Analysis: Electric cars and the Permian: Saudi Arabia in Lee County by Dr. Daniel Fine

[bluewill + 4]

 

Some 30,000 children marched in Belgium weeks ago against Climate Change. It is only a matter of two years before a few members of Congress, alone with only cameras today, will march at the head of crowds of 500,000 down Pennsylvania Avenue.

It will have its colors; green  — and yellow for the French — as 2020 arrives. 

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham placed the state in the march which calls for America to join the Paris Agreement on climate change when she joined the U.S. Climate Alliance. But is it all for Green Energy without technology?

So far there is nothing on the road that eliminates carbon. The Green Deal is loaded: it offers “Green Energy” with diversionary political baggage.

Is it around the corner? It is. In six years, Audi-Porsche-VW will have an electric car on I-25 that will be zero-emissions, cost $27,000 (today's dollar) with a range that beats Tesla.  

It will begin the phase-out the Combustion Engine. The Governor would be in her second term along with the Secretary of Energy and Minerals when this bit of history is made.

Too soon to shake heads negatively. The surprise is a mass electric car with a German engineering in a Ford. Indeed, Ford will no doubt bid for the license is this writer’s forecast.

The revolutionary change is green energy and colorless technology. The kids in Belgium would be getting drivers licenses by then. What happens to I-25 or 550?

Perhaps a new state budget along with Washington will build recharge sites or stations.

What happens to oil and associated gas in New Mexico?

Overall, the Permian Delaware retreats from historic production highs (2018) as demand for oil as the transportation fuel declines. Cars currently owned must be serviced with oil-based fuel until traded-in for electrics."  

 

 

[Illurion + 894]

This entire article above is some kind of Public Relations Press Release for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham ..........

Having read it,  i see nothing that is likely to actually occur in the time frame described......

 

- America is NOT going to join the Paris Climate agreement..

- private companies will build charging stations as market conditions show they are needed,  NOT THE GOVERNMENT...  and NONE should be built until there is an established STANDARDIZED PART  for such stations,  a "standard" that DOES NOT YET EXIST......!

- the teenagers that you are talking about   will be middle-aged   before the demand for oil as transportation fuel declines in any way.......

- EV's will not be "mainstream" in any meaningful way for some time,  as the battery and charging problems have not yet been resolved...

- The GREEN DEAL  as described so far is a monstrous JOKE..........

Edited February 27, 2019 by Illurion

[markslawson + 1,057]

6 hours ago, bluewill said:

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham placed the state in the march which calls for America to join the Paris Agreement on climate change when she joined the U.S. Climate Alliance. 

I'd agree with Illurion. This is about boosting the New Mexico gov, or might be if I could work out just what the writer was saying. The lead post is not well expressed. Bluewill also seems convinced of the inevitable win of EVs over combustion engine when, as Illurion also notes, EVs still have major problems to sort out. 

[Meredith Poor + 894]

Right now solar panels are priced at 40 cents per watt in the US and 20 cents per watt in China. By 2025 the US price is likely to be around 10 cents per watt. This is based on the idea that solar prices will decline by 20% per year over the next six years. Recently the price declines have been even more extreme.

Nothing is going to be able to compete with that price - not natural gas, not wind power, not hydroelectric. Storage is already scaling up.

This isn't a question of mass uprising - it's simply cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. New Mexico won't get much in severance taxes, so it will have to raise revenue some other way. It will have to clear up the now abandoned Permian fields.

[NickW + 2,714]

On ‎2‎/‎27‎/‎2019 at 6:20 PM, Illurion said:

This entire article above is some kind of Public Relations Press Release for New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan-Grisham ..........

Having read it,  i see nothing that is likely to actually occur in the time frame described......

 

- America is NOT going to join the Paris Climate agreement..

- private companies will build charging stations as market conditions show they are needed,  NOT THE GOVERNMENT...  and NONE should be built until there is an established STANDARDIZED PART  for such stations,  a "standard" that DOES NOT YET EXIST......!

- the teenagers that you are talking about   will be middle-aged   before the demand for oil as transportation fuel declines in any way.......

