(Crosspost from my Substack blog, where post includes links and images)>
I don’t think I’m the only one to notice that Marc Andreesen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ has a curiously dated feel, as if the author had been cryogenically frozen around the time he cashed out of Netscape. Two points particularly struck me.
First, there his paean to market processes, which are represented as “Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen”
This statement might have seemed plausible at the height of the dotcom boom, which coincided with the high point of faith in ‘turbo-capitalism’. But it’s not at all descriptive of the way in which the Internet and the World Wide Web have developed, as Andreesen himself ought to remember.
Until the mid-1990s, the Internet and the World Wide Web were products of government funded organizations, developed by academics and other users without a profit motive. The associated software, including Andreesen’s Netscape Navigator were given away free of charge (Gopher, the main rival to the WWW, failed because the he University of Minnesota tried to cash in on it). The Internet rapidly displaced commercial enterprises like AOL (who tried to buy their way back in by acquiring Netscape, and were themselves bought by Time Warner in one of the most disastrous acquisitions of all time). Even after the Web was open to commerce, much of the innovation (blogs, Wikipedia, most recently the Fediverse) came from non-commercial sources.
But even the for-profit Internet doesn’t fit Andreesen’s description. Google, Facebook and other platforms don’t rely on exchanging their services at an agreed price. Rather, they provide a service that is free of charge, and make their money by serving ads and harvesting user data for other marketers. At a stretch, one might say that advertisements in traditional media represent an agreed price “watch 20 minutes of our sitcom, and consume 10 minutes of ads”. But cookies and trackers are surreptitious – no one can really know how much they are paying. We are seeing a gradual shift back towards subscription models, both for traditional media outlets and for new entrants like Substack. But these are the exception rather than the rule.
Hardware vendors like Apple come a bit closer to the traditional market model. But even they rely critically on ‘intellectual property’, that is, laws preventing competitors from supplying equivalent products.
The result of all of this is that, in the Internet economy, there is almost no relationship between contribution and reward. Andreesen is a billionaire while Tim Berners-Lee drove a used car for years (more recently, though, he has been reported as having a net wealth of $50 million). As Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow have pointed out , the crucial thing is to establish a choke-point at which wealth can be extracted. These choke points do more to hinder innovation than to promote it.
Then there’s his pitch for nuclear fission. Again, this made sense in the late 1990s. The reality of global heating, and therefore the need to stop burning coal was becoming undeniable. Alternatives such as wind and solar were prohibitively costly. So, the risks of nuclear accidents and the problem of managing waste were outweighed by the certainty of climate catastrophe under business as usual.
But in 2023 nuclear power is a dead duck, a C20 technology with a string of failed revivals in C21. New additions have barely kept pace with closures of old plants.
By contrast, solar PV is the biggest single example in support of techno-optimism. From essentially zero, it’s reached the point where annual additions are around 400 GW a year, almost as much as the total installed capacity of nuclear. Costs have plummeted and, after some generous initial support from government, most of the process is being driven by markets. There is no better case of creative destruction than the rise of solar PV
Andreesen’s failure to recognise this illustrates two points
• He’s ignorant and doesn’t choose to inform himself, instead gullibly following sources that pander to his confirmation bias
• He’s driven not by rational belief in the progress of technology but by rightwing culture war politics
Finally there’s Andreesen’s rejection of the precautionary principle, which has been endorsed by quite a few generally sensible people, including Daniel Drezner . The precautionary principle has been interpreted in all sorts of different ways, from the common sense of “look before you leap” to the absurdity of “don’t do anything that might go wrong”.
But the most sensible interpretation, and the one relevant to the current debate is that of a burden of proof on innovators (I wrote about this with Simon Grant, here). That is, the precautionary principle, as applied to any particular domain, says that innovators should have to demonstrate in advance that their proposed innovation will not be harmful.
The opposite view, summed up by aphorisms like “move fast and break things” and “better to seek forgiveness than permission”, is that innovation should not be constrained. Negative consequences can be dealt with after the event, and, if necessary, rules can be adjusted to prevent a repetition.
The precautionary principle isn’t universally applicable. There’s widespread (maybe not universal) support for applying it to new medicines, whereas not many people would want to apply it to new restaurant menus (assuming they complied with existing health standards).
Looking at Andreesen’s manifesto, three cases come to mind. First, since he’s now a financier, there is the case of financial innovation. The default here is to allow any innovation that complies with the rules covering existing financial instruments. In my view, this has turned out very badly, most obviously in the leadup to the GFC, but also with more recent innovations like Buy Now, Pay Later, not to mention cryptocurrencies, in which Andreesen is heavily invested.
