> switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels
You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale. Maybe just your house or some districts. You still need coal/gas/nuclear to maintain the power grid.
Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned. Oil is a must in military. If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
Look at any recent data, and you'll find that renewables scale fantastically well, are super cheap, and even today as they are the cheapest source of energy, they continue to get cheaper.
Meanwhile nuclear, even in France, is an example of "negative learning by doing," where it gets more expensive as time goes on.
Even China, the best builder out there, is only doing a token amount of nuclear compared to renewables and batteries. And no advanced economy is going to be able to build nuclear as cheap as China; our labor costs are too high and construction logistics are not good enough.
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
This is of course very wrong, there are very highly diversified sources for all these things, more and more are coming online.
Nuclear is in far more dire straits along those lines than renewables, there's more constrained supplies, a shrinking number of people building the supplies. The US didn't stop importing uranium from Russia until a 2024 ban...
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well.
China is scaling, so is Australia, quite possibly other countries. We'll know when they hit the limits and stop deploying more solar.
Solar is dirt cheap (1200x cheaper), batteries are getting cheaper by the minute.
If you are rational thinking person, would you bet on technology that increases in costs over time or gets cheaper over time?
> invest in nuclear.
There was a time many decades ago to deploy nuclear at scale. Fossil fuel shills used 'environmentalists' to shut down all progress of nuclear. Now, they use nuclear again to slow down solar and wind. Just wait 30 - 50 years, we'll have a proper solution.
I do agree with you on nuclear though, countries should invest in nukes for security. All countries should invest in nuclear, it provides both energy security and real security from mischievous actors.
It's not that solar cannot scale as is, it simply cannot scale as a power grid (see frequency sync issue as an example, even in day time).
As I said in the previous comment, you need alternate sources to maintain the power grid, even in day time. And no, battery is not a good option for it because it is very expensive. Using a coal/gas/nuclear station to maintain the grid in both day time and night time is the best option you have right now.
Solar is cheap if you only look at the panels and how much energy it produces. It is not cheap if you look at the whole grid, which is something omitted from reports you see.
I'm not against solar/wind. I'm just against it as the major source. 20-30% seems to be a good value for it.
> There was a time many decades ago to deploy nuclear at scale. Fossil fuel shills used 'environmentalists' to shut down all progress of nuclear. Now, they use nuclear again to slow down solar and wind. Just wait 30 - 50 years, we'll have a proper solution.
The best time to start was decades ago. The second best time is now.
Look at France, they have nuclear and they have energy security. Look at Germany and how foolish they were to deprecate all nuclear stations.
Australia has less than 10% solar/wind. Seems reasonable to me.
China is an exception, because they have the full pipeline to build batteries, panels. Which country has the full pipeline? Relying on China for panels & batteries for energy security? Huh?
>It's not that solar cannot scale as is, it simply cannot scale as a power grid
Grid forming inverters have solved all your claims
>Solar is cheap if you only look at the panels and how much energy it produces. It is not cheap if you look at the whole grid, which is something omitted from reports you see.
This is untrue, the math conclusively proves your claims wrong, the solar industry produces a KWH for cheaper than any other source.
All the costs from harvesting raw material, making solar panels from raw material, building batteries, building grid forming inverters etc... are all captured. In the final cost in how much that producer sells a KWH for
Companies that operate solar panels and sell the KWH produced are able to undercut all other power generation companies using other methods.
Fossil fuels are massively subsidized compared to solar companies
Fossil fuels are subsidized by public transportation infrastructure to move their fossil fuels, special tax writeoffs, get to lease land that has oil for dirt cheap from the government. They also get special payments from the government even when they don't produce power, IMF data also shows far more direct subsidies.
Furthermore the trillions we spent on the Iraq war, and now the Iran war are being subsidized by the government that aren't being reflected in the price per KWH of a operator selling KWH generated by fossil fuels (If the oil companies had to use their own profits to pay for war). Oil companies also don't have to pay for negative externalities for exhaust fumes, and dumping waste into the water.
>Relying on China for panels & batteries for energy security?
China cannot cut off panels and batteries, these are commodities, these things are produced and sold in such large numbers that there is no possible way to track down or monitor such information.
These are not Jet Engines, nuclear centrifuges, advanced military microchips, Lithography machines, Rare Earth
There are only a handful of companies that buy rare earth, they are low volume, highly specialized (Hence possible to cut off)
While there are 1,000,000x more companies that buy their panels and inverters from china. Every single gas station, Every single convenience store, Every single grocery store, Every walmart, Every mcdonalds, Every auto repair shop, Every corporate building, Every one with a parking lot etc... would be a potential customer to buy solar panels, and batteries and install their system themselves.
They can cut off Rare Earth because theres a handful of companies in the US that can actually use them. While there are millions of companies in the US buying batteries and/or solar panels.
Once a ship leaves with 50,000 panels theres no tracking them. BTW China produces 1 billion solar panels a year!
> You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
Eh, once you have built your grid in solar and wind, you don't really depend on the countries that sold solar panels and wind turbines for you. Those last for a long time, long enjoy that you can even spin up manufacturing yourself; it's not really something inscrutable.
There may be an argument that depending on the state of the world that raw materials to manufacture some of those things may become more complicated to access, but that is true even for countries that currently make those.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
> Eh, once you have built your grid in solar and wind, you don't really depend on the countries that sold solar panels and wind turbines for you.