- EV's will not be "mainstream" in any meaningful way for some time,  as the battery and charging problems have not yet been resolved...

- The GREEN DEAL  as described so far is a monstrous JOKE..........

I wouldn't mid betting that around 1900 there was some guy sure that by the 21st Industry we would still be travelling around looking up the 4rse of a horse instead of driving cars.

[Illurion + 894]

On 3/1/2019 at 10:53 AM, NickW said:

I wouldn't mid betting that around 1900 there was some guy sure that by the 21st Industry we would still be travelling around looking up the 4rse of a horse instead of driving cars.

no doubt that SOME GUY would have been wrong.......

THAT SAME TYPE OF "SOME GUY" in 2019 is sure the world is coming to an end due to alleged global warming........  ...  and his girlfriend AOC says the world will end in 12 years because of it.......

 

ps:  came across this today...  excellent video....  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ

 

Edited March 3, 2019 by Illurion

[Boat + 1,323]

On 2/27/2019 at 7:49 PM, Meredith Poor said:

Right now solar panels are priced at 40 cents per watt in the US and 20 cents per watt in China. By 2025 the US price is likely to be around 10 cents per watt. This is based on the idea that solar prices will decline by 20% per year over the next six years. Recently the price declines have been even more extreme.

Nothing is going to be able to compete with that price - not natural gas, not wind power, not hydroelectric. Storage is already scaling up.

This isn't a question of mass uprising - it's simply cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. New Mexico won't get much in severance taxes, so it will have to raise revenue some other way. It will have to clear up the now abandoned Permian fields.

Add the cost of transmission lines, batteries and simply the massive amount of work involved working towards scale and you will see decades of incremental gain. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

If society were serious about reducing or removing carbon-based fuels from transportation, and I don't think it is, then it would be proceeding along the lines of "most bang for the buck."  And that is not happening.  Society's efforts seem to revolve around providing fancy electric (battery) power packs for individual cars, buses and trucks.  that strikes me as both inefficient and a mis-allocation of societal capital.  Admittedly, it allows the unit builders to make some money, where they have successfully priced their product  (both the Chevy Volt and the Tesla 3 do not make the cut), but other than that, it is a poor job, so far.

How could society organize itself to get better returns on invested societal capital?  First. let's remember that the typical IC engine is spending most of its life just loafing along.  Your typical auto requires a mere 25 hp to roll along, if it is not accelerating or climbing a hill. Thus, to exploit that, every place where the road today has to go over the top of some mountain, you build a tunnel, in order to maintain a road gradient of no more than 0.9%. At that grade, your auto or truck does not have to drop out of top gear, and you are not interrupting the low fuels flow into that engine.  I have calculated that some 40% of fuel on the 194-mile run from Baltimore to Morgantown West Virginia is consumed over only 30,000 feet or roadway.  Why?  That is where the trucks have to grind up the steep grades of the Cumberland with the fuel just gushing through the lines. 

For the USA, if you take the 100 highest-traffic mountain grades and drill tunnels instead, the liquid fuels consumption of the USA should drop down some 30%.  That is huge.  Tunnels today are built with giant tunnel-boring machines, which drill the hole and install the concrete shield in one operation.  Figure one billion dollars for each tunnel: for $100 billion, you are permanently off oil by a drop of 30%. 

The next societal step is to run electrified wire above one lane-way: the designated truck lane  (typically, the right-hand lane).  Each heavy truck has one axle set up with an electric drive motor, and you can keep the diesel hooked up to the other drive axle.  When you are running underneath the wire, the driver engages the trolley pantagraph and the diesel shuts down; that truck now is just as electric as the Tesla Truck, except there is no need for a gigantic battery  (which is the big stumbling block, and expense).  The truck is running off hydropower which is plenty cheap enough.  Your fuel use goes way down, societally speaking. 

Now to get fancy, the USA would electrify the western railroads. The payoff here, setting aside the fuel savings, is that the catenary wires themselves can bring excess electricity to the urban areas from wind farms and whatever out in the plains. But somebody has to pay for those wires, and since in the USA the RRs are private, then it is on their nickel, and the capital needed is placed by management into other parts of the RR instead. 

