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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

It's centuries away.

So much legacy technology and machinery, buildings, installations, infrastructure not to mention the fact that neither wind nor solar and not even hydro are anywhere close to being able to provide that it's only a few percentages of world energy usage and have upper limits.

In my view the only real fundamental progress when it comes to energy, within sight (and it's still far away if ever) is Thorium and Fusion.

Furthermore the externalities of things like wind and solar isn't calculated today and would make two things very clear. You can't have wind and solar without the backup of oil/nuclear/coal and they will never be able to provide us with enough energy to meet our needs to not talk about meeting our future needs (which will be many times higher than it is today)

I am all for green energy but i share your pessimism.

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Grid power distribution itself is barely more than a century old, and you think it will take several times that to adjust to a mix of different power sources, despite that being already well underway? On what basis?

Because it's too expensive at the end of the day.

The more wind/solar you build, the more backup from coal/nuclear/wind you will need.

But the way to make us all better off is to make energy cheaper. There is a 1-1 correlation between energy usage and then rich, advanced, safe, clean and flourishing societies.

Wind and solar will only go as far as the political goodwill will take them. They are IMO unfairly promoted and that will incur a cost on their fundamental ability to be a solid enough energy form IMO. They are great as plugins to the existing system but the idea that we should build a smart grid because of their inabilities to provide on demand is not sustainable at the end of the day.

So my basis is based on part speculation, part knowing the limits and true cost of wind and solar and other alternatives.

Only Fusion or Thorium or maybe if we are lucky, fuel cells, will be actual progress which will also be economically viable. But this idea of a giant mix all handles by a smart grid is the not how it's going to play out as the upside of the usual alternatives simply aren't enough to outweigh the downside of cost and complexity they will incur on society.

But it's just my personal opinion of course. Each to their own.

> The more wind/solar you build, the more backup from coal/nuclear/wind you will need.

The more road you build, the more rail you will need.

At current rate of adoption it may be centuries, but I'm willing to bet that by the end of this century (possibly earlier) there will be a great deal more public pressure to revamp the underlying infrastructure. We could do it in a few decades if we decided to spend the capital on it, its ultimately a question of political willpower.

I do agree that fusion would be the ultimate form of power generation and would have the least impact on the current grid. But regardless, the future of energy generation is in diversity of sources.

There already is pressure today to do that. However, I am unconvinced it will actually get done on any significant scale unless there will be fundamental improvements with regards to energy sources. Otherwise, fossil fuels are simply going to be too valuable in no small part due to its multiple applications which none of the other types of energy provides.

Otherwise, it will come down to economics. So I agree we will diversify but fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Honestly I don't even think it would be as complicated as all that. Its all down to what becomes more valuable. Here is a breakdown of energy generation in the US:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

63% of power generation comes from "fossil fuels", but half of that comes from natural gas. If we focus purely on carbon emissions and ignore implications of fracking, natural gas can be considered "clean". Also assuming all renewables are zero-emission, this means roughly 30% of our power generation has the potential for carbon emissions.

By simply instituting a carbon tax, or even requiring coal plants to sequester emissions would make burning coal expensive enough that other forms of power will become cheaper, and thus the market would align appropriately. These are things being talked about right now, so its not unrealistic. The coal lobby won't like this of course and will continue to push us away from that, but I believe in 50 years when Miami and New Orleans have turned into Venice and the new generation of people won't be working in coal, American conservatives, as well as other nations, will stop complaining about the coal industry so much. All that has to happen is a few percentage points in a certain direction and the machinations will start to work.

You are looking at electricity generation, not energy. Electricity production is a subset of energy and that's kind of my point.

We get these rosy images of how far we are with renewables when in reality once you dig into it you realize we are nowhere near anything that can replace our current primarily fossil based system.

We don't appreciate how much fossil fuels are making our lives more livable and how little alternatives add to this livability.

I understand the potential CO2 emission risk etc, but we are safer because we use fossil fuels, not despite of it.

And we are not just talking for energy here, we are talking plastic used in more or less any industry you can think of from healthcare to textiles to toys. We are talking for greasing, we use it for fertilizers which makes it possible for us to produce the amount of food we do etc. Which means that oil will play a very very very significant part of our lives for many centuries unless of course some completely new material shows up with as much versatility and application. And now that we are drilling for the oil anyway....

I understand that this isn't what we want to hear, but that's the reality and there isn't currently much of an alternative.

Does HN ban trolls?

I felt the argument was in good faith.

Yes, my statement was purely scoped to emissions, and using fossil fuels for electricity generation, as well as powering vehicles. If fossil fuels weren't useful we would of course not continue using them. Hydrocarbons will of course continue to be used in various materials.

However, for everything we make in plastic, there is a potential alternative. In many cases that alternative is more expensive than plastic for its specific purpose. Much of the reason plastic is cheaper is (conjecture here) because it is subsidized by fact that we use so much oil for energy. If all (or most) cars were electric, demand and production of crude would go down, and so would the economies of scale, possibly making plastic more expensive than biodegradable alternatives.

People will continue to use the materials that are cheaper. However our economy is not set up to internalize the costs to the world and to its biosphere. In that sense fossil fuels are very expensive, and we are incurring a debt. At some point its going to be time to pay the piper, and the alternatives will become cheaper by comparison.

It's not a question of whether there is an alternative it's a question about what we are using plastics for.

Plastic today is a highly versatile material it can be almost as hard as diamonds, it can be ultra precise like lego and so soft it's weaved into our textiles.

You've seen the sorry substitutes for straws? They can't even make that.

You won't find alternatives for that and again ex. wind and solar are subsidized without providing any of those benefits.

You last comment is speculation and your conclusion even if it was true isn't the only alternative. There are many others. Some of them include us developing methods to deal with CO2 if it turned out to be a problem and you are forgetting the most important thing here.

People who don't have access to cheap and plentiful energy are already incurring a debt to survive and paying the piper. There is a cost to NOT using fossil fuels, one very few are ready to make. I for one am not ready to exchange things like food security for the risk of some speculative consequences we dont even know and to the extent we know isn't something we can't deal with.

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