Don't worry about the political issues. Wall Street will follow the ROI numbers, and money will be available for power sources with good ROI. Oil is on the way out. Coal isn't coming back, either. Peabody Coal, the biggest coal company in the world, went bust earlier this year. Nobody wants to build new coal plants. They're huge headaches to operate compared to natural gas plants.
"efforts made to slow this transition by Trump and others in his administration should be seen as a protectionist, nonsensical, and amoral top-down defense of the harmful fossil fuel industry."<p>As a solar panel owner, I want to know, is this a response to the tax credit going away or is there something else of which I am not aware? If solar is able to stand on its own, the tax credit would seem to have served its purpose. The discontinuity in the level of feasibility when it goes away will not be fun, but I thought that people expected that to happen when it eventually does go away.
The per-watt numbers may sound great, but these are still apples and oranges energy sources. While there are some area where one can certainly replace the other (electrical grids etc) there are others (shipping) where the gap remains monumental. In terms of energy density (35ish MJ/L) and storage (a box) diesel fuels look to remain king for a while.<p>One downside of cheap solar might be a drop in crude prices, resulting in its more frivolous use. I'd hate to see improvements in shipping meant to conserve fuel, and thereby lower carbon emissions, be set aside once fuel becomes cheap again. We need to watch for this and, perhaps, get regs in place to ensure it is burnt as sparingly as possible.
EROEI never made any sense to me. It seems to conflate two fundamentally different notions: fuels as energy sources and fuels as energy storage mediums. Who cares that petroleum EROEI might fall to less than one? Petroleum in that scenario would still useful for vehicles. Even if you need two joules to extract one joule of fossil fuel, this process might be economically viable if your two joules are immovable (e.g., drawn from a nuclear-powered grid) and your one joule is movable (e.g., in an airliner). There's no special significance to EROEI.
I'm all for solar but to be fair the source study for this was looking at the economics of modules not deployments. Solar does have an inverse economies of scale problem where the cheapest, most amenable sites are the first to get solar farms. To scale it to be competitive with coal, nuclear, etc. you're going to run into higher site acquisition costs and suboptimal conditions. Worth the challenge to save our planet, obviously, but let's be honest about it.
In an attempt to clarify my previous point, everyone please feel free to examine Exxon's 2040 outlook, which puts Nuclear, solar, wind and other renewable energy sources at only 25% of all energy production by that time: <a href="http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/energy/energy-outlook/highlights/" rel="nofollow">http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/energy/energy-outlook/hig...</a>
Do any HN readers actually "invest" in oil? I think plenty of us <i>trade</i> oil, but who actually goes long in something that is so volatile in response to things you have no control over(war, accidents, the list goes on)?<p>Oil's greatest investment potential is how <i>volatile</i> it actually is. Look at the charts for brent crude day-to-day, or jump back a step and look at the crude ETFs(sco/uco/and-friends). There is a <i>lot of money</i> to be made with that much volatility.<p>Back to the original question, does anyone here actually invest(as in hold long positions) in oil OR solar? If so, I am curious why you chose those particular investment vehicles, since they are technically(as in looking at the company's technical breakdown) bad long investments.
Not without Lithium-ion <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densitie...</a>
Nothing will force companies to use Solar than high ROI. Google and Apple now use Solar in a major way, with Tesla's cars and SolarCity's roofs, we are living in exciting times.<p>The drop in Oil demand would mean the end of the OPEC bloc.
Not one mention of petrochemicals in this thread.<p>The main thing environmentalists (among others) seem to forget is that you can't make plastic out of sunlight. Or air. Or by pedaling a bicycle.<p>Oil (and natural gas, especially in the US where petrochemical refineries use it for ethane) will continue to be in demand if for no other reason than to be used as a feedstock for plastics and a litany of other chems that make modern life possible.
Hahahaha, oh Kenaka. GET WITH THE TIMES, Kaneka!<p>Oh, I'd almost forgotten about that. Thanks for the laugh!<p>(Honestly, I have no idea what I'm talking about, I just thought it was funny the one green diamond was lower than the other thingies.)
Guys. It's embarrassing that this is a top article on Hacker News.<p>There is really no association between the price of oil & the price of solar.<p>Oil is an expensive form of energy because it is portable & used for transportation. It competes with the price of lithium ion batteries.<p>Solar is for generating electricity. It competes with coal, gas, geo, hydro, wind.<p>And don't come back at this with some pathetic reasoning that on some islands or remote places idiots use generators. I say idiots because generators are loud, smell, need maintenance and these days are probably quite a bit more expensive than a solar + battery system.