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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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One thing to keep mind is that while the percentage share of renewables is growing, in absolute terms electricity production from coal and gas still increased. Looking at this data, which I assume to be the base of this article.
It's interesting. If you look at the IEA report here: https://origin.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2023/executive-summary
Gas, oil and coal demand is reducing globally; however global investment in fossil fuels is increasing, albeit at a far lower rate than renewables. I suspect this is driven by third world countries, where the initial cost can put off investment in renewable infrastructure; however this is also something that is being looked at: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-working-cut-renewable-energy-costs-developing-world-2023-12-22/
Also this report suggests that energy production from coal, gas, oil, hydro and nuclear have starting to plateau from 2021, with solar still showing an marginal increase alongside wind, bio energy and 'other': https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked
For coal the summary definitely seems to support the reduction in themand, but at least for the next few years gas and oil still seem quite stable to me.
Shouldn't it be the other way around, particularly for solar? Easy to set up, cheaper, flexible to scale, and the more decentralized setup might even help with poor electricity grid, since you can just set them up whereever needed and even have them work insular without connection the the network.
Imo the recent events have made it a bit hard to judge trends just from a few years. 2021 you are right in the middle of covid screwing over global trade, following that you have russia invading ukraine and the subsequent shift in europe (will be interesting how that plays out once the conflict ends), and as the main article of this thread suggests hydro was heavily affected by recent droughts (although those might become the norm). Only nuclear might be somewhat easier to extrapolate, since new capacity doesn't just magically appear, but involves long term planning.
Yeah, I would've thought that to, but according to the following report apparently not: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/07/renewables-are-the-key-to-green-secure-affordable-energy/
Interesting. Now that you mention it, i remember listening to a podcast that mentioned financing being a big obstacle for wind turbines, particularly the offshore projects, due to exactly that upfront cost. And i can imagine that for developing countries that is even worse.
Still i'd have thought that solar wouldn't quite have this same kind of problem, but i guess as the article suggests fossil fuels were cheaper, there's a political angle, and things are slowly improving.
Yes and no. Yes there were big issues blamed on financing but I understood it as contracts that were profitable at low interest rates suddenly weren’t when interest rates rose quickly.
If the customer won’t re-negotiate when conditions change, since that’s the point of a contract, at some point it’s cheaper to just break the contract and take whatever the hit is.
That's not surprising. The amount of technologies that have come out recently that use up huge amounts of power are fucking us over. Especially Bitcoin and AI.
Yeah, without strong global cooperation (good luck on that), I would think reducing demand of fossil fuels (or, I guess we're only reducing growth of demand right now), will just make fossil fuels cheaper, and some countries won't hesitate to take advantage of that. I think "The Green Paradox" talks about this.