Energy myths and realities

What Hacker News says

1. philipsSep 2022
   I have read one of Vaclav Smil’s books and I think he is too stuck on the idea that history will repeat itself. I don’t think this transition compares to the past examples he uses for political and technological reasons and in fact Energy Myths and Realities doesn’t age well because of how rapidly the statistics got out of date on renewable adoption.

   That said the book is a great and useful historical work.

   His steadfastness to this hypothesis that “all transitions are like past transitions” is explicitly stated in the end of one of his books:

   "A world without fossil fuel combustion is highly desirable, and, to be optimistic, our collective determination, commitment, and persistence could accelerate its arrival. But getting there will be expensive and will require considerable patience. Coming energy transitions will unfold, as the past ones have done, across decades, not years." (Vaclav Smil, Energy Myths and Realities)

   Show morethread
2. cossatotJun 2015
   There are two main issues with hydroelectric power (the power density of the two are not easily comparable as their is too much spatial variability in each):

   1) Ecosystem disruption (inundation of land as well as blocking migratory aquatic species and significant changes in the downstream water temperature).

   2) Almost all of the potential hydroelectric sites in the US (and much of the developed world) have already been utilized (e.g., [1],[2]). That is, capacity can't really expand much. However, the potential for pumped storage (which is not an energy source) is still high.

   Wind power production is still nowhere near at capacity even though it suffers from the deficiencies relative to hydro that you have mentioned.

   [1] Smil, Energy Myths and Realities (Excellent, highly recommended), http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Myths-Realities-Bringing-Scienc...

   [2]: Prentiss, Energy Revolution: The Physics and Promise of Efficient Technology (not that good if you've read other books on the subject), http://www.amazon.com/Energy-Revolution-Physics-Efficient-Te...

   Show morethread
3. pfdietzAug 2024
   Smil was wildly wrong about the trajectory of PV improvement. In his defense, so was almost everyone else.

   I found the following comment about Smil:

   "There is a way how to evaluate the quality of prophets, seers and visionaries. Find their 5,10,15 years old predictions. I own the Smil’s book: Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate (2010). So have a look how good prophet he was 10 years in advance and focus on photovoltaics (I own Czech translation of the book, so I need to re-translate his text back to English, I hope I will not skew his ideas too much):

   * To get 1 PWh/year of electricity you need to install about 450 GW worth of solar panels. You need dozens of years to acomplish such task. Reality check: 3 years in current speed, in the future probably faster.

   * The cost of PV panels fell from 5 USD/W in 2000 to 4.5 USD/W in 2009. He don’t see much perspective of price plummeting as predicted f.e. by Al Gore (who cited the learning curve, Smil counted with 0.05 USD/W in 2020) or by PV industry (1.5 USD/W in 2020). Smil predicted that PV panels would be 25% cheaper in 2020 and 50% in 2030. Reality check: Current price of PV panels is ~0.2 W/USD. While Smil wrote the book manufacturers finally scaled their production of polysilicone and PV cells to cover the demand. Competition among them set the cost of PV panel on the freefall trajectory. PV panels cost less than he predicted for 2030 in 2011.

   How credible are such visionaries?"

   I will add that in 2023, 447 GW of PV was installed globally. So, we're at the point where Smil's "dozens of years" is being done each and every year.

   Show morethread
4. activatedgeekMar 2021
   On this note, reading Vaclav Smil's "Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate" [1] has been sobering. I had a similar presumption that this isn't a technological problem but rather of a policy conflicts (and subsequent perverse mechanisms including corruption).

   In fact, it is actually a technologically challenging problem. This book is a decade old but I would assume that nothing has drastically changed over the past decade, and the energy demand has probably only gone up. Highly recommended read, if not already!

   [1]: https://www.librarything.com/work/10653100

   Show morethread
5. cossatotSep 2015
   ~85% of the US's energy usage comes from fossil fuels [1]. Despite the unfortunate reality of anthropogenic climate change, the really key thing to realize is that transitions to alternate forms of energy take decades because the scale of such transitions is absolutely enormous; these changes take longer and longer with every major transition, i.e. wood to coal, or coal to oil; oil to whatever's next could take a century [2]. The earth has about 1300 billion barrels of 'proven' oil reserves[3] which at current consumption rates of ~100 million barrels per day [4] gives us about 36 years of oil left. And that assumes that, despite rapid increases in population size and economic development, that consumption won't change.

   36 years isn't very long to develop the new energy technology, test it sufficiently, and build the infrastructure. Oil is the hardest to replace of all of our energy sources because it has the highest energy density and is therefore integral to transportation. Replacing coal with solar + nuclear would be a better option because both are based on stationary power plants instead of car engines and jet turbines. But in reality, if oil gets expensive now, we'll just start burning more coal because the pieces are already in place.

   Like it or not (I definitely do not like it), we are a society very reliant upon fossil fuels, and if fossil fuel accessibility is restricted substantially (i.e. by completely stopping oil exploration) there will be considerable destabilization of society, which will do two particularly nasty things: 1) Harm the poor disproportionately, by making it difficult or impossible for the poor in developed nations to heat their houses and drive to work and school, and raising the cost of food substantially; and by completely stopping if not reversing the economic development of the rest of the world, keeping billions in poverty. 2) Wreak tremendous havoc on the environment, as the forests are cut down to provide wood for heating and cooking, and the fisheries and wild animal stock is razed due to high food prices.

   There are no great solutions to the problem, but there are some that are much better than the current status quo of doing nothing, or the opposite end-member solution of enforcing an otherwise unlikely peak oil catastrophe by stopping exploration. Taxing carbon and using the proceeds to fund new energy technology as well as ramping up current alternative energy production both domestically and in India and Africa, and implementing more efficient transportation, heating and electricity generation could go a long way.

   [1] 2012 levels, from Energy Revolution by Mara Prentiss [2] Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Policy Debate by Vaclav Smil [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves [4] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/report/global_oil.cfm

   Show morethread