The Energy Transition Isn’t | Hacker News Reader

The Energy Transition Isn’t

robertbryce.substack.com

26 pointsmastry28 comments

This article is doing something weird: it's treating natural gas as an analogue for oil (and using the rise of natural gas exploitation as evidence for continued investment in other hydrocarbon sources) when natural gas is explicitly part of the US's energy transition plan.

Is burning natural gas ideal? Absolutely not. But it's much better than burning oil or coal for electricity, and using heightened financial and generation figures for natural gas to imply that hydrocarbons as a whole aren't successfully being replaced is deeply misleading.

(A cursory scan of this author's other posts indicates that this is a general theme of theirs.)

Are there really much of a difference in terms of emissions? I would agree gas is much better than burning coal in terms of health, but it is only ~50% of emissions, not even an order of magnitude.

The main takeaway for me is that nuclear isn’t getting enough press time because the prevailing view is that renewables are so successful, which he is arguing is essentially propaganda not supported by the numbers.

A 50% emission reduction is huge, especially in the context of being able to reuse most of our hydrocarbon-compatible infrastructure. Not everything needs to be on orders of magnitude to be worth doing.

I agree that nuclear power needs to be a larger part of the story. But the author should motivate that without relying on misleading categorizations.

Gas is far better in terms of carbon dioxide, but arguably worse than coal when you factor in methane emissions.

The only real benefit of gas, IMO, is that it's easy to switch on and off quickly and has the low fixed-costs desirable for a peaker plant (unlike nuclear).

The success is based on the cost and timescales available now, not based on the past 18 years (which is that solar and wind costs have fallen massively while nuclear still seems to offer high initial estimates with a good likelihood of massive cost overruns).

Moreover recent turbines burning natural gas can be retrofitted to burn hydrogen, which will be 'green' and therefore produced by renewables, typically while over-producing electricity... providing for part of a clean backup.

> to imply that hydrocarbons as a whole aren't successfully being replaced is deeply misleading.

But natural gas is a hydrocarbon? Replacing coal with gas isn't a replacement of hydrocarbons.

AVERAGE rate of renewable growth from 2004 to 2022 is less than the AVERAGE rate of growth in hydrocarbons over the same period.

Just coincidentally, that period includes all of the boom in "unconventional" gas (i.e. fracking) which turned the US into a net gas exporter -- while only catching the tail end of the (roughly exponential?) renewable growth curve.

Sorry, the author appears to be cherry picking here. Ask yourself, "why 2004"?

Two answers of note:

1) post - 2000 makes it look 'fresh', two decades of lookback diminishes the recent changes which look bad for the pro hydrocarbon camp.

2) Rob Bryce is now and always has been a Texas PR voice for the Texas oil baron crowd.

He comes to substack via the Institute for Energy Research ( a successor to the Institute for Humane Studies and another jewel in the Koch anti climate pro burn oil PR thinky tanks ) and the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (aka Centre of Conservative Turd Gilding and Polishing ).

His job is literally to spin data to make oil look good.

It presumably ends in 2022 because that's the last full year and the data for 2023 would be incomplete and therefore not be comparable. That's expected, not some sort of sneaky trick.

As for including the fracking boom, so what? Isn't that a rephrasing of his point? Hydrocarbon usage has gone up a lot. How is it cherry picking to use nearly 20 years of data?

I was all the way out the first time he wrote “dark money”

Robert Bryce has spent his entire career pooh-poohing solar and wind, and is a paid mouthpiece for the natural gas industry.

He advocates increased fracking on public lands and a curtailing of environmental reviews.

(in the US) renewables overtake coal for the first time: "Wind and solar sources produced a combined 252 terawatt-hours in the first five months of 2023, compared with coal's output of 249 TWh,"

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/renewable-energy/wi...

The author cites the BNEF energy transition investment trends report a few times, and I encourage everybody to flip through it. It contains many interesting facts, and you certainly have to take an extremely skewed view to arrive at the same conclusions as the author: https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/

Notably, the banner fact that 2022 was the first year - ever - where global investment in renewables equalled investment in fossil fuels[1]. This was primarily championed by China, which produced one of the most astonishing graphs I've seen in recent times[2]. It entirely upended how I view leadership on this issue and what countries are taking it remotely seriously. Canada isn't even in the top 10!

Anyway, given that - again - this is the first time ever that investment in renewables has matched investment in fossil fuels, it is not surprising that fossil fuel usage has continued to grow.

[1] https://imgur.com/B2QBY6u

[2] https://imgur.com/OlMAKVd

Are you sure? That first graph is very oddly worded. It says investment in "energy transition" matched fossil fuel investment, not renewables, but that only half of "energy transition" investment was investment in supply. What exactly is investment in demand meant to mean? This doesn't seem to be comparing investment in energy sources at all.

What an odd comparison. He is comparing the primary energy from hydrocarbons, which will go through a 70-80% energy reduction before it becomes final energy, to solar and wind energy which will go through a 5-10% reduction. So even in the most favorable, cherry-picked time period hydrocarbon and renewable energy consumption grew about the same rate.

this post is going to age poorly. The energy transition has been accelerating, and we’ve recently hit the point where, in more and more cases, it’s cheaper to switch to renewable than to maintain the legacy infrastructure. We’re already at the tipping point.

We used to see articles all the time about “paperless office? but everyone prints out their emails” and that was true until it suddenly wasn’t.

