Costs are falling and consistently along an experience curve. They're approching a lower bound. But that lower bound is well below the costs of both fossil and nuclear power, both of which are further exhibiting increasing costs over time.

I'm not dismissing or minimising issues involved in a sustainable carbon-neutral energy scheme. But it's within reason.

Fusion power ... still seems not to be.

Totally agree on fusion power.

The challenge with that assessment for renewables, is as California and Germany both are discovering, there are missing elements of the cost equation being used that aren’t being accounted for, but someone has to pay for it or bad things happen. Notably bad even for politicians, like people freezing to death or dying from heat in the summer.

Both are currently pretending (near as I can tell) to understand what it means, and report numbers that seem pretty rosy.

Cost of energy total, however, in both these places continues to skyrocket.

They may be able to continue to avoid it, if folks take the price signal to heart and find workarounds (like finally improve insulation in the stock of older housing and public spaces, or switching energy consumption pattern to flatten peaks). I can tell you that California so far seems to not get the hint.

In Germany it’s the winter heating load, and figuring out how to actually keep themselves from freezing during outlier (but not that infrequent) events.

In California, it’s the aging transmission infrastructure and shifting peak production vs peak demand without adequate storage leading to brownouts, blackouts, and high surge pricing during summer air conditioner loads.

In California they changed new construction energy codes, but it’s mostly BS. With the rate of new construction being tiny compared to existing (old) stock, it’s not going to make a significant difference for 50+ years. A decent portion of existing homes have either no insulation, or 50 year old insulation with poor or zero maintenance, and are grandfathered in.

Energy prices in both places continue to increase, that may do it. Both places are near world records highs already, and have been for some time.

aka Transmission. That's what HVDC will fix. The challenge in the USA is policy, not technical. I know nothing about EU, but assume they have a similar rat's nest of red tape.

FWIW, David Roberts' Volts newsletter covers the USA-centric stuff.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-the-challenges-of-buil... [2021/08/27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

> they’re both touching on different elements

There is no silver bullet. We need more of everything, there's always more to the story.

For sure, though all that adds costs and makes it clear we just don’t know yet what the actual cost is of the right solution (or what the actual right solution is).

Transmission alone can’t fix this due to national security concerns, which is also a huge factor in the current energy cost problem in Europe - a large portion of European natural gas comes from Russia, and Russia has made it clear they’re willing to use gas for larger policy goals in the past. Including turning it off and causing huge safety issues if Germany and others won’t play ball.

Even solar in the Sahara has this problem, as these lines are easy to cut during a war or ‘accident’, and hard to protect over these distances.

Energy supplies and access to them played a huge role in WW2, and that hasn’t stopped.

Well, yes, the entire concept of geopolitics has grown out of the global distribution of petroleum sources and consumers. And that itself is only the another round in competition over global resources that traces back at least as far as the 1750s and the Seven Years War (arguably the first true World War).

The history of the significance of sources, transports, and consumers of oil and gas loom large in recent histories. I recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (1991) with its treatments of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, and Vaclav Smils' Energy and Civilization (2017) which addresses more technically the role of energy in human progress. (There are a few other histories through the lens of energy I could recommend as well if you're interested.) The role of the Suez Canal, of Beruit as a transshippment point for Saudi oil piped across the desert to the Medeterranian, of submarine warfare aimed in large part at oil shipments to Japan and within and from the United States, as well as the central role of the Middle East in post-WWII geopolitics, all come to mind.

A renewables-centric world seems to afford far greater multipoliarity and far less concentration of strategic interests. It's fairly trivially possible to capture or bomb oil wells. It's less feasible to entirely destroy solar collectors --- yes, they're fragile, but the very fact that they do cover large tracts of land makes direct attack expensive. Interconnects, particularly those envisioned across the Mediterranean, would be attractive targets, though also likely armoured and defended. At the same time, distribution of other forms of generation, including wind, hydroelectrc, and geothermal, would make the impact of such attacks, and the likely retaliation on any aggressor (themselves all but certainly a major state power) large.

If I were to draw up risk scenarios, I'd likely put more emphasis on materials sourcing, especially of rare and strategic minerals: lithium for batteries, copper for wiring generally, coltan, rare earths, and the like. These aren't consumables to the same extent fuels are, but access could disrupt an adversary for a considerable time, though all but certainly at a cost of global trade disruptions.

