The large agency forecasts have underestimated the growth of renewables for I think about a decade.

But, concerning your optimism — one of the reasons that renewables have gotten better and cheaper faster than predicted is that smart people decided to work on it. There’s a lot of opportunity in clean energy and climate tech, and working on it full time is a great way to manifest your optimism.

China's energy insecurity is also a large part of it.

Their exposure to shipping blockades in the south china sea and reliance on oil and gas imports provided a lot of the early impetus for beating down the price.

If one is not able to work in the industry oneself, there are also clean-energy ETFs that one can invest in, to support companies working on clean energy, which can manifest similar optimism by-proxy.

Have any recommendations? I bought a bunch of shares of VOTE recently (the Engine No. 1 ETF), but I’m curious about others.

I think a Google search for "clean energy ETF" yields some good results.

I wouldn't say I am 100pc invested in clean energy ETFs, but do hold them for ideological reasons.

> I think in 10 years there will be so much progress made so fast in renewables that we will look at all large agency forecasts and think how bad these were.

No need to wait for 10 years, it's already pretty obvious. Look at any solar projection from any major institution 10 years back.

I sure hope so, but at least here in Germany NIMBYs are highly organized and effective at preventing more wind turbines. It doesn't help that many politicians do their best to prevent wind turbines too.

I wouldn't like to have a wind turbine just next to my home (let us say less than 1 km) either, and I would definitely fight against placing wind turbines into protected natural areas like mountains, which are pretty much the only places far from the sea that have almost constant wind.

The proponents of wind turbines seem to forget that wind turbines are huge industrial systems. Placing them all over the map in a populated territory in the name of nature sounds a bit like "we had to destroy the village in order to save it". Future generations may shake their heads on current placement of wind turbines just like we shake our heads on our forefathers placing iron smelting industry in the middle of cities.

I can see their appeal in shallow seas around North Germany, Denmark or England, where they can produce a lot of power from constant sea winds and be a bit out of sight and hearing, but people pushing them into Erzgebirge are damaging valuable places for a few megawatts of power.

We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral. Just putting up a couple of offshore turbines in northern Germany won't be enough by a large margin.

In Germany we always had very strict laws that regulate how long a house can be shaded by a wind turbine per year (8h/year, 30min/day iirc), only recently politicians started imposing arbitrary distance rules based on wrong information about noise immissions. I'd rather have a wind turbine close to my house than a road, provided I'm not in the flicker-shadow region of the blades.

"We need to put them everywhere the wind blows if we want to become carbon neutral."

That sounds far from optimal to me. If sea turbines are, say, five times more efficient and legally/socially non-problematic, why not just cover the sea with them as far as possible?

I think you have an overly optimistic view of sea turbines.

They're more expensive, require more infrastructure (pylons and electricity lines aren't conflict free either) and there are a lot of conflicts around use of seawaters. And for a country like Germany there simply isn't enough space within the north sea and baltic sea for all the wind power we'll need.

(And to be clear: I'm 100% supportive of offshore wind energy, I just think it's entirely unrealistic to assume that could be a replacement for onshore wind. We need both.)

Because "as far as possible" is not enough. Even if you ignore that off shore power is a good bit more expensive to build, there is just not enough room there with current technology. And, by the way, the ocean deserves just as much protection as the mountains. Building offshore wind parks is not exactly good for the local wildlife there either.

The planet is on fire, and we're arguing about whether firefighters create too much traffic congestion. Future generations are far more likely to shake their heads at how we destroyed the climate with CO2 emissions.

I'm sympathetic, I really am, but these small harms need to be weighed against the effects of unchecked climate change!

NIMBY found

What exactly is it about a wind turbine within 1000m of your home that bothers you?

Yes, I am not totally indifferent to where I live. In other contexts, this attitude might be called "activism" and viewed positively.

As to your question: sound and sight. I definitely believe in smarter urban planning that just does not mash power plants and residential building together.

It is absolutely activism. Not all activism is good. Activism is also the reason we have too many single-homes and not enough low-income housing or transportation—because we tend to give too much weight to the few individuals who are vehemently opposed to these changes, and not to the much broader good they can generate for the general public.