Do all of the above, and where does your liquid fuels use end up?  Whatever it is, it would be a huge drop. Lots of bang for the bucks, as they say in Yankeeland.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Jan van Eck

[Boat + 1,323]

If society was serious about problem solving with the best bang for the buck, population management would have to be at the top of the list. 

No tax incentives for having children. Tax incentives for having no children. Stop international food trade if non compliant for example.

If in 100 years the world population was cut in half, wouldn’t that be a positive?

[Meredith Poor + 894]

4 hours ago, Boat said:

Add the cost of transmission lines, batteries and simply the massive amount of work involved working towards scale and you will see decades of incremental gain. 

If the US automobile industry can make 17 million cars a year, how hard is it to make enough batteries to power 130 million US houses?

The transmission capacity already exists. Overall power consumption isn't likely to change much, it's simply a matter of where it's generated.

[NickW + 2,714]

5 hours ago, Boat said:

Add the cost of transmission lines, batteries and simply the massive amount of work involved working towards scale and you will see decades of incremental gain. 

Solar on domestic roof spaces does not need any transmission lines because the power is either used by the house itself or within the local grid. 

The 'my solar panels in London are boiling someones kettle in Scotland' analogy is a myth. 

Household batteries are stationary so you don't need to opt for expensive high denisity Lithium Ion types. As the first generation of EV's require battery replacement the old batteries will make excellent household storage batteries with decades of life left in them. 

 

Edited March 2, 2019 by NickW

[NickW + 2,714]

35 minutes ago, Meredith Poor said:

If the US automobile industry can make 17 million cars a year, how hard is it to make enough batteries to power 130 million US houses?

The transmission capacity already exists. Overall power consumption isn't likely to change much, it's simply a matter of where it's generated.

As the the number of EV's on the road expands there will eventually be a big supply of old EV batteries. These have decades of life left in them and will be available for cheap conversion for household / business storage. 

 

[Meredith Poor + 894]

7 hours ago, Boat said:

If society was serious about problem solving with the best bang for the buck, population management would have to be at the top of the list. 

No tax incentives for having children. Tax incentives for having no children. Stop international food trade if non compliant for example.

If in 100 years the world population was cut in half, wouldn’t that be a positive?

Most of the Western world is experiencing 'below replacement' fertility rates. Supposedly 40% of all pregnancies are unintended. Male 'pills' or similar contraceptives are either now available or will be shortly. In countries with already low birthrates, this could cut the number by a further 40%.

If the global population shrinks to 2 billion, which might occur in the next 50 years, then the complexity of the global economy will reflect some mix of technology and mass market production that is more reminiscent of the 1920's or 1930's than it is of the 2010's. It's hard to speculate on what we would keep and what we would live without.

While we are seeing below replacement birthrates right now, we aren't yet seeing what could be described as a population collapse. In societies with a large elder population, we could see something like this in the late 2020's or early 2030's, where the shrinkage becomes extreme, due to some mix of natural old age or an excess of deaths due to neglect.

[NickW + 2,714]

19 minutes ago, Meredith Poor said:

Most of the Western world is experiencing 'below replacement' fertility rates. Supposedly 40% of all pregnancies are unintended. Male 'pills' or similar contraceptives are either now available or will be shortly. In countries with already low birthrates, this could cut the number by a further 40%.

If the global population shrinks to 2 billion, which might occur in the next 50 years, then the complexity of the global economy will reflect some mix of technology and mass market production that is more reminiscent of the 1920's or 1930's than it is of the 2010's. It's hard to speculate on what we would keep and what we would live without.

While we are seeing below replacement birthrates right now, we aren't yet seeing what could be described as a population collapse. In societies with a large elder population, we could see something like this in the late 2020's or early 2030's, where the shrinkage becomes extreme, due to some mix of natural old age or an excess of deaths due to neglect.

The current global replacement rate is about 2.51. 2.1 is what is needed to keep population stable in the short term assuming life expectancy doesn't increase. 

Even in places you think would have high birth rates are below RR - Iran is about 1.7 as is the UAE. Saudi is about 2.5. 

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.tfrt.in

 

Edited March 2, 2019 by NickW

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

40 minutes ago, NickW said:

The current global replacement rate is about 2.51. 2.1 is what is needed to keep population stable in the short term assuming life expectancy doesn't increase. 

Even in places you think would have high birth rates are below RR - Iran is about 1.7 as is the UAE. Saudi is about 2.5. 

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.tfrt.in

 

NIck, you want to be cautious about taking "World Bank" numbers as gospel.  It is a bureaucratic institution with its own scissors to go sharpen.  The actual "global" replacement rate is quite a bit lower than what they pronounce, just a tad above a stabilized rate, but even that disappears within a decade.  After that, it is all downhill in population, in some places in dramatic fashion. 

There remains a difference between "fertility rate" and survival to reproductive age, that difference being combined of infant mortality and the adolescent death rate.  Overall, the reproduction rate is directed by the huge-population countries, the "biggies" being India and China.  So let's take a look at them.

China had a massive population fecundity and expansion rate(s), so the Communist leadership instituted the one-child policy for some years. This had two unforeseen results:  an over-leveraged population drop-off, and a skewed reproduction of males.  The girl fetuses were aborted due to sex-selection techniques, and obviously if you abort enough girl fetuses, then you don't have the numbers base to continue the population base.  Although China shows up as having dropped off in "live births per woman" from 5.75 to 1.62,  remember that you also have a huge drop-off in the number of women that survive to fecundity.  So it is not as if the population in total is reproducing at the 1.62 rate;  it is quite a bit lower than that, simply because you start from a dramatically reduced number of women arriving at the point of reproduction in the first place. 

It has now gotten so extreme in China that enforced celibacy itself is becoming a societal norm, much to the chagrin of the young males: there are just no women around to court and marry.  So these males are busy importing wife candidates from Southeast Asia.  That becomes a hidden migration shift, but also removes those women from high-fecundity locations such as Indonesia  (2.36) and Vietnam (already down to 1.95, below replacement) into China, already precariously down to 1.62. 

Now looking at India, the World Bank number of 2.33 looks alarming, but remember that "live births" does not translate to fecund females in twenty years.  A number of those live births will not survive.  The true inter-generation population rate is thus lower, and while you will get these arguments among the number-crunch crowd, it still results in a lower growth than "live births" would suggest or imply.  You will see this dramatically in places such as South Africa, where the live-birth rate is now 2.46, but remember that some 25% of the population is infected with HIV, a catastrophic infection rate that will assure that a number of those live births today will be sterile or dead in 20 years.  The raw numbers do not account for that.  There will also be adult population shrinkage due to deaths from AIDS infection, again not reflected in World Bank numbers data. 

Overall, world population will decrease, eventually entering collapse phase.  I would anticipate that in 75 years you will see a dramatically different population gradient: an older world, likely even more urbanized, with vast stretches of the planet largely abandoned.  Those residual populations will die off, with no migration influx; locations such as East Germany.  You see these alarming fecundity rates (5.5) in places like Uganda, but there are so few Ugandans (44 million) compared with Indians (over one billion) that it will not have an appreciable impact.  Plus, the untreated HIV infections will tend to hit the population numbers. 

Planet urbanization has other implications, including issues of income inequality and quality of life, so it will be an interesting future.  Then again, I will be dead, so not to be around to watch it unfold.  Oh, well. 

[Rodent + 1,424]

55 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

NIck, you want to be cautious about taking "World Bank" numbers as gospel.  It is a bureaucratic institution with its own scissors to go sharpen.  The actual "global" replacement rate is quite a bit lower than what they pronounce, just a tad above a stabilized rate, but even that disappears within a decade.  After that, it is all downhill in population, in some places in dramatic fashion. 

America is helping out. The obesity rate is astronomical (thanks, fast food and sugar industries and sedentary lifestyles). There will be many who have significantly shortened lifespans.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

6 minutes ago, Rodent said:

America is helping out. The obesity rate is astronomical (thanks, fast food and sugar industries and sedentary lifestyles). There will be many who have significantly shortened lifespans.

