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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the biggest things is the reduction in cheap energy. No Russian gas, no-one building nuclear plants, no fracking etc.

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That's weird, gas costs $3/gallon in the US right now.

This the same price as was in 2004 ($1.88), adjusted for inflation.

No fracking is a big "citation needed." Did the US ban fracking?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/a-new-nuclear-reactor-in-the...

https://www.businessinsider.com/more-solar-power-than-any-ty...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/US_Natur... (shale gas = fracking)

Who says I'm talking about America?

Who says you aren’t? You can’t be non-specific and then get pedantic about someone who is using specific examples.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/11/business/nuclear-power-france...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-62820639

Yeah, big cuts in lifestyle are required to achieve climate goals. Underlying most initiatives is effective energy/capita reduction. No international travel for the middle class. Probably weekend only car use.

With the honestly astonishing ramp up in solar power and grid-scale battery production over the past decade, I have to disagree with this take. We're hurtling towards solving climate change through market forces alone — now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't also be using policy to speed the solution, but it is pretty clear that, as Noah Smith puts it, "Solar and batteries are going to win, and our thinking needs to adjust accordingly."[0]

The coolest statistic I've heard regarding solar and batteries is that 0.5% of worldwide GDP is being invested in it. One out of every 200 dollars spent is being spent on solar energy! It's truly incredible :)

[0]https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/our-climate-change-debates-are...

I agree. I believe the green shift is a big part of the underlying cost. Every good requires energy to produce, and clean energy is currently more expensive than coal and gas.

No it's not. The LCOE of both solar and wind are universally lower than that of coal, and almost always lower than that of natural gas.

This keeps getting touted again and again and it's wrong every time. The problem isn't generation, it's storage and distribution, in particular the last mile. Try running a steel smelter on solar power. Natural gas and coal can be transported directly to the factory, solar and wind cannot.

Additionally, dirty coal is very cheap in parts of the world, far cheaper than solar plus batteries. Remember, most of the stuff we consume is not produced in America, and is not subject to US energy policy.

Storage is irrelevant until they decommission the natgas plants. You're being disingenuous bringing steel mills since they don't use electricity.

But any industrial plant that does run on electricity runs fine using solar power during the day and natgas generated electricity at night.

And it also runs on natural gas all day and night, so why bother with solar at all? Sans incentives and regulations, solar makes little economic sense for most use cases.

Steel (and in general metal) production most definitely uses electricity, and copious amounts of it.

Why bother? Solar can produce electricity for 0.5c / kWh during the daytime. That's why.

I don't understand, if you are using natural gas for electricity why not make it last twice as long and use the cheaper solar during the day?

There's an opportunity cost to having an expensive power plant just sitting around doing nothing during the day. Yes you use less fuel, but how much of the cost of power is the fuel itself vs infrastructure and other non-marginal costs?

So only if the total cost of solar is less than the marginal cost of gas would it make economic sense to replace gas with solar during the day.

> steel mills since they don't use electricity.

Really ?

p. 7

> Historically, the steel industry has accounted for about 6 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Today, that figure is less than 2 percent and will decrease further to 1.5 percent by 2010

> The total replacement of the open hearth process by basic oxygen and electric furnaces.

> The growth of the electric furnace sector of the industry at the expense of hot metal-based processes ...

p. 13

> Electricity (Figure 11): The correlation between plant tons and kilowatt hours over a wide range of production shows that the use of electricity outside the EAF is significant. With an average of 770 kWh/shipped ton and a typical EAF consumption under 500 kWh/cast ton, a significant amount of energy is used for auxiliary equipment in the melt shop, rolling, oxygen production, and general utilities

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2013/11/f4/steel_ene...

How do you reconcile that with the rapidly increasing cost of electricity as more solar and wind are deployed? I would expect prices to go down.

Similarly, I can opt into paying a premium for green energy from my supplier. shouldn't that be a discount?

Because natural gas has gone up in price.

Econ 101: price is set at the margin.

The price of the good is the cost of the most expensive producer that satisfies demand. Since wind & solar can't (yet) satisfy demand, they're not the marginal producer and don't set the price.

>Econ 101: price is set at the margin.

I think that is a pretty terrible model for modern energy production. You have lots of vertical integration and heterogeneous production methods. You also have long term supply contracts at different price points with independent producers.

If I have one plant that costs $X/kwh and another that costs $2X/kwh, my average production costs is not set by my least efficient plant.

If electricity isn't a free market, then the answer to the question "why is price going up while costs are going down" is "because it can".

The majority of new renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels.

https://www.irena.org/news/pressreleases/2021/Jun/Majority-o...

> No Russian gas, no-one building nuclear plants, no fracking

Good. We can instead invest in renewables.

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