There may be non-scientific or engineering advances (maybe coming from economies of scale) that you can take of advantage of and I think an expert can predict that they will be taken advantage of and yes prices will drop.
In fact there seems a decent chance from what I just read online that engineering alone can push the price of solar below current energy prices.
So I have to scrap my claim about prices.
Maybe some folks even claim you can get to 90% renewables usage with engineering alone, although this guy is not an expert. But I don’t have much faith in this guy compared with the expert study he criticizes, so I think that renewables cannot exceed half our energy generation without either new science or big rises in energy costs. (This is not only because of prices but because of intermittency.) And I think the chance of never getting new science is at least 5%.
The problem seems to be that given the lag until engineering peters out, you are talking about extremely long bets. Maybe we might be dead. Even so, I think Stuart Armstrong’s claim that we will not be constrained by energy is suspect.
If you save all or most of the resource, I agree the cost will be huge. But if you only save a little, if it could somehow be done securely for ages, I’d say it’s worth it as insurance.
Added 2/25-This last statement assumes there are actually uses for fossil fuels where it would be economical to pay 1/(5%) = 20 times as much as today’s market price. I don’t know if there are, or whether they would still exist in a future world.
There may be non-scientific or engineering advances (maybe coming from economies of scale) that you can take of advantage of and I think an expert can predict that they will be taken advantage of and yes prices will drop.
In fact there seems a decent chance from what I just read online that engineering alone can push the price of solar below current energy prices.
So I have to scrap my claim about prices.
Maybe some folks even claim you can get to 90% renewables usage with engineering alone, although this guy is not an expert. But I don’t have much faith in this guy compared with the expert study he criticizes, so I think that renewables cannot exceed half our energy generation without either new science or big rises in energy costs. (This is not only because of prices but because of intermittency.) And I think the chance of never getting new science is at least 5%.
The problem seems to be that given the lag until engineering peters out, you are talking about extremely long bets. Maybe we might be dead. Even so, I think Stuart Armstrong’s claim that we will not be constrained by energy is suspect.
If you save all or most of the resource, I agree the cost will be huge. But if you only save a little, if it could somehow be done securely for ages, I’d say it’s worth it as insurance.
Added 2/25-This last statement assumes there are actually uses for fossil fuels where it would be economical to pay 1/(5%) = 20 times as much as today’s market price. I don’t know if there are, or whether they would still exist in a future world.