Yup, gotta get those sedentary 'Merikuns back out there with the bucksaw and the big axe, splitting their own firewood to keep warm, instead of buying expensive heating oil!   Oh, wait - they already do that in the back country, because everyone is poor and nobody has the money to buy oil to have some heat in the house.  Ah - it's those urban types that get all fat, sitting on the sofa watching the Football Game!   Justice.......

[NickW + 2,714]

1 hour ago, Jan van Eck said:

NIck, you want to be cautious about taking "World Bank" numbers as gospel.  It is a bureaucratic institution with its own scissors to go sharpen.  The actual "global" replacement rate is quite a bit lower than what they pronounce, just a tad above a stabilized rate, but even that disappears within a decade.  After that, it is all downhill in population, in some places in dramatic fashion. 

There remains a difference between "fertility rate" and survival to reproductive age, that difference being combined of infant mortality and the adolescent death rate.  Overall, the reproduction rate is directed by the huge-population countries, the "biggies" being India and China.  So let's take a look at them.

China had a massive population fecundity and expansion rate(s), so the Communist leadership instituted the one-child policy for some years. This had two unforeseen results:  an over-leveraged population drop-off, and a skewed reproduction of males.  The girl fetuses were aborted due to sex-selection techniques, and obviously if you abort enough girl fetuses, then you don't have the numbers base to continue the population base.  Although China shows up as having dropped off in "live births per woman" from 5.75 to 1.62,  remember that you also have a huge drop-off in the number of women that survive to fecundity.  So it is not as if the population in total is reproducing at the 1.62 rate;  it is quite a bit lower than that, simply because you start from a dramatically reduced number of women arriving at the point of reproduction in the first place. 

It has now gotten so extreme in China that enforced celibacy itself is becoming a societal norm, much to the chagrin of the young males: there are just no women around to court and marry.  So these males are busy importing wife candidates from Southeast Asia.  That becomes a hidden migration shift, but also removes those women from high-fecundity locations such as Indonesia  (2.36) and Vietnam (already down to 1.95, below replacement) into China, already precariously down to 1.62. 

Now looking at India, the World Bank number of 2.33 looks alarming, but remember that "live births" does not translate to fecund females in twenty years.  A number of those live births will not survive.  The true inter-generation population rate is thus lower, and while you will get these arguments among the number-crunch crowd, it still results in a lower growth than "live births" would suggest or imply.  You will see this dramatically in places such as South Africa, where the live-birth rate is now 2.46, but remember that some 25% of the population is infected with HIV, a catastrophic infection rate that will assure that a number of those live births today will be sterile or dead in 20 years.  The raw numbers do not account for that.  There will also be adult population shrinkage due to deaths from AIDS infection, again not reflected in World Bank numbers data. 

Overall, world population will decrease, eventually entering collapse phase.  I would anticipate that in 75 years you will see a dramatically different population gradient: an older world, likely even more urbanized, with vast stretches of the planet largely abandoned.  Those residual populations will die off, with no migration influx; locations such as East Germany.  You see these alarming fecundity rates (5.5) in places like Uganda, but there are so few Ugandans (44 million) compared with Indians (over one billion) that it will not have an appreciable impact.  Plus, the untreated HIV infections will tend to hit the population numbers. 

Planet urbanization has other implications, including issues of income inequality and quality of life, so it will be an interesting future.  Then again, I will be dead, so not to be around to watch it unfold.  Oh, well. 

Those figures are live births per woman of reproductive age. However I appreciate the comments about disproportionate No.s of males to females. I believe in India its now 85 females to every 100 male births. Sex selective abortions must be a massive industry there and I presume illegal? 

Manufacturing sex robots will be a good trade to be in India in 20 years time. 

[Illurion + 894]

14 hours ago, Boat said:

If in 100 years the world population was cut in half, wouldn’t that be a positive?

I don't believe so,  as it is NOT WHAT MOTHER NATURE DOES...........

Such a goal IS CONTRARY TO LIFE..........

"IN NATURE,   THE PURPOSE OF LIFE,     IS TO CREATE MORE LIFE."

