>Getting old countries to pay to replace what they already bought is just too hard.
This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.
This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.
Also, renewable energy is cheap. That renewable energy is expensive is a meme that was born when the prices were ten times higher than today.
No able-bodied person in an urban area should need to own a car, but that's not reality.
The current skyrocketing prices may very well be that need.
Good public transportation is even farther away, you need a ton of committment, which many places don't even have, and then a good network takes 30-50 years to build.
Anyway I love how the pro fossil fuel people claim to be thinking about the poor. In general the policies that reduce carbon emissions will make life a lot easier for the poor (better public transport, support for cycling, cleaner air, etc).
> You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace.
The problem in home energy is no different than in EVs. If you make no gas cars... poor people are still stuck using whatever gas cars they can still afford (since they will be instantly high demand = you get expensive or really old) and there wont be a widespread solution to powering all of those EV vehicles the middle class gets for at least a decade.
The reason it's not happening is because it's very very expensive not only for the cars (lithium/cobalt/etc costs would ramp up really fast) but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings, where in my city most poor people live.
Telling them all to sit for hours waiting for a charging station that is hopefully near your apartment building is crazy, even if current numbers only hit 2-3x, not 10x. And multi-level underground parking lots aren't going to have plugs available for every car. Mine had 2 plugs available and it was used 100% of the time.
But most relevant that adding supercharger/any car chargers to homes everywhere is also going to apply tons of pressure on... you guess it home energy demands.
Sure there is: add chargers to more parking spaces. They don't even necessarily need to be fast chargers; cars parked at apartments will typically be parked for multiple hours at a time (heck, possibly even days). There are benefits for non-EV owners, too (namely: that power could just as well be used to run a battery tender or block heater).
Yeah, it ain't cheap (yet), but when you compare to the cost of gas (even without wars in Eastern Europe), it pays for itself.
Apartment buildings not built with EVs in mind are notoriously hard to retrofit to enable charging. And I don't simply mean the wiring from some central electrical room to parking spaces -- that difficult part is actually the easy part.
There are endless issues in getting such places wired up:
-- Which spots get wired? When every parking spot is owned by someone, whose will it be? How is the ownership of the charging spots determined?
-- Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?
-- How will the electricity be billed and paid for? This influences how the wiring and hardware upgrades need to be designed and built.
-- How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?
These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered. Inability to answer these questions to the owners of a building's satisfaction actually stops progress on this topic.
All of them.
> Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?
The landlord.
> How will the electricity be billed and paid for?
Included in rent.
> How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?
Same way it's handled for every other amenity.
> These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered.
And yet they're demonstrably answerable in all of 2 minutes. They're "non-trivial" only because landlords are cheapskates.
Your best bet is to develop the technology in the countries that can afford it. Then introduce the renewables when it's affordable. That's not far off.
Let's take this morning's peak, electricity wholesale spot prices were £600 per MWh. A "subsidised" wind farm in the North Sea might be paid £150 per MWh, which ordinarily is indeed very expensive, but right now that means £450 per MWh comes to the government as the other side of the "subsidy".
There's maybe 13GW of wind power this morning (of maybe 35GW used in Britain). If that was all gas power instead, it would have cost us almost £1M every ten minutes extra on top of what will be on bills anyway.
Even at "normal" prices recently, those wind farms are basically free. Only in the middle of the night when there's no power need and the reservoirs and batteries are full do they drive prices briefly negative and thus their subsidy actually pays them, all day the prices are above subsidy levels and they pay us.
You need to include health costs etc. in that, but if we're worrying about poor people, then simply ignoring the pollution that will make them sick seems weird.
Unfortunate, but that's how it is.
Yes if they had the capital to go for the best option they might but I doubt they do.
1. Fixed v. perpetual costs
2. Negative externalities from pollution
Even accounting for one of these (let alone both) puts renewables in pretty favorable light.
Yes this is a problem, but it has to be fixed different and should not block us to continue doing what is best for all overall.
Guess who is getting hurt most through climate change? the poor.