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Energy production is one of the purest of the wealth producers.

Extractive energy production where you can dump negative externalities onto the public or hide your subsidy in a part of the budget that is not directly traceable to you (e.g. Marines in Iraq and destroyers in the straits of Hormuz) is surely one of the purest wealth producers, but if forced to actually compete on its own the equations would look a bit different...



It would still be radically net positive. Oil is a stonking great deal; you put in one joule and get something like 10 to 30 back. (Note how I phrased that in energy terms this time, that's an important point.) You can't actually subsidize something of that size to profitability, because the energy industry is on of the bases of the economy; if oil is a net loss, the whole edifice comes crumbling down regardless of what you do. You can't subsidize the oil industry into net energy profitability with wealth taxed away from dry cleaners and accountants, and it doesn't matter what games you play with dollars if you aren't making a true net energy profit at the base of the economic structure.

Wind and solar both generally barely break even or barely above if you take a full accounting of their energy inputs and costs, biofuels are often a net loss (depends on the crop, but I think the balance of the argument has corn ethanol as a net loss, cane sugar seems to be a net gain, but...), and the problem is they're competing with things that easily get tens of times of returns on energy expended with the fossil fuels and nuclear power.

One of the things you rarely see correctly computed is what it would truly take to power our entire society with renewable energy, including the sudden new energy expenditures necessary to keep our purely-renewable infrastructure maintained with replacement gear. As the net energy benefit of the average piece of gear approaches 1x, the necessary expenditures approach infinity. Replacing 10-25x sources with 1.5-3x sources requires yet again far more resources than the naive multiplications and divisions would imply, if you don't make the mistake of assuming free infrastructure that never decays, or one-time-cost infrastructure that never decays.

(Incidentally, this is why cheap solar, in the sense of truly cheaper without government subsidy solar, is exciting. A solar panel that can make back 5-10x the expenditure to make and install it, and isn't a massive expenditure of metal and glass and silicon is a big deal, it makes things practical that weren't before. Or a solar installation consisting of lots of cheap reflectors concentrating the energy on a centralized station. I still think we might be able to go both net positive and practical on solar. Wind I'm less optimistic about, it's difficult to see what we can cut out of our wind generators and still have wind generators the way we can cut down on the mass/energy footprint of a solar installation with clever engineering. In the limiting case, a reflector is a sheet of foil and an amortized central station; a wind generator is an entire wind generator.)




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