 

Were i to get religious for a moment,    to paraphrase THE BIBLE,      GOD SAID HE CREATED MAN IN HIS IMAGE.........

 

Well,   GOD IS CONTINUALLY CREATING THINGS,      AND FOR MAN TO CONTINUE IN  GOD'S IMAGE........  THEN MAN MUST CONTINUE TO CREATE THINGS.............  STARTING ,    AT THE VERY LEAST,       WITH HIMSELF...........

 

When i was a boy,   my FATHER told me that    "WHEN YOU STOP GROWING..........  YOU START DYING...........!!!!!!!

 

MANKIND SHOULD DO "NOTHING"  TO TRY TO REDUCE IT'S POPULATION............

 

[Illurion + 894]

On 3/1/2019 at 11:28 PM, Jan van Eck said:

If society were serious about reducing or removing carbon-based fuels from transportation, and I don't think it is, then it would be proceeding along the lines of "most bang for the buck."  And that is not happening.  Society's efforts seem to revolve around providing fancy electric (battery) power packs for individual cars, buses and trucks.  that strikes me as both inefficient and a mis-allocation of societal capital. 

Obviously we will always need to have cars and trucks available to reach all destinations........

With that said...........

 

I MUST ADMIT THAT I AM A MASS TRANSIT GUY.......

SPECIFICALLY,   A MONORAIL GUY........

 

Back in the 1970's,  when Walt Disney World first opened,  i was a  MONORAIL PILOT.........

 

Use a car or truck when you have to,  for where a Monorail doesn't take you......

 

But build many concentric circles of interconnected Monorail systems in a city,  and most everything would be in reach.....

 

I believe that a huge amount of the various trips we all make per day could easily be completed via Monorail if they could ever be built........

 

But Monorail systems are few and far between.....

Here in town we have a small system built in the 1980's that is only 2 miles long..

HARDLY ANYONE USES IT BECAUSE IT DOESN'T TAKE YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.............

 

But i sure wish there was a Monorail i could ride around town......

 

Sometimes,   i wake up from a dream in which i went back in time,     i was young again,  having a good time,   Piloting Monorail Blue ..............

Edited March 4, 2019 by Illurion

[markslawson + 1,057]

On 2/28/2019 at 12:49 PM, Meredith Poor said:

Nothing is going to be able to compete with that price - not natural gas, not wind power, not hydroelectric. Storage is already scaling up.

Meredith - again, all this has been thoroughly debunked, many times on this site and elsewhere. Even if the solar panels and wind turbines cost nothing at all, the grids might take any of the energy generated unless they were forced to do so/ did so as a public relations exercise or whatever. The problem has never been the levelized cost of green energy but of accommodating intermittent power on grids run 24/7 and which have to be constantly balanced for voltage and frequency. The cost of doing so completely swaps any cost advantage from the use of green energy.    

[NickW + 2,714]

43 minutes ago, markslawson said:

Meredith - again, all this has been thoroughly debunked, many times on this site and elsewhere. Even if the solar panels and wind turbines cost nothing at all, the grids might take any of the energy generated unless they were forced to do so/ did so as a public relations exercise or whatever. The problem has never been the levelized cost of green energy but of accommodating intermittent power on grids run 24/7 and which have to be constantly balanced for voltage and frequency. The cost of doing so completely swaps any cost advantage from the use of green energy.    

You are probably correct for Northern European type climates with a large disparity between winter and solar output but for Meditteranean type climates the solar / storage scenario Meridith presents is quite likely assuming storage costs fall low enough. In those climates you are basically having to cope with diurnal storage rather than interseasonal. 

With utility scale battery storage doing the above (marked in bold) is extremely easy. 

In Northern Euro type climates you need to balance out the interseasonal disparity in solar with wind, biogas /mass, Hydro if available and failing that some investment in CCGT. 

[Meredith Poor + 894]

2 hours ago, markslawson said:

Meredith - again, all this has been thoroughly debunked, many times on this site and elsewhere. Even if the solar panels and wind turbines cost nothing at all, the grids might take any of the energy generated unless they were forced to do so/ did so as a public relations exercise or whatever. The problem has never been the levelized cost of green energy but of accommodating intermittent power on grids run 24/7 and which have to be constantly balanced for voltage and frequency. The cost of doing so completely swaps any cost advantage from the use of green energy.    

