alt Hacker NewsA core trait of my personality can be summed up as "always look on the bright side of life". To that end:
This war seems more than likely to drive up oil prices not only in the near term, but in the medium and long terms too! In addition, petroleum usage seems likely to become dependant on sucking Iran's proverbial dick, a notion that very few people in The West will find palatable.
Optimistically then, perhaps this will finally light a fire under everyone's asses to switch to renewable energy sources! Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide. Once deployed, international trade can stop completely, and you'll still have electricity to heat your homes, cook your food, and drive your car.
No more being dependant on dubious regimes like Iran for your day-to-day.
Admittedly this is true for coal, too, but I think we've already established that it cannot economically compete, so that should play out in favour of renewables in the long run.
Replies
> Wether it's wind, solar or hydro, a underappreciated property of renewable energy is the energy sovereignty they provide.
If your sovereign territory happens to support them geographically. This is true for many, but not all countries.
Also, without large storage capacity, you might end up being self-sufficient during sunny, windy days, but find yourself very dependent on your neighbor countries for imports on overcast days or at night without wind.
The combination of all of this is especially unfortunate for hydro, where you're pretty much fully dependent on the geography you've been handed.
So I'd say the self-sufficiency story of renewables doesn't fully hold. They benefit from regional cooperation and trade just as much as fossil fuels, if not more. (In my view, that's not really a counterargument, but it does raise the importance of having a well-integrated, cross-border grid even more.)
I'd love to believe this, but very recent history has shown (in the US at least) that we are moving backwards and trying to resist renewable energy.
this misses the fact that petroleum is incredibly useful outside of the burn it to make electricity and burn it to make car move use cases.
The petrochemical industry is huge we've yet to find alternatives for it. Half the stuff around you was made with something derived from oil, and you can't replace that with wind or sunlight in the foreseeable future.
It will be a boost for renewables, but hardly the end for natural gas. Keep in mind that while ~20% of natural gas was supplied via the Persian Gulf, that means 80% was not.
I expect that batteries will eventually solve the day-night cycle for solar, but for seasonal storage, natural gas is much easier to store, so this still looks to me like a mix of energy technologies, with renewables getting a larger share.
There are still processes that we haven’t replaced petroleum for, like Haber-Bosch. China has already banned the export of fertilizer for this reason.
It's very helpful to understand energy density to evaluate what a shift to renewables actually entails or what is even possible. Vaclav Smil is a good source or for a less dense version Nate Hagens has podcasts about it.
For the US to start going that route we need a certain group of politicians to stop telling everybody that windmills are killing whales and birds en masse, claiming solar "isn't there yet" (somehow it never is), and that there is such thing as "clean coal." Literally the only thing I don't hear them fighting (loudly) against is hydro power.
The US just gave away a billion dollars to NOT build renewable energy.
Self-sufficiency is a myth. Even if you wanted to try and be energy independent, for the short and medium term (and maybe longer, who knows?) you will be dependent on China and all the baggage that they bring because of their dominance of rare earth mineral processing. Need a new solar panel? Don't make a certain country mad (whether that's your local Ayatollah or CCP official).
And that's just energy. What about pharmaceuticals? Financial markets? Who protects your shipping lanes? Who builds your semiconductors? Where do those factories get their energy from?
I support the diversity of energy sources because they all have strengths and weaknesses. We've got to figure out climate change. But we also can't have, even if you want to somehow "move off of oil" a single country run by lunatics who can decide whenever they don't get their way that they get to seize 20% of the global oil supply. We can't have China dominating rare earth processing either. For some others it may be a reliance on American military technology.