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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

You left out an important step - assuming that all the planning and modelling has been done correctly in and doesn't turn out to be politically motivated, have mistakes or miss unknown unknowns.

Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong. Centrally planned economies often look like they are about to power ahead when the plans are still on paper. It is only when people start starving that there is the "oh, the plan wasn't actually very good" moment and/or crackdown to cover up the disaster depending on how authoritarian the government has gotten.

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> Reconstituting all of society's energy consumption is a large project with a lot of technical uncertainties that will be discovered along the way. These sort of forecasts routinely turns out to be very wrong

I frequently see this type of comment, and I like to imagine what if people with this attitude won the debate that was happening 300 yeara ago.

300 years ago, thousands of people in London were dying of cholera and the city was debating development of a sewage system.

They would argue that its not proven that shit in the streets causes disease, and a system of this size was never tested, and how much would it cost?

If they won the argument back then, we'd still be shitting in pots and throwing it out of the window.

Todays debate is literally the same problem, it's about cleaning up and about not tossing a different kind of waste out into the environment irresponsibly.

People with this attitude are never the ones i proving the human condition.

Do you have an example more current than 3 centuries past? Because Germany launched an impressive project to reconstitute their grid quite recently and are now at risk of freezing because it turns out their plan didn't work, they shut down a bunch of perfectly serviceable nuclear plants and went heavily in on Russian gas rather than developing local options. The 20th century was full of big ambitious projects that led to some of the greatest human catastrophe's in recorded history. The US has proven unable to build infrastructure for decades, being shown up by such people as literal communists.

The problem here is nuclear works great and regulators legislated until it wasn't cost effective. Indeed, they've shut down all the options that might cause pollution, which includes ... all the ones that work. The issue here is not cholera.

Well, that giant impressive green energy project was also put in place by the voted in (democratically) folks in power, and widely popular at the time I believe?

Despite a minority that was objecting it would cause these exact issues?

What's that quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

> Because Germany launched an impressive project to reconstitute their grid quite recently and are now at risk of freezing because it turns out their plan didn't work

Germany did not follow the plan and did not deploy enough renewables to cover their energy needs. They barely did anything to shift their energy generation profile.

However, it was still enough to have a big effect on the solar industry, even if it didn't affect Germany that much. They drove down solar costs for everybody else, which we can all now enjoy. And now there's 100s of GW of solar produced annually, and in nearly every area it's the cheapest power you can get.

The International Energy Agency has under-forecasted renewable growth for something like 20 of the last 20 years. I don't think it's a given that a model is overly optimistic.

Their recent adjusts are not little tweaks...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/exceptional-new-norma...

(I realize that this article is about a different, US DOE forecast, I'm just saying that they are working from a model that has assumptions in it and it has proven difficult to model this space)

There is clear political motivation in those who oppose the energy transition. Despite hundreds upon hundreds of papers on 100% clean energy electricity grids, they are produced by scientists that tend to follow the data rather than use data to justify their politics. There are a few counter examples (perhaps Marc Jacobs?) but there are so many other modelers coming to the same conclusion as DOE here, and nobody has seriously refuted these models in any way.

Agreed except for the dig at Mark Jacobson. He was my undergrad and grad advisor, and I only knew him to be driven by data and a deep concern for the welfare of people and the planet. There are bad scientists out there but Mark isn't one of them. lol I recall him declining my request to put something about Al Gore in our common area because he didn't want to politicize the space.

Hah, point taken. When he sued other research over their research, I think he became highly political within the field, even if not along US national political lines.

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