I suppose if something is debunked enough times it becomes true. In the meantime...

Power storage is pretty much as old as modern scientific understanding of electricity, since the original sources of electricity were batteries (unless you're Benjamin Franklin flying a kite). Lead acid and lithium ion batteries are real - not particularly cost effective, but households have used them for power storage for years, if not decades. It's not a matter of whether it can be done at all, it's simply a matter of relative cost.

Solar and wind power are definitely getting cheaper over time. Electrical storage technologies are also getting cheaper, just not as quickly - so far. There is a lot of confusion about various fuel sources, such as coal vs. natural gas vs. nuclear since these have their associated costs. Coal costs have remained relatively constant, however this isn't too helpful when costs of competitors, such as natural gas, are declining. The same goes for nuclear - nuclear plants built today aren't any simpler than plants built in the 1960's, and nuclear plant construction isn't any more competent. CCGT is a major simplification over conventional coal fired boilers - particularly if pollution control is included. Solar prices shrink, CCGT prices shrink (particularly with respect to fuel prices), wind prices shrink, so people whose life or investments are wrapped up in fossil fuels yells 'solar isn't competitive'.

It takes a certain amount of energy to make a solar cell, and it takes that energy plus a bit more to make a solar panel. If natural gas prices decline, then the cost of gas fired electricity also declines, lowering at least one input cost to cell manufacture. If the natural gas well uses solar panels for it's instrumentation, then the natural gas price cost is reflective of the money saved from not running a power line to the instrumentation unit. If it is too expensive to build a 'base load' power plant in oil country, then wind turbines are installed to meet incremental demand. Therefore, all these prices interact with each other like so many vines wrapped around the same tree trunk.

In the late 1980's I was being told by people that should have known better that 'housing prices have never declined in the US'. Whether that's true is less material than whether mortgage holders can continue to afford making payments on their houses. There was a 'first time' when that condition reversed, and mortgage holders were forced to default. Just because gas and oil have 'always' been 'the cheapest' and the 'most reliable' doesn't mean such a situation is guaranteed 'forever'. The question isn't the abstraction of 'well it won't happen in our lifetimes', it's 'where is the cost intersection in time, and what influences the displacement of that intersection?'.

 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

On 2/27/2019 at 5:49 PM, Meredith Poor said:

Right now solar panels are priced at 40 cents per watt in the US and 20 cents per watt in China. By 2025 the US price is likely to be around 10 cents per watt. This is based on the idea that solar prices will decline by 20% per year over the next six years. Recently the price declines have been even more extreme.

Nothing is going to be able to compete with that price - not natural gas, not wind power, not hydroelectric. Storage is already scaling up.

This isn't a question of mass uprising - it's simply cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. New Mexico won't get much in severance taxes, so it will have to raise revenue some other way. It will have to clear up the now abandoned Permian fields.

Everyone will climb on board when they actually see all the projections come true. Until then it is still a nice dream. Meanwhile I will continue to support natural gas vehicles as the best solution. It will continue to grow faster as the main energy for creating electricity and also as the base energy provider for the grids.

Los Angeles is veering away from natural gas due to their green mayor. It is against his energy advisors wishes. We should all watch what happens to Los Angeles energy rates if he follows through on his recent order to "Make it happen."

[ronwagn + 6,290]

On 3/1/2019 at 7:53 AM, NickW said:

I wouldn't mid betting that around 1900 there was some guy sure that by the 21st Industry we would still be travelling around looking up the 4rse of a horse instead of driving cars.

Electric vehicle progress since 1828. https://www.energy.gov/timeline/timeline-history-electric-car

Complete with pictures.

Remember the electricity has to come from somewhere. The question is where. We will have to wait and see who will pay what and why.

Related article https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Are-Semi-Solid-State-Batteries-A-Gamechanger.html

Edited March 3, 2019 by ronwagn
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