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Comment by zthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

So we can fear monger all we want into forcing change in the west with alternative energy. But you can’t change how fossil fuels make things much easier and affordable in the rest of the world which is where a lot of the pollution exists at this point (India and China). To go through the amount of energy it takes to become a 1st world nation you need massive amounts of energy that is cheap to acquire and cheap to use. And right now that is fossil fuels. Alternative energy is a luxury.

Hopefully someday the tech becomes more affordable for poor countries and can supply enough energy for them to get through an Industrial Age.

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Also note that much of the pollution in India and China is created in the process of manufacturing goods which are then exported to the west, so it’s not like you and I have no influence at all.

Right. We could choose not to buy from them, helping them stay in poverty. That's always an option.

Currently Dollars only serve the Chinese government as a way to put pressure on the competition (USA). They are still eating their own food and living in their own technology based buildings built from their local resources by their local workforce. America doesn't help keep Chinese from poverty, because China isn't incapable of it in the first place. If anything, the political pressures just created perverse incentives there.

Correction: Dollars only serve the Chinese government as a way to put pressure on the competition, and means to buy microelectronics

That's not even remotely true.

China isn't self-sufficient in calories, be they fuel or food. If they don't get dollars for foreign trade, they starve in the dark.

Not buying new stuff so often would be a start.

Most of the growth in Chinese carbon emissions (>90%) is due to growth Chinese consumption, not exports.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-is-now-cheapest-electricit...

New solar is now often cheaper than keeping a coal plant running

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/most-new...

And we should expect solar to get even cheaper.

When the sun is out. And when you’re blanketing literally 6 SQUARE MILES of beautiful Oregon ground[1] at a time with PV panels, it starts to look a lot less cheap.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/energy/facilities-safety/facilities/P...

Actually you'll find the economies of scale probably help keep the costs down.

Square miles of land are pretty common. Blanketing them with something useful is a good thing.

If you had ever driven from Shaniko to Maupin in early June when the prairie lupine is blooming, I doubt you’d be so cavalier.

Can you explain to me then why China is still building new coal based power plants? If solar is cheaper, why would anybody build something else?

Because solar energy is not cheapest form of 24/7 energy source.

Baseload is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over some timespan. Providing that baseload with solar or wind is not as cheap as hydro, coal, natural gas or nuclear.

Inertia.

Because solar only works when it’s sunny.

The quoted prices for cheap solar energy don’t include storage. Solar plus storage is still expensive.

Not for a baseload needs.

Solar is cheapest in a similar way that fish is the cheapest food on an island.

If you only look at the days when catches are high then it is the cheapest method to produce food. If fish are your primary source of food, and every day you don't get enough you will have to eat expensive imported food, you food cost over the year can be quite high for a primary fishing nation. The fish will still be cheapest, but as a strategy it is somewhat expensive or carry a high risk of starvation.

Nations will build as much solar/wind as there is peak demand, because it is the cheapest energy when it produce. Nation will also build coal, oil and gas power plants in order to be there when those solar and wind aren't producing. Economically that is the cheapest way to produce a stable energy grid. Environmentally it is far from the best. Falling solar and wind prices reinforces this model.

And yet coal and natural gas prices reach multiyear highs due to unsatiated demand...

Both yes and no. If renewables and buffer storage become raw cheaper than fossils, then they will just be adopted.

But as of now coal is cheaper. And nuclear which is the natural bridge gap tech is politically unfeasible.

> But as of now coal is cheaper.

do you have a reference for that? Citation needed as to where and by how much coal is cheaper.

About what? Does 1gw base load capable renewable installation with grid storage that can work 24/7, 365 days per year even exist?

And this is fairly trivial to start with coal.

Ah, you didn't mention base load or scale, just "coal is cheaper". Thank you for clarifying.

It's becoming clear that (see links that I posted upthread, and the replies) that _any_ blanket statement of "_x_ energy is cheaper" is going to be wrong in some cases, at present. And things are changing year by year.

Since we were talking about emerging and developing economies I assumed that we were talking about base load since this is what they mostly need.

As we can see by Itaipu and Three Gorges Dam - people prefer renewables to coal when it makes economic sense and is cheaper.

Also switching to alternative energy has a huge upfront cost in CO2 - producing all those windmills and solar panels costs a lot of energy.

If the time to turn things around is really so short, maybe that upfront CO2 explosion is not the right way to go.

Similar things hold for other things like energy neutral buildings - actually building them has a huge upfront cost in CO2.

This. And to be honest, luxury solution discussions and their waste of public discussion bandwidth are part of the problem. Financially support the building of thorium reactors in china and india- is part of the solution. Solar at home- is nice, but not part of the solution - as most of the carbon cost in the west has been carted off into the east.

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