Rhetorical flourishes aside, I'd love for you to be right and I'm perfectly content to be convinced that you are. What specific technologies or materials will get batteries over this hump? Please don't say lithium-ion because although they seem OK for phones I can't seem to buy one for a power tool that will last a year.

When it is blowing, possibly. However it requires backup power for those inconvenient times when there is no (or little) wind. The cost of backup plants is one of the hidden costs of wind.

"While China continues to build a handful of nuclear plants, their wind generation capacity is already far ahead of what they're producing from nuclear"

China is planning on 400-500 GW of nuclear electric production by 2050. That will likely dwarf the real output of its wind farms.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/why-china-will-go-all-in-on-n...

"Wind is already cheaper than nuclear without subsidies in the USA and the UK. It also kills less birds and bats than buildings, cell towers, and cats."

Wind might be cheaper in the very best siting areas. The long-term durability of the generators remains to be seen.

Regardless, the affordability and effectiveness of wind has long been exaggerated by advocates. Here is a more balanced treatment:

http://www.strata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Full-Report...

The report's conclusion:

'The true cost of wind energy is higher than most cost estimates calculate. Mandates requiring the use of wind energy increase electricity costs for consumers, and subsidies mask the actual cost of doing so. RPS require intermittent renewable energy to exist, but at the expense of utilities and consumers. The PTC makes wind power cheaper for utilities and consumers, but at the expense of taxpayers.

Through such policies, U.S. policymakers have essentially decided that electricity consumers will have wind power, even if it is more expensive. The cost of this decision has fallen to U.S. taxpayers and consumers of electricity. When weighing the costs and benefits of wind power, not including all of the hidden costs makes wind power appear to be a more attractive option than it actually is. Energy policy decisions, however, should be based on a more complete estimate of the cost of wind energy.'

"You mention next-gen nuclear tech will come in at 5 cents/kwh. Utility solar is already below 4 cents/kwh"

That is heavily subsidized, and also in the very best siting environment. Obviously those installations produce nothing at night, and even during the day average well under their peak output.

Solar is in no way a replacement for reliable, 24/7 nuclear generation.

From the article: > In the power industry, Hawaii is commonly considered a "test case" for new renewable energy technologies because its power prices — the highest in the nation — have made cutting-edge resources cost-effective on the islands before they reach that point on the mainland.

So not directly applicable, right now, in most other locations.

Don't forget ocean ecosystems have already more or less collapsed due to fishing and mass human migration has already happened due to urbanization and population growth. Most city buildings that exist today will have been constructed in the last few decades or certainly the last century. We're quite fast at moving and developing civilizations.

Baseline power is the observation that if we have less than ideal power plants that need to run 24/7 to be economical (usually because of high capital costs, e.g. nuclear plants), we can still deploy them if we then also invest in other plants for filling in the peaks.

See, the important part here is that you always need to meet demand (maybe you can shift demand around a bit, but after shifting it the observation still holds).

If you have baseline plants, your supply curve is a flat line so the peaks in the demand are the holes you need to fill in somehow.

With a renewable source like wind or solar, you may actually be able to meet the peak demand, but then have a hole in the supply at some other point (say at night, or when there's no wind). So you need to fill in these somehow (as you say).

As result, under $3K/kw we'd have a week of reserve and the ability to short-term double power during peaks using the gas turbines. And using the same loan calculations it is $0.075/kwh.

This... is exactly what is happening :-). Utilities and network operators are trying out ways to give incentives to customers who can respond with negative load (i.e. turning the power down). It makes economic sense because the alternative is increasing production at immense speeds, which is quite costly and inefficient (often using diesel generators, and a lot of them). Aluminium smelters like the examples you give (and quite a few other businesses) are doing precisely this.

Also note that an aluminium smelter works by electrolysis, not by pyrolysis (which is what GP seems to suggest?), which is why they use so much electricity and why they can in fact turn it on and off at a whim.

You also have to consider that people who live in apartments or rent a house in developed markets are pretty much either locked out of the market for PV's or not incentivized to pay out of pocket (even considering the subsidies/financing that exist [looking at you Solar City]) for such systems. I'd say that share of the population is far larger than people with a mortgage/own a home and are interested in such systems.

This embodies the situation: "Does this mean CSP will eventually disappear, trampled by PV? Not necessarily. CSP has one major advantage over PV: dispatchability. Current CSP plants can store thermal energy for up to 16 hours, which means that their production profile can match the demand profile (just like a conventional power plant). PV is not dispatchable, as a feasible commercial energy storage system does not yet exist. Dispatchability will be increasingly important when and where renewable energies achieve high penetration rates, so two things can happen: CSP becomes a commercially viable solution before a commercial PV storage system is developed, carving its own market segment; or the PV industry quickly solves the storage issue and becomes the solar technology of choice."[0]

[0]: http://thisisxy.com/blog/cannibalization-in-renewable-energi...

They already did in the UK and Germany as the article points out.

The political weight of utilities and the oil/natgas industry is significantly higher in the US which is probably why the US hasn't followed in Germany/UK's footsteps. Too many Senate re-election campaign funds being paid for by Kochs, etc.

