Not to disagree with your underlying point, but I think it might be more constructive to frame the problem as a failure to internalize the costs, rather than a focus on money. Ultimately we do need a fungible way to compare solutions, and money is the simplest way to do that. We just need to figure out how to effectively internalize those externalities to the price.

Cost functions have an implied ethical system behind them. Using money is just waving your hands over it and going “well, money is objective, so we don't need a value system” – but there's still a value system there. It's like “machine learning” in that regard; there's no magic.

Money is just a fungible unit of comparison for types of value, nothing more.

In that case, gas plants are the best peaker option in most places as in most place CO2 and methane emissions cost $0.

Is that a meaningful statement?

I can rephrase to say that the comparator function for money has an ideological bent. It rewards the externalization of costs

Money is a unit of measure. Any other unit of measure you choose will be fungible with it. Money is simply a way of unifying things we care about and translating them into the same space.

In order to compare two actions, you need to normalize their consequences to make them comparable. This is a fundamental requirement of making decisions. 'Money' is simply the unit we choose to do that in our complex society. We can call it utility points or something else, if you want, but it's still the same abstract object.

I agree.

There's so much bullshit in mainstream energy analysis; there's too much incentive. Energy is central to civilization - what we use, where and how we get it, how we use it, how much of it there is and when we can use it - change any of those variables, change the shape of the entire civilization.

Yet the conversation around energy technologies is entirely dominated by dollar cost. This obfuscates so much, and lends a false equivalence to pricing/market/financial mechanisms - it implies that if something can be sold cheaply (low price) then it can be produced/extracted cheaply (low cost).

We are quite capable of, and actively involved in, stealing from our futures (high cost) in order to achieve low prices in the present. The economic externalities of our energy usage don't go away - by definition, that which is finite and we use now to do this, cannot be used later to do that.

That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit. Junk nobody needs that we'll convince them they want anyway.

And why are we doing this mad, insane, thing? Because we're convinced it doesn't matter, we're convinced the price of energy will always be low. We're convinced we're not the ones paying the costs.

Apologies for going full doomer on y'all. https://pics.onsizzle.com/oh-i-made-myself-sad-me-irl-242092...

> That energy we'll one day need to feed ourselves, and heat our homes, and supply our medicines and materials? We're using it, right now, to make a shitload of disposable, toxic, plastic shit.

We should limit it's use to making medicines and materials instead of burning it to heat our homes and propel our cars.

Not only does the latter consume a lot more fossil fuels, it does so by dumping a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere. Plastics consume 14% of global petroleum production today [1].

We could ban all the "disposable, toxic plastic shit" tomorrow (and I agree that we should find ways to create a less disposable culture) and we would still have a huge CO2 problem caused by fossil fuel powered space heating, transportation and electricity production.

1. https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-plastics-pipeline-a-surge...

> What is the $/MWh cost associated with mining for, recycling, and disposing of battery components?

A fraction of the cost of the batteries, naturally.

> What about the third order effects of centralizing control over the fuel source within only a handful of countries[0]?

The lead in car batteries is one of the most recycled materials on the plant. Your link is talking about lithium, not lead. Lithium-ion batteries only make sense in portable applications like cell phones and electric vehicles where weight is a major consideration. In stationary applications, heavier batteries like lead-acid are infinitely more practical.

The problem with batteries is that there are a bunch of grid storage chemistries using abundant elements that can scale to 1 GWh but there is almost no demand for grid storage only chemistries so lithium wins by default because it piggybacks of other developments.

> What is the $/MWh cost associated with mining for, recycling, and disposing of battery components?

A chemical battery is rather compact, imagine how much stuff you need to build a gravitational mega-structure.