Above, new BMW ad touting the new i3 electric vehicle.
When we think of rapid technological change, the early days of the internet come immediately to mind, for anyone who was an adult at that time. In 1993, while many of us had seen or used computers at work, the idea of owning one seemed a bit off the wall. What would you do with it?
Send an email? to Whom? Why?
We remember what happened then.
Fast forward, wrap your mind around this fact. Solar energy is now cheaper than gas, in Dubai. And Texas.
Below, watch Michael Leibrich, New Energy guru for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, discuss the transition now underway in the utillity space. Worth a listen in the entirety, but if you’re pressed, go right to 8:30, and listen to the story about film Photography giant Kodak’s inabilty to foresee and adjust to the rapidity of the switch to digital cameras – a process Liebrich likens to a “phase change.”
Texans like my friend Michael Osborne will quibble whether Dubai or Austin has the lowest prices for Solar right now, but the message is clear.
One of the biggest solar power stories of the past year — if not the biggest — was the record-low price of solar power that was bid in Dubai toward the end of the year. ACWA Power bid 5.98 cents per kWh, well below the cost of natural gas in the region (which is 9 cents per kWh). Michael Liebreich — Chairman of the Advisory Board of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and founder of the company under the original name of New Energy Finance — was kind enough to invite me to dinner the other night after a World Future Energy Summit panel that he moderated. On the way to dinner, our conversation was already getting so interesting that we stopped to record a bit of it.
Mr Liebrich’s remarks stand up in light of the most recent survey of utility executives by Utility Dive:
Despite these challenges, utility executives today see immense opportunity in emerging areas. The emergence of electric vehicles, energy storage, smart technologies and even rooftop solar are an opportunity for utilities to bring new services to consumers — or at least build out the smart grid platform on which they will rely. But without first solving their most pressing challenges, utilities won’t find it easy to seize new opportunities.
I’ll include my recent Renewable Energy piece, just to round it out, in case you’re sending this to someone to make a point about the energy transition.
Finally with Liebreich somebody who’s not trying to sell snake oil.
http://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-10-predictions-clean-energy-2015/
“It’s still about the costs, stupid!”
I love that term “Kodaked” – it conveys so many aspects of new technologies supplanting old technologies.
OPEC countries are connecting the dots.
An unused barrel is a sellable barrel.
I’ll be brief. We need to stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by talk of electric BMW’s, Dubai (population 2 million), and the apples and oranges of the “Kodak fail”and rise of the internet vs AGW.
We need to focus on our old friends COAL-INDIA-CHINA. Anything else is mindless bright-sidedness and whistling past the graveyard.
Fortunately, China & India are starting to move. Let’s hope they move quickly in the right direction.
DOG – do you not feel that there is anything to gain by ‘leading by example’? Of taking the ethical and technological high ground by aggressively reducing our GHG emissions? If that’s the case we’ll have to agree to disagree. IMO there is a lot to gain by our developing the technological tools, and the policy processes, needed to transition to a low fossil fuel economy. If we don’t lead the development of solutions then we’ll be buying from those who do. And I see a definite risk of the US clinging to fossil fuels long after other nations have matured past them. Much like Japan still has a whaling fleet long after most other nations have accepted that whales are more than just prey to be hunted.
Of course we should “lead by example” and “take the ethical and technological high ground by aggressively reducing our GHG emissions”.
Unfortunately, we are doing far too little, far too late in either leadership or reducing our GHG emissions. IMO, mankind’s “developing the technological tools” is what has gotten us into this AGW box in the first place, and we are NOT going to grow and “technologize” our way out of it based on present evidence.
Nor are we going to come up with “the policy processes needed to transition to a low fossil fuel economy” as long as the dominant “policy” on this planet is free-market capitalism, unrestrained growth, and plundering of the planet’s resources by whoever “gets there first”.
I see some faulty logic in both 1) “If we don’t lead the development of solutions then we’ll be buying from those who do”, and 2) “And I see a definite risk of the US clinging to fossil fuels long after other nations have matured past them”.
1) Is a non sequitur. It does not follow that if we do not “lead” we will go to the back of the line. Our “solutions” need to be U.S.-specific, and they may not be appropriate for other countries, just as other countries’ solutions may not be right for us. It’s a stretch to phrase it the way you did.
2) The only “other” nations that really matter at this juncture are CHINA and INDIA. It matters little what Denmark, Sweden, and Germany etc “mature” into when we have over 2.5 BILLION people that are burning too much COAL in Asia right now and plan to do so for a long time. U.S. per capita carbon emissions are too high right now, far higher than China or India, and WE are the ones who need to “mature” down to their level. And all analyses point to things getting worse before they get better over there, regardless of what we do.
Your example of “Japan still having a whaling fleet long after most other nations have accepted that whales are more than just prey to be hunted” better illustrates how difficult it will be to solve the AGW problem. The Japanese are alone on whales—-isolated and under attack—-and they have been for DECADES. Yet they still kill whales. Just as sharks are killed for fins to make SOUP. Just as elephants, rhinos, tigers, and bears are killed for ivory or for body parts that are highly prized as “medicine”. Various “cultures” and subgroups of humans do exactly what they want to do regarding the biosphere and pay no attention to any “greater good”—-wishful thinking about who is going to “lead” and what rapid technological “fixes” we may apply IS, as I will repeat, mindless bright-sidedness and whistling past the graveyard.