If it's not going down already, I imagine it will be going down within the next couple of years.

When you expand it it gets very cold and you lose pressure (you can wait a bit for the air to warm it up to regain some of what was lost).

How do you define "real" terms? Sure it's not the price that would emerge if those taxes/incentives didn't exist, but market prices are always adjusted to the current particularities, it's never an absolute value. For example, if it was technically and legally possible to identify all the health and property damages caused by coal pollution and force the coal producers to compensate affected people, the market price of coal would have to be higher than what you call "real" cost, but would that be any less real?

I don't understand how what you say is somehow a case for fossil fuel more so than a case for energy use. That is: why is the rise of a country's wealth metrics tied to fossil fuel? Wouldn't it be the same even if it were using say solar?

Also, I quickly browsed through your second link and I was very surprised about the figure 1.6 (which claims that there is less pollution as time goes by). I checked the source and although there isn't much context, it seems that what the EPA data is saying is that less pollutants are emitted year over year… that's a negative second order derivative of the amount of pollutant, not a negative first order derivative as the title seems to suggest (to me anyway).

It bothers me greatly that such a superficial analysis reveals bothersome details like this. I am inclined to believe that this source is not very good.

But I agree on one point. When (not IF) the sea level rises, some people are bound to end up better off, by taking opportunities and exploiting all the other people who have to find new place to live.

Some people will do absolutely anything to make money, and don't care how their action will affect people living now or a generation from now. Human nature.

The point I think (and to which I agree) is that real costs matter because anything can be "competitive" with enough subsidization. And subsidization doesn't make things cheaper in the real sense, it simply realigns incentives.

As is, renewables are heavily subsidized, fossil fuels are taxed heavily, and there's still a gap. It's trivial to close that gap through tax policy. So then the question becomes, what is the correct level of subsidization? I'm not sure, but I don't think the answer is "more, more, more". Because eventually you will eliminate the industry that is paying the taxes to offset the subsidized one. When it's no longer economically feasible to pay those heavy subsidies, that's when you'll see why the real cost of production matters.

If we someday convert our deserts into massive solar energy farms, it may not even matter much that the oil technology is less efficient. There would be so much excess energy during daytime, the greater efficiency of EV wouldn't be a big advantage.

And gas engine technology itself isn't standing still. The traditional ICE engine efficiency of 25% is pathetic compared to the EV 80%. But the Prius combines both technologies and gets 40% thermal efficiency which is a big improvement. It's possible this could be increased further with more improvements in hybrid technology.

Many think that hybrids and plug-in hybrids are a bridge technology to a pure EV future. But the future may end up being a lot more similar to the present than expected. Maybe the typical car purchase in the future will be a 100 mpg hybrid with 60 mile plug-in battery range as an option. Those who have personal garages would buy the option, those who don't would not. And it would be all powered by massive solar power farms in the Mojave desert and wind farms in the mid-west. And the output from all this would be electricity and carbon neutral oil.

Doesn't burning it just turn it back into what it was made from? You're not releasing any more carbon than you put into it.

Whenever I would go home, the heat would completely wreck my productivity. I would have to sequester myself in the coolest room in the house, then judiciously use the air conditioning to maintain some semblance of sanity.

Then my dad got fed up and took advantage of a government subsidy to buy solar panels.

It was expensive initially, but now we essentially have free power. We'll break even in terms of costs within 4 years.

We now run air conditioning when we want, wherever we want.

The increase in productivity is massive. I no longer have to deal with heat when I go home.

Now imagine this happening for billions of people living in tropical climates.

It's going to change the contour of the world

We've heard that before, as far back as 1954: "too cheap to meter". The problem is, even if the incremental generation of electricity is practically free, there are still large costs in building the windmills and solar panels. And there are large distribution costs as well.

In addition, the more cheap energy there is, the more inefficiently people will use it. Why bother with things like Energy Star and LEED? Just build inefficient power supplies and poorly insulated buildings. After all, it is "practically free" to heat them and cool them.

Post scarcity energy is a non-starter. Consumption will always increase as necessary. Here's an even more crazy example: just how much bitcoin (or similar) mining would there be if energy were cheap? It's already a disgusting misuse of resources, it would be a lot worse!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

far from it. Just for example - the gas turbine reaches 50+% efficiency and in sequence hybrids there is no limitations which killed gas turbine car 50 years ago. Of course gas turbine is expensive, so we aren't going this way.

>Note the VW emissions scandal.

A BigCo stuck in old ways tells nothing about what is technologically possible. I'd say you can't do worse than current typical gas or diesel engine which basically hasn't changed for 100+ years :) Even well known Atkinson cycle was implemented en-mass only recently. Once i file my patents, i'll tell you in more details about other efficient designs and improvements :)

Without the efforts like CAFE and CA emission/efficiency requirements, we'd still be stuck with 20% efficient carburetor gas ICE. The increase of the regulatory pressure creates market opportunity for efficient designs, and you'll see what will come when CAFE hits 50mpg :)