Quote:
Originally Posted by Flash Walken
I appreciate the response, but it didn't touch a single bit on why energy alternative are not promoted by the government.
Why aren't renewable energy alternatives for consumers subsidized to the same degree as conventional energy?
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I apologize, I suppose my response was asking you to read between the lines a little. The data I provided, however, was meant to show you the consequences of what happens when a Government makes a bet and does subsidize a transition technology like wind or solar PV through guaranteed contracts at artificially high prices and preferential access to the grid as they have in Germany.
The net impact is exactly what environmentalists want. Namely, conventional baseload gets replaced with renewables. However, you're replacing baseload with a less reliable technology, and one that is far more expensive. Do you think a party in Alberta would have any success if they ran on a platform of "hey, let us destroy the only job that you're good at and have energy prices triple over what they are today so we can pay for doing so"? Probably not, and that's why it's not happening. Would you pay $0.32/kWh for the generation cost of your power? Not to mention the fact that any new grid that would need to be established for connecting expanding renewable energy would be astronomically expensive due to it's horribly low economies of scale. It hasn't happened because it is not a good alternative, and Germany's case study is a perfect real life example of how crappy an idea it is. Their carbon emission levels haven't appreciably declined under Energiewende, either - so what the heck exactly are they accomplishing?
Policymakers
have not come up with a way to encourage the adoption of renewables without hurting the public because they
can not.
It is simply not practical to build a modern society around the performance parameters of renewable technologies. They cannot provide enough power - they lack the energy density (output vs footprint), are not on for predictable amounts of time (how can you develop a manufacturing base or run things like hospitals if you cannot depend on power being available), and the energy returned from the technologies is
not greater than the energy invested in their production and operation (or are very marginally so). What's the point? No matter what politicians do, we won't be able to solve this puzzle without completely re-defining the way we live while we are at it. The only thing that can solve that is revolution, collapse, and reconstruction under a new set of rules. Policy alone is not effective enough to cause that much change.
Sure, traditional baseload might start getting clever and divert it's excess energy during peak renewable generation times to processes like hydrogen production or other synthetic fuel fabrication (i.e. converting CO2 from the atmosphere and seawater into diesel fuels, etc); but the truth is that utilities will only re-divert enough to these processes as is required to avoid losses when power pool prices go to zero or negative. There will always need to have a significant baseload behind a grid with significant renewable inputs for the hundreds of "just in case" failure scenarios that come hand in hand with renewables. This will make our power extremely costly and with high footprint - again, unless we all agree to live like pioneers when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.. but only then.
Second, I take exception to your question about "subsidization to the same degree". This isn't really a point. Granted, the data is difficult to gather and interpret, the IEA estimates that hydrocarbon subsidies run about $660 billion annually, for example. But that is something like 0.7% of global GDP, and these sources account for a vast majority of global energy supply (and thus GDP). It's easy to put up billion dollar subsidization bills when the activity is generating far, far more income. Germany plans on investing something like 550 billion Euro on their transition, which is approaching the same scale, but these sources do not generate anywhere near the same value on a kilowatt basis.
But thank you for asking the question, because I am going to seek out better data to see if someone has compared the levels of subsidization an energy supply receives relative to it's generation contribution.
Let's make no bones about this - renewables are in the very early stage of their adoption curve. The amount of money governments invested and subsidized for the development of our existing power generation and distribution model is astronomical (another set of data that would be interesting to research). You're right that renewables haven't received the benefit of 100 years of subisdization and stimulation policy, but my point is that we are making the wrong bet. The kinks won't be worked out with time.
I am glad we are acting, but setting our supply mix targets with too high of a renewable component is folly and it will completely devastate the high quality of life we enjoy today. There is absolutely no better fit for a growing population and improving quality of life standards world-wide than there is with Gen IV nuclear. An investment in that technology has the potential to support the development of a true space exploration age as well - something renewables have a very slim chance of making any meaningful contribution to. As funny as that sounds, I do believe it is important for our species to get off this planet eventually. Why not start now?