Energy security is mainly what I was referring to. Inconsistent access and/or prohibitively expensive electricity and gas is a huge problem for personal health, healthcare, education and access to economic opportunities.
this is all well and good but seems to ignore the central problem - energy security is a national priority. Hand waving away the problem by pointing to energy markets or a decentralised grid does not address the fundamental issue.
You are right, the goal is not 100% secured energy supply but we have multiple problems at the same time - energy security and climate change to name just two.
The issue with energy, especially electrical, isn't strictly about cost per KWH. There's the fixed cost of existing power plants that are expected to return a (highly regulated) profit, the problem of getting enough baseline power to run the grid, and also the fact that some sources of fossil fuels are cheaper to extract than others.
These are huge problems that can't be fixed by any one group and are going to need solved in the next 10 years before we can replace most or all of our existing power plants with renewables.
Electricity is only 15-20% of a country's electricity. Add to that. In order to secure reliable energy, coal, oil, gas or nuclear are needed and because of the politically driven focus and preference of wind it make the energy net more expensive for the consumer. The general discussion about energy as we see here is extremely superficial.
What we got is a society fully dependent on cheap electricity, that must further increase energy usage in order to prevent greater catastrophe, and which is on the verge of economic depression.
We can't throw all democracy laws and regulations overboard, but we can't continue with statue quo. Without energy we don't have working cities, agriculture stops producing food, heating and then public health starts to break down. The agricultural sector was one of the first areas that got hit when energy prices jumped.
Those things are close enough to be wartime-like, and could easily turn into actually wartime.
These are definitely problems, but here are some positive points to balance the negative:
The price of renewable energy has fallen 99.8% since 1975 [1] and power generation from renewables has increased 800% since 1965 and doubled since 2010 [2]
GDP per capita is 5-20 times higher than in 1820 [3]
Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1770 [4]
Armed conflict causes just 0.2% of global deaths [5] and relations between nations have become more peaceful since 1945 [6]
5 billion people own smartphones [7], which are orders of magnitude more powerful than a supercomputer of 50 years ago, and which they can use to access the entirety of human knowledge in the form of books, articles, and free lectures from top universities, plus instant communication and collaboration with people across the globe. These are all things that the richest people in the world didn't have access to for most of human history.
I've been listening to this rhetoric for years, yet every year, more energy problems are caused by (lack of) stable base load electricity supply, both in US and Europe, and much more in countries that heavily invested in "green" (non-nuclear) tech (e.g. Germany), than not (e.g. France).
We actually need constant energy supply at all hours of the day and night if we want to have a modern industrialized economy with factories and refineries operating around the clock. It's generally not practical to shut down those facilities just because electricity prices are temporarily high. So, in practice all of those industries will migrate to areas with cheap, reliable power (even if it's not "green"). This has obvious national security concerns in that it makes us dependent on unreliable imports for critical materials.
This. Along with the privatisation of the industry and the miss aligned incentives. Gold plated delivery of electricity, but no guarantees of getting it.
I find it insane that a country with as much natural resources, plus unlimited sunshine and space for wind farms has such high energy prices.
It’s also why I’m not sold on electric cars. I’d hate to suddenly be unable to charge it. If someone is really serious about CO2 emissions we need to transform the economy to be reliant on electricity not oil, and the only way to do that is drive the price down close to zero.
Especially worrying for me is the push to get everything on electricity. Only to then do rolling blackouts, or turn things off selectively so energy providers can fleece end users with price hikes.
Alas everyone is only interested in the next 4 years so there is little vision.
I think it's a very big problem for my descendants. This is something I am sensitive to as my parents and grandparents have left America in such a terrible state for me to inherit, and now resist any attempts to yield power.
The energy industry is fighting against both economics and ecology to maintain dominance. It does so for lots of reasons. It has no right to exist.
Energy production, distribution and storage seem to be much more pressing issues. This seems like a misallocation of resources from outside. I wonder how spending money on this can be justified in the presence of the current energy mix.
The thing about money is that energy is a critical sector of the economy of each region, so governments push a lot of public funding towards it. That's why I'm bringing up politics here, otherwise the free market would take care of the issue as always.
Probably recency bias, media coverage, and because for the resources it uses (with any source of energy), it’s hard to see it as a better alternative to what exists currently
Agriculture, fossil fuels, transportation and manufacturing for single use products are some of the highest order problems to me.
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