Urban planning that mashes together residential, retail, light industry and clean power sounds a lot smarter than American style urban planning that forces you to drive everywhere.

As a normal citizen, you do not really need to drive to your power station, though. Wind turbines operate without personnel and transmission losses from one extra km of cable are negligible. Only maintenance needs to visit them from time to time.

Wind turbines have almost zero footprint, a few square meters per square kilometer. They can either be installed where people are or where people aren't. Far better for the environment if they are installed in populated regions.

What's the pros?

NIMBYISM is activism. Your comments are classic NIMBY - you want these things but in someone elses back yard.

There are 'activists' everywhere, there are even 'activists' who campaign for the age of consent to be lowered because they want to have sex with 12 year olds. Being an activist is only as positive as the cause and the motives.

"Your comments are classic NIMBY - you want these things but in someone elses back yard."

No, I want them in reasonable distance from villages and cities. Say, 1 and more km. I do not want to push them into anyone's backyard.

And that is actually entirely possible, unlike with, say, highways or railways that fundamentally connect human habitation with another human habitation. Even Europe has a lot of empty corners.

People have a very simplistic view of nature vs industrial. That could make sense in some untouched part of the Nevada desert. But a lot of the world it is just more complicated than that. We act like the landscape is untouched, unblemished and static when it is not!

People don't like their view to change and equate that emotional impact with more substantive impact to nature. Landscape does matter, but not very much in comparison to more pressing matters. I think future generations will shake their heads at our willingness to pander to emotion.

Yet you probably have a major road less than a kilometer from your place which is much more polluting and environment damaging than a wind turbine.

Visit a place than mixes industry and residential sensibly, like Japan before condemning it. Heavy industry is segregated, but light industry isn't.

Not really, the next major road is some 4 km from me. I chose my place of residence with regard to that (and I actually mostly travel by train/bus).

Also, if electric cars become a thing, you can at least hope that within 10-15 years, environmental damage from major roads will diminish.

You have not refuted the OPs point. We become so used to the impacts that we've grown up with that they tend to become invisible. Cue the pearl clutching and hysterics when something new comes along.

Your "we" does not include "me". I specifically avoid noisy locations all my life. For me, lack of noise is even more important than clean air, though they tend to come together.

Renewables seem to be growing quite fast, the fear I have is that electrification may take longer. Car transport seems to be 'solved' (just needs roll-out over decades). But many other industries may take more time.

Electricity is just 20% of energy use. [0] And forecasts for 2040 are set around 28%. Even if electric goes all-renewable, you're still not there if you use non-electric for heating, industrial, air, sea etc.

Second, renewable growth is quite strong now yet there's large increases in energy use and decreases of nuclear. All in all, it appears the share of no/low-carbon energy sources in 1995 (i.e. renewables incl nuclear and hydro) was roughly large as it is today [1], but unfortunately on a much larger total energy consumption. [1] That's absolutely depressing. It seems the trend has finally set in the last few years, but we're a long way from home.

If we're talking 1950, I'd be an optimist. But it seems we're very much on a tipping point. The fact we'll be able to innovate ourselves to low-carbon is something I'm very optimistic about, but in the necessary timeframe... I'm very concerned.

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/share-of-elec...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Heating for one doesn’t just depend on switching energy sources. You also have options like better insulation, building codes, more efficient heat pumps or even moving south.

Got those in the northern hemisphere, weather from the south is coming to us. Won’t even have to move.

Yep. I'm proud of what I'm doing with my house. Installed heat pumps, put in $5000 of new insulation, replacing propane stoves/fireplaces with electric. Next car will be electric.

The EU wants to be carbon neutral by 2050. Europe's forests absorb around 10% of today's CO2 emissions and they are expanding. Given over 50% of CO2 emissions comes from transport and energy (natural gas is the real elephant in the EU), just pushing hard with today's renewable technology could quite easily go a long way towards meeting that goal.

I'm oddly optimistic about it as well - I think we get bombarded with bad news regarding renewables so often that it can be easy to forget that there's plenty of good news too.

Feel free to speak up in the doom and gloom threads that appear on here the next time there’s a heat wave or a forest fire. We need more optimists.

Will we finally have fusion power then to? Cured cancer as well?