If that happens I could see them setting themselves up for a big political fight against their customers as they try to maintain their business by force/law.

Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.

Then we decided to deregulate.

To a large extent, that business model is obsolete in many places. For example Consolidated Edison in NYC used to generate most of its own power. Here is a link to a generating station they used to own but were forced to divest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenswood_Generating_Station

Due to deregulation of the energy markets in New York State, Con Edison was required to sell all of its "in-city" generating stations in New York City including Ravenswood. In 1999, Con Edison transferred ownership of Ravenswood to KeySpan Energy (KeySpan) for $597 million.

I think it's stupid, but nobody asked me before they forced this on Con Ed.

They were legally forced to sell as well, not due to a lack of profitability.

They have to lobby to start charging for the services they will do in the future. If they don't do that, they will soon have to lobby to get free money from people, and that last one can only end badly.

I would wager that the vast majority of people are still going to need/want the connection.

But at some point you can't sell more product than what breaks down and needs replacing, which I would call maintenance mode, not growth.

At that point, you either start designing obsolescence into the products (arguably already done in both lamps and other various electric appliances), or you need to disrupt the industry to supply something worth replacing to, or you (or at least a majority of the workers) move to another industry where growth can happen.

I absolutely don't want to live in a society where electricity needs grow in perpetuity, or every house gets more and more lamps "just cuz".

The end goal for any company should be monopoly in their market, at which point they slash their workforce to just keep the market, and divest into another market (where they can then employ the workers again).

Improve medicine, explore space, optimize production methods, invent new energy method etc. for more and more people. Those require growth.

Other than the definition, I agree with what you're saying.

By contrast, in under 250 years since Adam Smith our culture's growth is trashing the planet in nearly every place we measure. The Growth Delusion develops and documents problems with growth further https://www.amazon.com/Growth-Delusion-Poverty-Well-Being-Na....

Many times we make an advance like, say, anesthetics, growth leads to things like opioid epidemics.

You can live how you want, but you may want to reconsider what sounds like an unqualified faith in a pattern that may have worked when we had a lot of empty planet to expand into, but creates problems when we learn that we don't any more.

The fact is that we have gotten increasingly better and better at converting the earth's resources into serving our needs and have been able to effectively optimize and improve our ability to get more out of less. Most importantly wherever you see humans flourish and get wealthy enough the environment improve because we start to care about it and get the power to do something about it.

Humans didn't use to live in harmony with nature, they used to live in fear of nature. Mother nature is brutal to humans and it's only because we have gotten better and better at controlling it that humans could flourish.

I am unconvinced that minimizing our impact on nature is the moral thing to do and unconvinced that what we are doing right now is by any metrics worse than what those bushmen did. Too many people romanticize humans relationship with nature.

There is plenty of evidence countering a faith in growth. A culture that has existed for several orders of magnitude longer than ours is strong evidence. It would even if they were as ignorant and fearful as you describe them. That there were the opposite strengthens the case.

I'm not sure if you were suggesting that people in our culture are not ignorant or fearful, but I see a lot of it, or if you're suggesting that past flourishing means it will continue, but I wouldn't bet on it unless we change a lot.

The culture you are referring to did so for 100.000 years because it couldn't consume enough of its surroundings for it to have to worry about anything.

We don't live in such a world and unless you can give me an alternative to growth that allows all the people who haven't gotten up to our standards of living then I am not sure what you are trying to get at.

Of course, our culture is also ignorant compared to the future that's not the point. The difference is that our culture is learning and evolving, their culture wasn't until they got out of their environment and started exploring the rest of the world.

I am not talking about past flourishing I am saying that the only way (I would welcome arguments for the opposites, the bushmen isn't one) for humans to keep flourishing is growing.

Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid.

EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/FCYT1xa.jpg

[2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-g...

This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):

>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.

>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.

Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...

edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-ca...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications

It would only take 0.6 percent of total US land mass covered in solar to power the entire country (about 100 miles by 100 miles). The batteries to back that energy production would only be about 1 square mile. That doesn't take into account residential rooftop solar already producing. Nor wind turbine parks in the middle of nowhere that contribute to farmer and rancher incomes. Offshore wind can be sited anywhere along the costs outside of shipping lanes, far enough off in the distance to not be seen but close enough to keep transmission costs reasonable. We are awash in clean, renewable energy.

To your point about the developing world, India is aggressively deploying solar, and is 4 years ahead of its solar capacity targets.

Solar and wind are ramping on curves somewhere between linear and exponential. They can be turned up in months, not years. They can be sited almost anywhere. They are what is going to win the day.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/has-us-nuclear-powe...

https://blog.ucsusa.org/mike-jacobs/solar-vs-nuclear

"In comparison with nuclear, the amount of solar power built in 2016, taking into account how many hours each can operate each day, is the equivalent of more than 3 new nuclear plants.