You don't account for repair, replacement and upgrade? You don't want to expand your power grid? This is a very naive take to be honest.
No country should be stagnant with what they already have, that's a recipe for a disaster.
I can argue the same, once you have built your grid in nuclear and stockpile enough uranium for decades, you're pretty much set right? Those last for a long time as well :).
it takes at least 20 years to build a nuclear power plant and it takes another 20 to build it back. it costs a multitude of resources and money to build, maintain and tear down compared to renewables.
nuclear has its role currently but it's not the future.
Long long ago people planted trees where a windmill was to be build. Construction would start 20-30 years later and also took quite a bit of time.
If it took (I dunno) say a year to build one you could pick a new location and plant trees each year.
Seems almost an alien concept but I guess it is a bit like a construction company has to wait for the new powerplant to expire before they get to build a new one.
Yes, switching energy sources takes a while, but the energy system is being completely rebuilt anyway as equipment ages out, so you need to be continually doing this anyway.
None of the actions that countries are taking to decouple from the US happen over night.
The US has destroyed its privileged position among nations, but the effects won't be visible for a couple more years.
There’s a huge difference in relying on others for daily fuel/fertiliser supplies for your survival, and relying on them for parts for vehicles/infrastructure that can run for decades.
There’s also the fact that EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled. Once the transition is complete I expect larger regions (ie Europe, but maybe not an individual European country) will be self sufficient in their materials.
> By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale.
You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need. What’s more, if you switch to electricity for industrial heating, metal production and fertiliser production, you will have ALL the buffers you need to absorb fluctuations in renewable energy and more. Especially for heating solutions - storing energy for months is trivial. Most people aren’t aware that just dumping excess energy in geothermal wells in summer has become fairly common in the Netherlands. Especially Americans live in this bubble where they have no clue about solutions that have become commonplace and widespread in other countries.
> Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned.
No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance. The only thing that’s hard to replace is the longer hydrocarbons. But we’ve been forced to do deal with that anyway due to better vehicle fuel economy (the amount of bitumen you get when refining enough oil to drive a car X km is going down, giving you less bitumen to pave those X km of road).
> Oil is a must in military.
I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller. Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
I suspect advancements will reduce need for oil there as well over time. We can already synthesise jet fuel.
> If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
It’s not the magic bullet people think. There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
The main issue that nuclear isn’t cheap enough to be a part of a full decarbonisation solution. We need the dirt cheap intermittent excess electricity from renewables to make decarbonisation of fertilisers and various industrial processes viable. We have started to get the first local self sustained renewable ammonia production plants for fertiliser recently - and they’re generally tied to local renewable electricity production. The cost of the electrolysis and storage solutions for making hydrogen keeps going down, so it’s increasingly viable to produce hydrogen intermittently and store it to use when electricity is more expensive.
I like nuclear. But it’s not essential, and will probably not be competitive barring a huge breakthrough. And no, SMRs are not it. The way to get the cheapest nuclear is to build the biggest reactors. Same as with wind turbines. The scaling laws favour bigger designs (energy production scales with volume, costs roughly scale with reactor vessel surface area)
> EV batteries - and many of the other components in this plan - can be recycled
And not many of them are recycled, because making new ones is cheaper. Unfortunately it's true for most of the stuff you see. So no one is incentivized to recycle.
> You absolutely can. This is a completely outdated idea by this point. We have all the solutions we need.
Sure you can use batteries to maintain the power grid sync, it's a valid solution but is it THE solution? It is the most expensive solution you have today to maintain the grid, both day time (frequency sync for example) and night time.
It is a lot cheaper to just use coal/gas/nuclear station to maintain the grid. That's the point I'm trying to make. It is a lot easier, cheaper and more diverse to just use coal/gas/nuclear as the main source and maybe 20-30% wind/solar.
It's not that you CANNOT do it. It's that it doesn't make sense to switch 100% to wind/solar, and will be very stupid to do such thing.
> No. Oil is just hydrocarbons. It’s not a magical substance.
Oil produces plastic, a major component in all of the "renewable components". I'm not talking about oil as energy.
> I’ll give you that. For a while. Though the quantities are smaller.
You'll be surprised. Look up how much reserve quantity in serious militaries. Cut off oil and you lose a war in a month.
Wake me up when you have jet fighters & tanks with batteries.
> Any reason to think Europe couldn’t be self sustained for that purpose?
Yes. Every country in the world needs oil, especially in military. Do you want to defend against Russia?
> There have been huge supply chain issues with nuclear as well. Though at least you can fairly easily build up a supply of fuel that can last a decade or two.
That's the point? You can be energy secured for a decade at least. Supply chain issue is a much bigger problem if you want to go with solar/wind. There is no country in the world except China that can produce full pipeline of solar right now. Would you want to depend on China for the supply chain?
There is no denser energy source you have today than nuclear. Denser energy = good. It's always been that way since beginning of human history. It is also clean. It should be the essential. Everything else should be just an alternative.
The best time to build nuclear is decades ago. The second best time is now.
You think other countries can't restrict those things? Restricting components related to those things will work just fine.
By the way, you can never switch completely to just renewables, it doesn't scale that well. They are simply too inefficient, unsecure, to "switch completely" in a country scale. Maybe just your house or some districts. You still need coal/gas/nuclear to maintain the power grid.
Oil is needed for many components inside stuff you mentioned. Oil is a must in military. If you want clean, abundant, cheap, secure energy, invest in nuclear.
Everything has tradeoffs. Diversify it.