. Otherwise it’s going to lead to a lot of civil wars as the established order breaks down. That will be unfortunate.
Do they strike you as smart?