Some other Crockers are also in a state of denial about all that, as witnessed by the 5 “thumbs down” my comment got. I will be vulgar and blunt—-get your heads out of you-know-where, people. Doesn’t the relentless buildup on Crock of evidence for AGW (perhaps CAGW) and that we are fast approaching major SHTF time sink in?
The Economist, hardly a hotbed of socialist greenies, did a good overview of where the world energy industry is headed. It contains most of the points made on this site.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/specialreports?year%5Bvalue%5D%5Byear%5D=2015&category=76986
The BIG difference between digital photography and film was that it allowed an entirely new way to manage photography, and it blended seamlessly with the prior explosion of personal computing. It was (and still is) a serious pain in the arse to get film images on the computer, and it was really expensive to boot, and more and more people wanted to share images by computer. For photographers, the ability to see the image on the back of the camera led to a wave of new photographers and a renewed excitement about photography itself.
Solar compared to fossil carbon doesn’t have those features. It provides essentially the same service, and arguably less effectively than natural gas, as it won’t provide electricity on demand without storage – which greatly ramps up the cost. It’s “cool”, but it doesn’t provide the same level of revolution to the consumer that digital photography did as compared to film.
Costs, for many years, were essentially the same between film and digital. Digital cameras were much more expensive than film cameras, but this would be offset by the film costs over time. Prints themselves were essentially the same price. This compares to solar, but it was the difference in services to the consumer that was the key driver of digital photography’s adoption.
Price parity between renewables and fossil carbon is a big deal. It will drive changes, and it will drive them faster than many expect. But three things: 1) without another direct and tangible benefit to the consumer it won’t happen as quickly as digital photography took over film, 2) price parity of natural gas to solar in an NG importing country like Dubai (and one where solar makes incredible sense) without storage costs factored in shouldn’t be taken as a definite indicator of worldwide price parity, and 3) renewables will have to be significantly less expensive than fossil carbon to justify the large costs of replacing existing installations (without it or without an essential and important new type of benefit, they augment the growth wedge only).
I’m going to take issue with the following statement:
“In 1993, while many of us had seen or used computers at work, the idea of owning one seemed a bit off the wall. What would you do with it?
Send an email? to Whom? Why?”
This statement is at least 10 years off, maybe more. 1983 would have been a better (but not completely accurate) date.
I started in the personal computer business in 1976 with an Apple I computer (that I stupidly sold 10 years later as an antique). My take was that it would be a fantastic teaching machine, esp. for kids.
With the introduction of various small cheap computers (notably from Apple) lots of entertainment and educational stuff hit the market, including some credible chess playing programs. (Remember, it was porn that sold the video tape technology back in the 1970s.) There was decent bookkeeping programs and word processing (although they used dot matrix printers, still much better than a manual typewriter or doing it by hand). There were some chat room services preceding email even back then.
There were people then (as today) that can’t handle technology. But there were plenty that were getting on board (right at the time of the 1984 ad in the Superbowl). Technology often runs well ahead of the Joe Average public. I predicted it back in the mid 1970s, and I’m often stupefied why more people didn’t.
My next prediction is the electric bike. Not much more expensive than some non electric models, but they allow a lot more people to use bikes in more challenging environments and conditions. Stromer claims that their bikes can get 90 miles out of a charge.
” 3) renewables will have to be significantly less expensive than fossil carbon to justify the large costs of replacing existing installations (without it or without an essential and important new type of benefit, they augment the growth wedge only).”
Hence the beauty of ‘free’ electricity.
In most of the developed world, health care is ‘free’. It is not dispensed as fee per service, or fee per use, but the burden of its cost is spread egalitarianly by all as national budget item on taxes.
The same is true for our police departments, our fire departments and every single Federal bureau which provides analysis, or standards, or regulations. When you go to a bank, you don’t pay extra for an account protected by the FDIC. You don’t go to a grocery store and pay less for meat that was not FDA-inspected.
When you erect PV panels on your home, they have a pay-back period. After that, when your infrastructure costs are repaid, your electricity is essentially free, is it not? I propose that we all demand the same for green electricity produced by infrastructure paid for with our shared tax dollars. We paid for its infrastructure with our taxes, so why should we be charged for its fuel, since sun. wind, tide are free?
And what better way to induce people to switch from fossil fuels to renewables than to make fossil fuels completely price uncompetitive? We don’t need carbon taxes, we just need to build our green energy with tax dollars, so we – the people – own the system instead of some corporation.
The low price of solar will help India get a lot more for their money, it is expected they will exceed an investment of $10 billion during 2015, (rebounding from some earlier years) some of which will be spent on solar, placing India at number 7 behind China in clean energy investments. Paddy Padmanathan the CEO of ACWA (an international company) brings Indian solar expertise to the middle east.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/27/india-clean-investment-hits-7-9-billion-expected-pass-10-billion/
Jan 28th 2015-Times of India:
President Barack Obama on Tuesday made a strong pitch for emission cuts and said the world does not “stand a chance against climate change” unless developing countries like India cut their carbon emissions by reducing dependence on fossil fuels.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Cant-win-climate-fight-without-India-Obama/articleshow/46036542.cms
Saudia Arabia-based ACWA Power has developed a name for itself as a responsible energy operator, with a key focus on renewables. With the cost of renewable energy falling dramatically, it is now an economically viable option for many companies. Paddy Padmanathan talks about the company’s three recently acquired solar energy plants, the economic case for investment in renewable energy, and Saudi Arabia’s ambitious energy mix targets.
http://www.worldfinance.com/markets/energy/paddy-padmanathan-on-solar-energy-acwa-power-video