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Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Number 1 isn't really true in any sense. In Canada we use over 100,000 kWh or equivalent and Denmark uses about 30. Their standard of living is higher. So is Switzerland at 30. Would you say Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago have twice the standard of living as Canada?
Your number 2 also isn't correct. Return on energy invested (EROI) is not a useful metric for really anything, and the current way it's calculated ignores a lot of inputs and outputs that would make it useful. To compare a finite resource that requires much more investment as time goes on (ie fossil fuels) vs investment on infinite resources is a metric without any useful units. Besides, I'm not sure how it's relevant to any conversation about the future. The technology exists now, at the price it exists, and will continue to get significantly cheaper.
Gonna need a citation here. The way standard of living increases is by increasing services delivered to citizens. And while, yes, that requires energy, there's no reason that has to start at biomass and work it's way through. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
Yes! The reason was there were no other better options! It's 2023 this year. The industrial revolution was quite a while ago.
I guess I just don't see it that way. The technology exists (at least to the extent to get 80-90% there), the money exists to get it done, and will is getting there. We need more people pushing the will than having more people say "well wadda ya do. It's hard".
When looking at transition costs, no one said "it'll be expensive to build all these gas stations, oil tankers, oil wells, refineries, pipelines, etc. No. The market was there, government policy made it attractive to do it, and here we are. The wealthier world can absolutely afford to help grow energy wealth in the right way in emerging countries.
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If the money was there, and it made economic sense to do so, we would be getting it done. O&G companies are divesting of all of their green projects right now because they don't make economic sense, green energy companies are tanking on the stock market because they are not as profitable as most hoped and wealthy countries have no desire to give hand outs to power countries.
Its not "its hard", its that the system as it stands does not incentivize anyone to do anything and certainly not sacrifice money and quality of life to do so. I still have yet to see any tangible, concrete, and sound economic analysis on full cycle green energy making sense at this point to push out fossil fuels. If you can provide to me costs associated with building green facilities, maintaining them cause they won't last forever and solar and wind are notorious for useful life issues, upgrading grids to accept them (which is a whole other can of worms and is never in any of these assessments in terms of full cycle economics) and supporting base load requirements to quality of life I would be happy to look through them - they do not exist as far as I can tell.
Yesterday I read an article on utility poles alone are going to cause issues for the lumber industry. There is simply not enough trees that size to support connecting power lines. That is just 1 issue and one I never would have thought of as an unintended consequence of needing more power.
https://www.wsj.com/business/the-ele...trees-e2b7ee92
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Electric cars. The solar build-out. Washington’s rural-broadband initiative. Utilities bracing the grid for stronger storms. They all depend on the same thing: big trees. The utility-pole business is booming, thanks to a flood of public and private infrastructure spending. So the hunt is on for the tallest, straightest, knot-free conifers, which are peeled, dried and pressure-treated at facilities such as Koppers Holdings’ pole plant in southeastern Georgia’s pinelands. Employees cruise surrounding pine plantations, marking pole-worthy loblolly and longleaf and making offers. The bigger, the better these days, given how much more equipment and cable poles must hold in the era of fiber optics and electric cars, said Jim Healey, Koppers’ vice president of utility and industrial products.
“Based on production data and current harvest schedules, there are not enough larger trees available to sustainably produce the quantity of 40-foot poles made today if the poles had to be two to four classes larger,” the North American Wood Pole Council warned in a 2020 paper. The trade group suggested utilities consider more, not larger, poles.
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