Any large, arid, low-population, sun-rich region becomes a potential energy producer and exporter, in a solar-dominated world. This includes many of the Middle-Eastern petro-states, but also their less-endowed neighbours, much of North Africa, the Southwestern United States, Northern Mexico, potentially regions of western South America, and much of Australia. Where direct electical shipments aren't possible, either production or synfuels created using surplus electrical power (much of it direct analogues of petroleum hydrocarbons) is another option. Carbon-neutral production of such fuels is not especially effient in a round-trip energy sense, and retains some local pollution concerns in combustion (particulates, partially-combusted hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide), but would not suffer from either CO2 emissions or sulfur emissions from current low-grade fuels. There is the potential for alternate fuels --- hydrogen, ammonia, methane (arguably a petroleum analogue), and alcohols being among them. I'm leaning in favour of synfuel hydrocarbons myself for numerous reasons, but all would offer the ability to capture sunlight and ship it elsewhere in a far more decentralised fashion than the present fossil-fuel-depedent global economic system exhibits.

It expect there will be large and frequent shipments of electrically synthesized anhydrous ammonia carried in supertankers from multiple competing tropical countries to northern Europe, and large reserve stocks of it kept at terminals there, and inland regionally. That ammonia will be burned in existing gas turbines or converted to H2 for industrial uses.

Then, the trans-national HVDC transmission lines also being built out will enable access to reduced spot prices, while remaining strategically unnecessary.

As I said, I'm a fan of hydrocarbon alkane analogues, not so much hydrogen or, as you suggest, ammonia.

Ammonia is useful as fertiliser. It's the 2nd most hazardous material noted in the US (I'd participated in an earlier thread pointeing this out), after the far more prevalent carbon monoxide. As a fuel, ammonia would prove an extraordinary hazard.

Earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29211672

Ammonia is dangerously toxic if released indoors. Outside, NH3 is buoyant, rising away from leaks as fast as it evaporates. Besides its fertilizer and feedstock uses in the millions of tons annually, NH3 is already in heavy use as an industrial-scale refrigerant.

For those millions of tons of NH3 handled industrially, 1153 incidents is very small.

> I recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (1991)...

I'd like to learn about realpolitik. Henry Kissinger, Jean Kirkpatrick, etc.

Much as I despise that world view, I'm not sure they're wrong.

At the very least, I'd like to understand them better. Like how the Know Your Enemy podcast surveys modern conservativism. https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy

I've got some books about Kissinger in my queue. I figure I'd start there.

Other recommendations?

Not especially.

I likewise find the PoV unsavory, though ... pragmatic. Yergin's general philosophy (and enthusiastic boosterism of the oil industry) is not my own viewpoint, but his storytelling and knowledge are excellent. Discover enough about the field, however, and the bits he skips over become apparent. The bits he covers, however, are valuable.

Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power (note that this is in two volumes, catalogue listings vary in including both) is similar to Smil's works on energy/history, but focuses far more on the political dimensions and their relationship to the power (physical and political) afforded through energy regimes. It becomes increasingly polemical as it approaches the present, possibly with strong justification.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/sources-of-power-how-energy-f...

First volume -- before oil: https://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foragi...

Second volume --- oil and beyond: https://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/83762...

What really emerges from all three authors --- Yergin, Smil, and Weissenbacher, is how absolutely transformational the oil age proved to be. It is liquid power in every sense of that word.

On politics, I've been looking at James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State), Francis Fukuyama (Origins of Political Order https://www.worldcat.org/title/origins-of-political-order-fr...), John Kenneth Galbraith (see his Anatomy of Power https://www.worldcat.org/title/anatomy-of-power/oclc/1087969...).

I'm familiar with Realpolitik as a term. There's the related "geopolitics" which arises out of German doctrine, and borrows heavily from principles of the use of naval power. That, if I'm recalling correctly, traces to Alfred Thayer Mahan's treatise on sea power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Thayer_Mahan#Sea_power

Otherwise, this is an area I'm mostly fumbling around in. Appreciate the podcast recommendation.

In exchange, Neal Conan's swan song might also be of interest, "Truth, Politics, and Power". I'm not sure it covers quite the same topic though it's own I've been meaning to listen to.

https://exchange.prx.org/series/37658-truth-politics-and-pow...