renewable energy transition

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Climate Change by Joseph Romm

biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Climatic Research Unit, data science, decarbonisation, demand response, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, gigafactory, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge worker, mass immigration, ocean acidification, performance metric, renewable energy transition, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, the scientific method

It is ironic, as one of the Stanford authors noted, “At the moment, Germany makes up about 40% of the installed market, but sunshine in Germany isn’t that great. So from a system perspective, it may be better to deploy PV systems where there is more sunshine.” Germany has done the world a great favor by investing so heavily in its renewable energy transition, which has helped to bring down the cost of solar energy for every country. However, solar power is considerably more cost-effective in places where it is sunnier longer during both the day and year, such as the Southwest United States and the Middle East. This is another reason we can expect the amount of solar PV generated to continue its rapid increase.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The cities of Frankfurt and Munich, which had never sold off their energy grids, had already joined the transition and pledged to move to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 and 2025, respectively. But Hamburg and Berlin, which had both gone the privatization route, were lagging behind. And this was a central argument for proponents of taking back Hamburg’s grid: it would allow them to get off coal and nuclear and go green.5 Much has been written about Germany’s renewable energy transition—particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its future targets (the country is aiming for 55–60 percent renewables by 2035).6 The weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question of whether the decision to phase out nuclear energy has led to a resurgence of coal (more on that next chapter).

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That would mean partially compensating Ecuador for what it would have earned from oil revenues had it opted to drill. As Esperanza Martínez, president of Acción Ecológica, explained, the “proposal establishes a precedent, arguing that countries should be rewarded for not exploiting their oil. . . . Funds gathered would be used for the [renewable] energy transition and could be seen as payments for the ecological debt from North to South, and they should be distributed democratically at the local and global levels.” Besides, she writes, surely “the most direct way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide was to leave fossil fuels in the ground.”30 The Yasuní plan was based on the premise that Ecuador, like all developing countries, is owed a debt for the inherent injustice of climate change—the fact that wealthy countries had used up most of the atmospheric capacity for safely absorbing CO2 before developing countries had a chance to industrialize.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Germany’s chief solar lobbyist and architect of the renewable energy law was inspired by an early-twentieth-century scientist, Wilhelm Ostwald. Much as modern environmentalists do, Ostwald believed that society’s energy consumption should be no greater than what the Earth receives each year from the sun (Chapter 12). The renewable energy transition would cost the equivalent of a scoop of ice cream on monthly electricity bills, the Greens claimed. Nine years after the scoop of ice cream came a revised price tag—€1 trillion ($1.13 trillion). Soaring electricity bills led to a consumer backlash. Renewables turned out to be an engine of financial destruction, costing shareholders of the three quoted German utility companies nearly €70 billion ($79b) and consumers €269 billion ($304b) in higher electricity bills.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

And as far as the end user is concerned, renewable electricity is just another form of electricity – it offers no advantage as a means of powering things, even if generating the electricity that way has various charms. Its benefits are felt at the level of the system, not at the level of the individual buyer. That means a renewable-energy transition will need significant pushing. As with Grübler’s observations about the time transitions take, this points merely to decarbonization being unprecedented, not impossible. But the best example in recent history of an energy transition that governments tried to push through, rather than simply letting users pull, is not very encouraging.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Each year, a new curve graphed the power that Californian consumers would expect the grid to deliver after they had consumed all of the solar power generated in the middle of the day. Plotted together, the various curves took on the unmistakable shape of … a duck. Excited to have boiled a complex concept down to a tractable bath toy, CAISO adopted the “duck curve” as the mascot of its campaign to educate the public about the difficulties of the renewable energy transition. Figure 3.4 California’s duck curve. This is an updated version of the original figure created by the California grid operator (CAISO) to predict the increasing strain on California’s grid as the penetration of solar power increased. CAISO’s original projection of a more than 1,000 MW/h ramp requirement in 2020 arrived three years ahead of schedule.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

One pioneering study found that in the case of Germany, where nuclear and hydroelectric dams produce seventy-five and thirty-five times more in energy, respectively, than is required to make them, solar, wind, and biomass produce just 1.6, 3.9, and 3.5 times more.89 Coal, gas, and oil return about thirty times more energy than they require.90 Just as the far higher power densities of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high-energy, urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. And, as we have seen, for some advocates of renewables, that has always been the goal. In its 2019 exposé, Der Spiegel concludes that Germany’s renewable energy transition was just done incorrectly,91 but that’s misleading. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how romantic they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life. 6. Why Dilute Energy Destroys Since the 1970s, when the renewable energy agenda was proposed as an alternative to nuclear, most scenarios for 100 percent renewables depended heavily on burning biomass when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing.