The things that seem largely missing from such articles:<p>1. Walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods.<p>2. Passive solar design.<p>We have created a world highly dependent on various energy inputs. It has gone a long way towards killing off walking, cycling and vernacular architecture (where passive solar is a historic default).<p>Those technologies still exist. They can be brought back into more mainstream use.
I think this writing needs a bit more organization - it reads like a stream-of-consciousness flow from the author, and while that's okay for literature, for complex energy issues it's hard to parse.<p>If the issue is the European energy market over the next six months or so, then at least quantify all the possible inputs more systematically. There's LNG tankers coming from the USA, there's whatever Eastern European pipeline capacity, there's Middle East and North Africa production of crude oil, there's the issue of whether crude oil is being imported to be refined, or refined products, etc. France's nuclear output potential is uncertain at best over the next six months. In addition, a rough calculation of the total input of wind and solar over the next six months would also be part of the picture.<p>Jumping from there into lithium battery production for vehicles doesn't make much sense (and note there are many other storage technologies for feeding solar/wind into the grid in a controlled steady manner that don't have the small volume footpring that lithium provides).
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Annual vehicle sales are 90 million, give or take. Assume 50kWh per battery, and around 850 grams of lithium carbonate per kWh. No recycling, no tech improvement, full market penetration, no savings from autonomous vehicles or the like and it is 3.8 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent - market price assuming today’s lithium price of $60k works out to $230bn, or the dollar equivalent of 23 days of global oil consumption. Assume more normal lithium pricing of $20,000 and you get 8 days of current run rate oil consumption for a year’s worth of lithium vehicles at 100% market penetration. This is existential for commodity trading houses longer term: they can sell more lithium, copper and nickel but the core businesses they are in are big, lucrative and going to shrink and there is no certainty that lithium is not going to disappear into vertically integrated supply chains that do not need freewheeling intermediaries or “financialized capital”.
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This math for lithium stands before we consider really disruptive things such as: maybe lithium isn’t it for grid storage, or even autos? This is the latest from the Sadoway lab - if we are going to use primarily sulphur and aluminium for batteries they will be laughably cheap. A tried and tested way to make money in materials science is to “do it better, with more available materials and less energy” - this is all three if commercialized. Over the last few years cobalt demand estimates have been crushed by developments in cathode chemistry due to cost and performance improvements in simpler chemistries - I am sceptical that this is the last time that today’s “unobtainium” becomes tomorrows chopped liver. Maybe new nuclear works, even if at low levels of total energy provided simply for stability and security reasons? Perhaps we can do a lot more pumped hydro than we thought? All the while the solar wafers get thinner and more efficient and use less materials…. the preponderance for everyone now calling for longer term structural energy inflation when papers like this are coming from Oxford which take account of these dynamics seems deeply unwise if you are doing anything but playing quarterly revisions.
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See my notes in <a href="https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html" rel="nofollow">https://dercuano.github.io/topics/energy.html</a> about this and related topics. The note <a href="https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html" rel="nofollow">https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html</a> predicts energy optimism 14 years ago, including a lot of the details about how it's happening.
Did anyone else find that hard to parse?<p>The odd thing is I can't figure out what it was that made it so tricky for me to read? Perhaps I just need more sleep.
I see this as a good example of the results of normalcy bias[1]. Europe hasn't even finished cutting itself off from Russian energy imports. German industrial infrastructure is centered around massive quantities of cheap natural gas. It is used as chemical feedstock for a number of products. The higher prices of LNG supplies from further and more costly suppliers will carry through making their products far less competitive.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias</a>
There is also the down side of up.<p>At some point, maybe ten or twenty years from now, we're going to have a <i>lot</i> of bankrupt companies around the hydrocarbon economy. Everything from gas stations to oil rigs is going to have non-trivial costs to decommission. The sooner we understand this and plan for it with specialized funds[0] that can handle it the better. Right now we're in the established candle makers versus upstart electric bulb manufacturers part of the story. The difference for us is the sheer scale of this transition. We already have petrol stations in Canada that are run at a yearly loss because the estimated costs of disposing of the surrounding soil are high enough that it's cheaper in net value accounting terms to lose money year by year.<p>[0] I imagine something like an escrow style fund where payments into the fund are paid back with interest after a predefined period of time if there is no cleanup from the entity or its subsidiaries, including subsidiaries that have been sold off to new owners. That way it aligns incentives and rewards good actors that take preventative steps to ensure less costly decommission.
Interesting to see the commodity traders take on this, freaking out about a boring, predictable energy supply system not needing them as middle men.<p>> An extremely dull future awaits of energy flows being largely local or in grids where the best meteorologists and machine learning engineers rake the table.<p>Tragic that it took a war to accelerate the right thing, but better than people using the chaos to do their usual disaster capitalist thing, like the UK tried and surprisingly had to retract.
> If this can continue along with the current weather forecast this winter does not look that bad and gas prices should move towards a stable level albeit materially higher than before the Ukraine invasion, likely around 100 euro for TTF<p>The average price before all this inflation took off was of about 15 euros for TTF. When, last October, the price had reached 130 euros for TTF (meaning the current level), the EU was all up in arms against the "speculators" [1]. All this to say that even a 100 euro per TTF price won't do any good in the medium to long term for most of the European industry, meaning they'll have to go bust.<p>[1] <a href="https://euobserver.com/green-economy/153295" rel="nofollow">https://euobserver.com/green-economy/153295</a>
Australians will read this hearing the words in his father's voice. Fairly or not.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Turnbull</a>
As long as global governments are comitted to consumer capitalism there is now doubt that for the richest countries energy abundance will not be a problem. The question is at what long term ecological cost that energy abundance will come.
There is a main problem, IMHO.
The more energy we consume, the more heath we transfer to the environment.
After greenhouse gases (like COx and NOx), that's a huge underestimated problem.
So, producing more electricity will in the end lead to more waste heath going to the environment (mainly the atmosphere and the sea).<p>Better plan would be to consume less and better. Aw, but then we have the industry which wants exactly the other way around...