This morning, the first story I saw was one of Steve Hanley’s latest articles on CleanTechnica, “Should People Be Prevented From Living In Fire And Flood Prone Areas?” It seems a majority of people in the U.S. would support a ban on building in areas at risk from such natural disasters as flooding and fires. A majority would also support buying out people whose homes are at risk.
A quick glance at the current political situation in the United States would seem to give the fossil fuels sector a possibility of a clear path to the future, as there is a chance that the current regime will stay in power. But that may be a delusion, with or without a political change.
I have come to believe that the end of oil & gas could look very different than what people expect. In ways it could appear even to defy the accepted law of supply and demand. If I am right, loss of demand in the face of continued availability of the resources could drive retail prices up instead of down. And once this process has begun, the consequences could quickly become disruptive.
Because of the nature of baseload power plants, only supplying enough to cover the base load, other plants have to be put online to cover any demand above the base load. These include load-following plants, which are more costly to run. In the old days, many of these ran on oil. Nowadays, the fuel of choice is natural gas, though the design of the plant is a different from that of a gas-fired baseload plant.
There is a saying, “United we stand, divided we fall.” It comes in many forms, in many languages, including Abraham Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself, cannot stand,” a fairly close restatement from the Bible.
For the first time, FERC is projecting a net decline of US fossil fuel capacity over the next three years.
While we are trying to find the recipients for the trillions of dollars aimed at reviving an economy bashed by Covid-19, and trying especially hard to make sure that none of it goes to the undeserving, we might consider a way to use that money to go way beyond stimulating the economy to saving the world.
In the US, renewables are expected to see fifty times as much net capacity added in the next three years as nuclear and fossil fuels combined.
Some people have asked when the prices will stop falling. Their understanding is that the decline in price really is unpredictable, and they believe that no definitive answer can be made about what source of energy will be least expensive in the future. In some important ways, they are wrong. The declines are predictable, to a degree.
One nuclear industry safety assessment figure claims risks are only one-tenth as great as the historic record shows they are. If the people in the industry know it, they are not admitting to a serious safety problem. If they don’t know it, they are simply ignorant of their industry’s record. Either way, I think it is clear that nuclear industry safety analyses should be regarded as untrustworthy.