Indeed, the reason for the talk of transition is the combination of the cost of renewables becoming extremely attractive and the corresponding takeoff of adoption, which is currently still quite exponential. It's a prediction of where we're going, not a description of the last 18 years.

I thought it was going to be a worthy critique based on the way it started off, and I was prepared to entertain its claims. Renewables certainly have technical limitations, and there are certainly political incentives to market a message of success. But then it just flamed out into a Facebook style rant about evil conspirators and the same tired "renewables can't work" talking points. If there are tough discussions to be had, this post certainly doesn't help us have them.

He's complaining about the $4.1T investments in wind and solar not leading to it growing faster than carbon sources.

But not investing that would have left the world in an even worse position. If anything it's just not enough but it will have to be.

I also note that he doesn't even attempt to quantify how much was spent on hydrocarbons in the same time frame (as far as I can tell, investment in oil and gas was at least 2x in renewables in 2019, and I suspect that multiple would get a lot higher further back), and that the timeframe chosen is quite long to spread out the recent gains in renewables over as long a time as possible while giving hydrocarbons longer to stack up an increase.

When you say "as far as I can tell", what do you mean? Why do you say 2x?

This was based on some googling for reports with some numbers. I can't find the exact one I used to get the number but the report linked by ahelwer in another commend has the same kind of numbers (investment in hydrocarbons was 2.6x of renewable generation: adding on top investments in switching demand to be able to use renewables, which is primarily investment in EVs, puts the number at 1.7x in 2019): https://about.bnef.com/energy-transition-investment/ https://imgur.com/B2QBY6u

(It’s not a great article - it is surely quite motivated in a certain direction - but I do not think it should be flagged. Not sure if it’s possible to register a vote against flagging.)

“Energy-source politics” often reminds me of the Condorcet voters paradox. That paradox is where Voter 1 prefers A>B>C, Voter 2 prefers B>C>A, and Voter 3 prefers C>A>B. If A were to be declared the winner, one can point out two voters have “C>A” in their preference and only one voter has “A>C”, so C should be elected - but two voters have “B>C” and only one has “C>B”, so B should be elected - but two voters have “A>B” and only one has “B>A”, so A should be elected…

It’s important to note this paradox is stronger than just “it’s a tie”. The meat of the paradox is that for any chosen winner, the majority actively prefers a different winner.

The three candidates are fossil fuels, renewables, and nuclear. Alice prefers fossil fuels > renewables > nuclear (she wants airconditioning at night and watched Chernobyl recently). Bob prefers renewables > nuclear > fossil fuels (he has a live feed of IPCC predictions and updates). Chuck prefers nuclear > fossil fuels > renewables (he is a techno-optimist who runs a Bitcoin mining farm 24/7).

In this situation, if Georgia the governor announces a billion dollar subsidy for fossil fuels, Bob and Chuck (a majority of her constituents) will write her complaint letters suggesting nuclear instead; if she puts that billion towards renewables, Alice and Chuck (again, a majority) oppose her and demand she support fossil fuels instead; if she allocates it to nuclear, Alice and Bob (a majority) vote her out of office in favor of her opponent who will subsidize renewables.

Into this dynamic you put Larry the lobbyist (a stand-in for Robert Bryce, the author of the article). Larry’s motivation is simple: he gets paid for every dollar of government funding he directs to the industry he is employed to lobby for. If he is employed by fossil fuel companies, his best tactic is simply to criticize renewables (as this will activate a majority support for fossil fuels).

>some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.

This is an interesting stat, but I think it's misleading - the vast majority of cost for solar/wind is upfront, so it will naturally appear more expensive in the short term even if it's cheaper overall. Also, obviously, there was far more invested into solar in 2019 than there was in 2006.

I agree that the energy transition isn't (and obviously the Biden administration wants to pretend otherwise, because "we're solving climate change" is just great politics), but I want to attack some of the implicit assumptions why:

First up, the problem isn't renewables being too expensive, it's that they're too cheap and competitive. If you expect the price of future goods in a market to drop like a rock, why on earth would you want to enter that market, let alone commit significant investment into today's goods? Companies care about being profitable, not about being cheap. And as a quick aside, of course more is invested into the tech that currently holds 90% of the market.

Second up, reliability doesn't matter yet - if your electricity sources are 50% gas and 50% renewables, then you're just fine. Yes, when we get to the finish line this will be a big problem, but our deadline is not dictated by time, but by emissions. If we emit 100N emissions per year today and we reduce that down to 10N next year, then we have 10x longer before man-made emissions push us past whatever our goal is. As such, focusing on the last 10% is a terrible idea if it even slightly hinders our adoption for even the first 50%.

Third up, energy vs electricity is a double-bind. For example, switching to renewables alone won't stop ICE car emissions, but a very common criticism of electric cars is "why bother, the electricity is just coming from coal anyway". These two criticisms demand mutually exclusive sets of priorities, and if you pick one then people will hit you with the other.

The energy transition isn't, but we desperately need to discuss why instead of making assumptions.

> Companies care about being profitable, not about being cheap.

You can make huge profits on small margins if your market is huge. This profit vs cheap isn't an adequate explanation of corporate entry to the market (whatever it actually is).

> This is an interesting stat, but I think it's misleading - the vast majority of cost for solar/wind is upfront, so it will naturally appear more expensive in the short term even if it's cheaper overall.

Very good point!

$4.1 trillion spent globally over 18 years isn’t a staggering amount of money. Ballpark this is equivalent to about 1% of aggregate U.S. GDP over that period of time.

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