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0 pointsbryanlarsen1y ago0 comments

How about significantly less than 1x?

Fossil fuels waste most of their energy as heat. Gasoline cars are ~30% efficient, EV's are ~90%.

And heat pumps are often 200-500% efficient, unlike fossil fuel furnaces which cap out around 95%.

Transportation and heating use far more fuel than industrial uses.

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specialist1y ago

Ya, that's Saul Griffith's prediction too. I'll defer to you both.

Tragically, I got wonksniped by Pueyo's Henry Adams Curve shout out.

TIL He's referring the Roots of Progress thesis. The mythical "stagnation" phenomonen that some "rationalists" used to obsess over.

From the hip: the mistake is measuring national vs global per capita energy use. As many, many have noted, we delegated our energy consumption by moving our mfg overseas.

Mystery solved.

Further, notice similarity between Roots of Progress' graph and https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Spoiler: Neoliberalism happened. aka globalization, austerity, supply-side economics

FWIW: Omitting Pueyo's tangent about the Henry Adams Curve, I found this article to be a great overview of solar PV's current position on its cost-learning-curve.

And I agree the cost of solar PV will decrease for some time. Even faster than the most optimistic projections, which has been the norm for years.

Exciting times.

I look forward to Pueyo's article explaining why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs. Transmission? Utility monopolies? Financing?

bryanlarsenOP1y ago

> why price of electricity continues to rise despite decreasing production costs.

That's economics 201. The price of a commodity is the cost of the marginal producer. So it doesn't matter how cheap some producers are, the price of a commodity is set by the most expensive producer that is meeting demand. So price of electricity won't drop until cheap producers can meet 100% of demand.

Until that happens, cheap producers enjoy outsized profits, encouraging more cheap producers to join the market.

NortySpock1y ago

Makes sense, and then you can split consumption (or production - arbitraging with a battery) into time-of-use buckets (a kWh of electricity already has different costs if you're buying during peak hours vs off-peak vs super-off-peak), or spot prices vs reserve prices. In commodities terms, I feel like it would be similar to futures and spot-price.

Those who can buy their energy in bulk and store it efficiently, or only consume when the price is lower than X, will pay a lower rate than those who cannot store energy, or who pay to have someone else store it (again, arbitrage)

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