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Comment by testfoobar | Hacker News Reader

It really doesn't matter how cheap wind and solar get; burning coal and oil will always be productive somewhere.

Without enforceable global bans, someone will generate GDP by extracting, exporting, importing and burning hydrocarbons.

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No? There's very clearly an efficiency past which renewables exceed even the cheapest fossil fuels. Even with falling prices as a result of lowered demand, it's still not free to transport and extract.

It’s hard to compare apples-to-apples, though, since the capital efficiency, payback period, and profit pattern are so different. If you have access to limitless, relatively cheap debt, then yeah, there’s absolutely no reason to build fossil fuel plants anymore. Developing countries don’t have that luxury, and even to the extent that they do have borrowing capacity, they may have even higher-IRR things to use that capital for.

Not saying any of that is true of India specifically - I’m not familiar enough to have an informed opinion there.

>> If you have access to limitless, relatively cheap debt, then yeah, there’s absolutely no reason to build fossil fuel plants anymore.

Thats kind of the point. The cost of capital is rightly higher in developing nations. Capital intensive carbon neutral projects just don't make sense for much of the world.

sources would be nice to have here

I doubt the numbers are anywhere close, but if a coal plant and a wind plant cost the same to build, produce the same power output, and use the same footprint, there's almost no reason someone would build a coal plant unless there was coal someone was paying to get rid of. Assuming you've got some wind to harvest anyway.

I'm not sure what kind of sources you're looking for, with such an unbounded hypothetical.

Over the past hundred years we've invested trillions globally in developing a hydrocarbon economy. Whether it is regulatory arbitrage, environmental arbitrage, or labor arbitrage, it will always be profitable somewhere to use hydrocarbons.

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