To dive in a little deeper: let’s use a 25 percent capacity factor for new solar, making the 14,626 MW installed equivalent to 3,650 MW of theoretically perfectly running nuclear plants. The Westinghouse AP 1000 units under construction for the last 7-10+ years produce about 1,100 MW. So, in one year, solar additions were equal to what takes more than 7 years to build. The difference in speed of deployment is why UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is clear that nuclear power isn’t a near-term climate solution."

So if you're not going to take my (rando HN poster's) word for it, the Union of Concerned Scientists seems somewhat reputable.

Also because of the way the Navy works their reactors are less bespoke for each ship than traditional land based reactors - and better fit the mass production model. This is something that could scale.

1. http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...

Wind farms go great on agricultural farms - they tend to have wide open spaces, and the actual footprint of a tower can have minor impact upon the productivity of the field.

Solar generation goes great on both residential and in particular - commercial buildings, over the tops of parking lots, etc - which has the dual effect of producing power and reducing the heating of the underlying building/parked cars (great for reducing the need for air conditioning)

Your average suburban home has enough roof area to produce either all of, or a significant fraction of, it's own energy for a moderate household.

Marginal-use land (hilly areas), coastal areas, and off-shore are also generally good areas for windfarms too.

Elon Musk begs to differ. Here's something he said: “If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said at at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.” https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...

something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker

Not to slag on Pinker, but Musk has proved himself to be a hell of a lot better visionary in the real world than most anyone else, and that includes pop authors.

Somewhere else I saw a claim of 0.6% of US land area needed for US power needs. Even if it's 1%, no BFD. Let's assume that many areas of the world don't have as good solar irradiance as the USA. So maybe it's 2% in some other places. Still, no BFD.

IMO the biggest problem with current nuclear is that it's run by utility companies. Those places aren't staffed by the world's brightest bulbs (heh heh). Allowing morons like that to build and manage nuclear plants is akin to allowing toddlers to play with live hand grenades. Most of the time they don't pull the pin, but when they do the results aren't pretty.

PV solar is simplicity itself. No moving parts. Linear economies of scale: 2x the panels means 2x the cost and 2x the power.

OTOH Southern Co. is now saying that the two nuclear reactors they are trying to complete will cost more than $25 billion. https://www.myajc.com/business/southern-says-vogtle-costs-ex... Oops.

Furthermore, while they are renewable to they are also unreliable and need to have backup sources which makes them unfit as a enegy base. Remove the subsidies and you will see just how problematic they are.

And then we haven't even looked at the problem with producing them, maintaining them etc.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/topics/encyclopedia/so...

I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.

The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.

Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...

First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.

So much for 'decoupling'.

Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

http://longbets.org/

We don't use whale oil anymore.

You are constraining your history in a single century, and "older energy sources" in a single set of mostly equivalent ones.

When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/fossil_fuel?wasredirected=tr...

Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.

So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).

Maybe this graph can convince you: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/global...

This is one way to make welfare payments more effective. People are spending their money on food, and not as much on heating.

If you live in a country with denationalised utility companies you can get them to pay for this from the profits they're getting after denationalisation.

But, even when you do this you find people have different reasons for not accepting the offer.

The UK "Nudge Unit" found that the thing that drove more signups to loft insulation wasn't just free insulation, but offering a free loft clearance service too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-...

> For years, by offering financial help to insulate people's lofts, thereby reducing their energy consumption and their bills, successive governments had been trying to give money away – and failing. But in 2011, the nudge unit realised that money wasn't the problem. What held people back was all the clutter that they knew was stored up there.

> So in a trial, people were offered not subsidised insulation, but subsidised loft clearance – with unwanted items being taken to local charity shops – on the condition that they got the space insulated afterwards. The scheme cost people more, but they loved it, and uptake rates tripled. If the insulation was subsidised as well, it became a fivefold increase. Another approach was less successful, but equally revealing. When offered a still greater discount for every friend or neighbour they roped in, people took no interest. You cannot put a price, it appears, on being seen to be a loft-botherer.

Humanity is thriving during a period which started about 20k years ago where the global temperature is 10°C higher than for most of the past 2 million years.

Try 90+% of Earth's history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

Though all living humans are alive during the current (anthropocene) extinction event, so in that sense "we" have never known anything else.

No, we're really not. Climate change due to carbon emission is real, but we'll reduce our carbon emission "in time" to avoid extinction level increases and/or adapt to the environment more drastically if we miss that target.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction