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Re:Offshore wind to become a $1T industry by toomuchtodo on Friday October 25, 2019 @12:37PM (#21356683)
Electricity can replace most energy needs. Whatever is left should be minimal (~5% total oil consumption, air travel, chemical processing, steel coking, etc). Coal and nuclear are already not cost competitive, if natural gas can't compete with batteries, it too will be left as a stranded asset. Natural gas is a perfect fit now for renewables, it throttles very fast and ramps every night for the steep duck curve in California. Batteries are even faster. Hundreds of GWs of annual battery production coming online across the world.
Re:Offshore wind to become a $1T industry by vkou on Friday October 25, 2019 @01:02PM (#21356951)
> Electricity can replace most energy needs.

Electricity currently supplies 20% of our energy needs.

Please outline how you are planning to, in the next 20-30 years, scale world-wide electricity production, as well as the capacity of the electrical grid by 5x.

Nobody has even the foggiest plan for how that is going to be done. I understand that it's easy to just shrug, and say: "Someone will figure it out". That isn't very comforting to me.

Re:Offshore wind to become a $1T industry by gns24 on Friday October 25, 2019 @01:28PM (#21357230)
It's not quite as bad as that, as electricity is a more efficient fuel source for many applications, including heating if you have a heat pump and the cold side isn't a lot colder than your target temperature. For transport it's much more efficient - 1kWh of electricity will get you a few times further than fossil fuels containing 1kWh or energy.

But your point is still valid, we certainly need to more than double grid capacity if we want to rely on electrification to avoid lifestyle changes.

Re:Offshore wind to become a $1T industry by xyzzyz on Friday October 25, 2019 @01:10PM (#21357030)
Especially as solar and wind are not consistent (clouds and windless nights etc), so you need to overbuild by large factor, and considering that there is no viable way to store energy, that requires insane overcapacity, on the order of 10-20x of current electricity use.
Re:Offshore wind to become a $1T industry by ThomPete on Friday October 25, 2019 @12:52PM (#21356847)
Fossil fuels are used for thousands of products everything from medicine to concrete to asphalt to pesticides, to solar cells, to windmills and machinery and manufacturing, etc.

We are not even close to having the battery technology that will work with most things we use fossil fuels for today let alone replace the other products that come from fossil fuels.

Fuel Cells are not even on the drawing board let alone at scale.

With regard to nuclear, it's expensive because it's being demonized which creates all sorts of extra requirements which is part of what make it more expensive. Furhtermore nuclear is calculated at actual cost neither wind or solar is.