“But I might not actually differ with your 1% figure by too much-I’d guess a 5% chance that renewable energy prices now are roughly as low as they will ever be.”
I’d be willing to bet you $100 at 20-1 odds that levelized costs of solar electricity generation are cheaper in fifteen years. Would you be interested to specify the bet more closely?
“if that 1% materializes, the waste could be huge.”
On the other hand if the 99% outcome materialises, the waste will also be huge (not using a resource when it was useful, and leaving it until later when it’s obsolete).
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.
“But I might not actually differ with your 1% figure by too much-I’d guess a 5% chance that renewable energy prices now are roughly as low as they will ever be.”
I’d be willing to bet you $100 at 20-1 odds that levelized costs of solar electricity generation are cheaper in fifteen years. Would you be interested to specify the bet more closely?
“if that 1% materializes, the waste could be huge.”
On the other hand if the 99% outcome materialises, the waste will also be huge (not using a resource when it was useful, and leaving it until later when it’s obsolete).
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.