The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be Most Disruptive Yet
Lots of arguments in this thread. Yet, there are few that are missing that I would like to add my two cents to.<p>1) People keep pointing out the need for batteries and yet keep forgetting that battery production is ramping up exponentially over the next few years because of EVs. Vehicle to grid power is technically feasible, obvious, and well on its way to becoming a thing in many places. So, EVs are not a problem but actually part of the solution here. Yes, EVs use a lot of power when they are charging and they use some of that power when they are driving. But most of the time they are not driving and plugged in to the grid. This means that lots of people switching to EVs in the next two decades is going to result in plenty of battery capacity that is already plugged into the grid that can absorb lots of the excess power generated during the day. It won&#x27;t be enough by itself but it&#x27;s a big factor.<p>2) The article is about grid solar and wind. However, lots of house holds are now technically capable of going completely off grid with privately operated solar and wind + batteries. In some places people already do this and in some places they even do it without subsidies. This is only going to get more affordable and common over the next few decades. Ironically the biggest factor slowing this down is not technology but legislation and the de-facto exclusive monopolies of existing energy players in a lot of markets. E.g. the US energy market is closer to a communist planned economy than anything resembling a free market right now: expensive, inefficient, and stupid. IMHO that is something that can be fixed quite easily and price pressure will make this a popular demand and basically irresistible for politicians to act on. I doubt this will survive decades in its current sorry state.<p>3) The key argument that Ramez Naam makes is about economies of scale driving prices down. This is true for clean energy and will continue to be true for some time as technology improves. You can bicker about the time lines of course but a 2-3 factor price drop is purely a question of when rather than if and there may very well be more in stock beyond that (5x, 10x, 20x?). IMHO we&#x27;ve seen nothing yet. It&#x27;s worth noting that a lot of studies on this in the past have been systematically pessimistic on price levels and efficiency.  E.g. a lot of coal plants are shutting down prematurely precisely because the economic studies that convinced their investors that was a good investment years ago were flat-out wrong by magnitudes. The current prices for clean energy are nowhere near as high as what people commonly believed would be the case even ten years ago. IMHO the combination of growing demand and the obvious VC investments at scale in this area are going to continue to yield results for decades&#x2F;centuries to come.<p>4) Likewise, economies of scale provide little more benefit for non clean power solutions. Nuclear, coal and gas are not going to get massively cheaper in the next few decades and the latter two are arguably at risk of actually getting (much) more expensive as carbon taxation is becoming more of a thing and state subsidies for coal, oil, and gas are becoming much less of a thing at the same time their primarily fuel is actually getting scarcer. Also, price volatility for oil and gas is already a problem. Especially oil is going up and down like crazy. You can&#x27;t do reliable price projections for even a few years ahead. Right now it seems world+dog is dumping oil thus depressing prices. But perhaps this is in anticipation of easy sources running out and demand collapsing: better to sell now at a low price while you still can. If it was a safe investment, people would be waiting for demand and prices to go up. That&#x27;s not what&#x27;s happening. Peak oil and coal is already in the past according to some and investors are already acting accordingly and they are primarily greed driven. Clean energy only has the &#x27;problem&#x27; of getting massively cheaper than it is right now at a somewhat unpredictable pace for decades to come. Maybe someone will figure out fusion at some point. For that to be feasible, it will need to be cost effective with clean energy. I believe it is possible but might not happen until next century.<p>5) Batteries and grid are not the only way to use (excess) clean energy. Having cheap electricity means that you can do interesting things like desalinate seawater and store the resulting drinking water or use it for agriculture. You can also use it to generate all kinds of fuels from air and water. IMHO a potentially disruptive thing is the notion of actually generating methane and other carbon based fuels from basically air and water. Right now this is stuff that is feasible in labs and mostly not very practical, just yet. However, imagine this becoming actually cheaper than pumping oil out of the arctic, shipping it halfway across the planet, refining it, trucking it to your favorite petrol filling station, etc.  The point I&#x27;m trying to make here is that excess energy has plenty of useful applications and is an opportunity rather than a problem. IMHO the vast majority of energy we generate in a few decades or so may not be for grid usage but this type of applications. We might still be burning diesel or gas in a century but I doubt it will be of the fossil variety.<p>6) The transport sector is electrifying. Ships already run of generators (see point 5) and increasingly also using batteries. Cars, trucks, buses etc. are well on their way of becoming EV only. Even short haul flight is likely to become electric in the next few decades (fuel cells &amp; batteries). Most of that energy is going to come directly or indirectly from on site solar&#x2F;wind. If you are going to be charging vehicles at an industrial scale, clean energy is what you will invest in to do it as cheap as you can. Buying it from a last century grid connected dinosaur plant burning oil&#x2F;gas&#x2F;coal from the Jurassic era (apologies for the bad pun), is not even close to being a plan. This is a cut throat business with super thin margins that is completely dominated by fuel cost. Clean energy is going to have insane cost effects here and anything that can&#x27;t keep up will be out of business in a few decades.