Then (not mentioned in the manifesto) but maybe in the background there’s the case of genetically modified crops. Here the precautionary principle was applied early on, following the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. This process allowed research that established, fairly convincingly, that food produced from GM crops was just a safe as that produced using crops developed by traditional breeding and selection (also a form of genetic modification). That finding didn’t end controversy over issues like corporate control, or debate over specific innovations like Roundup-Ready (glyphosate-tolerant) crops, but it gave pretty good assurance that the nightmare scenarios floating around at the time of the initial discoveries would not materialise.
Finally, of course, there are recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, from which Andreesen hopes to make a lot of money. I’m not convinced by the apocalyptic scenarios put forward by people like William McAskill (and linked in some obscure way to the idea of ‘effective altruism’). But I also haven’t seen a clearly convincing counterargument to say that such an apocalypse can’t happen, or, at least, is less of a concern than other risks it might tend to offset, for example by generating enough prosperity to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict. And that’s also true of risks that aren’t existential such as the possibility of large-scale fraud through techniques like voice replication. Following the logic of the precautionary principle, I’d prefer (if possible) to slow down the pace of development and try to understand the consequences before they are irreversible.
None of this makes me a techno-pessimist. But, having seen lots of glowing visions of the future crumble into dust, I’m not impressed by Andreesen’s revival of 20th century tech-boosterism. Scientific progress provides us, collectively, with a range of technological options. The choice between them should be made wisely and democratically, not by the whims of venture capitalists.
{ 61 comments }
Alex SL 10.25.23 at 6:55 am
Well, that observation about market ideology isn’t new or restricted to this person. Billionaires will hardly admit that they don’t deserve their obscene wealth and earned it only from establishing choke points, so they have to claim it is due to innovation and/or fair exchange, i.e., they have “created value” that others were willing to pay for. In reality, of course, there are two problems. First, exploitation of labour. Second, the existence of the kinds of profits that make a billionaire possible is proof of market failure. But again, they will hardly admit that, so they have to pretend publicly that they do not understand how functioning markets would work (competition driving down prices to where nobody can make billionaire-creating profits).
And because of a combination of ignorance and sycophanty, they have a large audience who also either doesn’t understand what markets are or pretends not to understand it.
Regarding financial innovations, I am not an expert, so I might be missing some subtleties, but it seems to me that there has not been any need for financial innovation since ca. the 1940s or so. The point of finance is not to develop new consumer gadgets or cure cancer but to raise investment capital on one side and to allow people to make investments on the other while avoiding the kind of systemic risk that can crash the economy if things go wrong. How to do that was well sorted out decades ago. Financial “innovation” of the last few decades has taken two forms: (1) automated high-speed trading, which I would at a minimum describe as of questionable value to society, and (2) undermining and evading regulations to take on more risk or simply do crimes, like pyramid schemes or plain embezzlement, in other words, direct harm to society.
Cryptocurrency is the perfect example. That “industry” or “ecosystem” would have no reason to exist if not for doing something that is clearly illegal in traditional finance, like wash trading, Ponzi schemes, or insider trading, and claiming that it is fine because crypto is not traditional finance and therefore not covered by regulation. It is as if I argued to the police that I can drive 120 km/h in a school zone because I put a big sticker on my car that says “not a car”.
Regarding AI, the clearly convincing counterargument to say that such an apocalypse can’t happen is physics. Singularitarians have read A Fire Upon The Deep and somehow missed that it is fiction, that it describes events that are already known to be somewhere between deeply implausible and physically and biologically impossible. We could just as well discuss the consequences of Sauron getting his ring back. More plausibly, public communication will be further swamped by automatically mass-produced disinformation and plagiarism while the data centers running the AI draw so much electricity that it offsets any savings from decarbonisation efforts.
Matt 10.25.23 at 10:53 am
We are seeing a gradual shift back towards subscription models
One semi-related area where this is very common is with software, where you usually no longer buy the program and then (maybe) update when the version you have is not up to date or, perhaps, is no longer supported or compatible, but where you get a license, essentially renting the software for some time. I’m far from convinced this is a good thing!
But, it seems to apply also to some apps, which is the way that lots and lots of people access the internet these days. (This seems to me to be a move away from the web and a bit more like the old AOL or Compuserve model.) Of course, lots of apps are free, and depend on adds or other things, but many cost money, too, either to install or use. That seems like a significant change from the web of the late 90s or early 2000s.
J-D 10.25.23 at 11:00 am
The story is told of the billionaire 6th Duke of Westminster that he was asked what advice he would give to a young entrepreneur wanting to succeed and that his response was ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror’.
engels 10.25.23 at 12:54 pm
Billionaires don’t need to justify their wealth; they have armies of lawyers, academics, media people, etc to do it for them.
We are seeing a gradual shift back towards subscription models
As Fry and Laurie foresaw:
oldster 10.25.23 at 7:17 pm
” (I wrote about this with Simon Grant, here) ”
Link missing.
Brett 10.25.23 at 8:26 pm
The funniest part is the nuclear stuff. Not just because the actual history of cheaper nuclear power is at odds with his libertarian inclinations (the only affordable nuclear power was done by governments or monopolistic utilities), but because it’s mostly culture war grievance. Conservatives who don’t deny that climate change has happened have come to associate solar power with progressive/leftists/environmentalists and hate that, so they’ve latched on to nuclear power in return . . . even though it’s basically the power generation equivalent of airships these days in terms of civilian use.
John Q 10.25.23 at 8:50 pm
Oldster, I mentioned at the beginning that this is a crosspost from my (free subscription) Substack. Unfortunately, links and images don’t transfer easily. Here’s the link you asked about
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6bjbqaadp02izjnfb9uhk/Grant-S.-and-Quiggin-J.-Journal-of-Economic-Behavior-Organization-2013-Bounded-awareness-heuris.pdf?rlkey=y2g9v7ubjqv9w8vj8kffw9ipt&dl=0
oldster 10.25.23 at 10:38 pm
Thanks for the link, John, and I apologize for having missed the note at the top, which would have directed me to your ‘stack.
Chetan Murthy 10.26.23 at 4:26 am
Regarding Andreesen’s worship of Teh (sic) Market, I always go to Delong (and via him, Negishi): https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/must-read-welfare-economics-and-existence-of-an-equilibrium-for-a-competitive-economy-negishi-2006-metroeconomi.html
In other words, Andreesen is full of it.
But also, I feel compelled to note that his “case for Bitcoin”: https://a16z.com/why-bitcoin-matters/
is ….. a giant heap of mendacious bullsht. I mean, a giant heap. Lies upon lies upon lies. When a man lies this much, Daniel Davies’ 1-minute MBA becomes relevant (again via Delong): https://blog.danieldavies.com/2004/05/d-squared-digest-one-minute-mba.html
His post is worth reading, but here’s a teaser: “Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless.“
Doug M. 10.26.23 at 9:38 am
“By contrast, solar PV is the biggest single example in support of techno-optimism. From essentially zero, it’s reached the point where annual additions are around 400 GW a year, almost as much as the total installed capacity of nuclear.”
Solar isn’t baseload.
Solar isn’t baseload.
Solar isn’t baseload.
I absolutely love solar and wind. Love them! But they are not baseload. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. So unless you want to sit in the dark on a still, cold winter evening, you need you some damn baseload.
(No, “smart” grids won’t solve this problem. They can help a bit, but they are not a magical fix.)
(No, storage can’t solve this problem. We don’t have any storage technologies (yet) that are within a couple of orders of magnitude of what we need. Maybe we will in 30, 40 or 50 years. But we definitely do not have them now.)
We need baseload, and we need a lot of baseload. So we need a technology that is (1) cheap, (2) carbon-free, and (3) massively scalable.
The problem is, that technology doesn’t exist yet. At best, we get two out of three. So, natural gas is cheap and scalable, but not carbon-free. Heat pumps are cheap and carbon-free, but they don’t scale. And nuclear is carbon free and scalable, but it’s stupidly expensive.
That said, visceral resistance to nuclear is just as dumb and retro as woo-woo let’s built lots of fission plants, it’s cool and also annoys the libs! The one big problem with fission is that it’s expensive. Okay, we should at least be looking at ways to make it cheap.
Maybe that’s not doable! But since cheap nuclear would be a game-changer, we absolutely should be pushing more research money at the problem.
Doug M.
Alex SL 10.26.23 at 1:12 pm
As always, I am puzzled why, if my territory of ca. 400k people is running on 100% renewable electricity, it wouldn’t be possible to do the same for a nation of 40M people by building 100x the amount of solar, wind, and storage.
I am also puzzled why people who promote nuclear power not merely as a transitional solution but as THE solution do not seem to realise that uranium will, just like fossil fuels, run out one day, whereas the resources used for renewables and batteries can be recycled, meaning that what they are really saying is that, if they are right, technological civilisation is unsustainable and will have to be dismantled ASAP. Or maybe they do know that uranium is limited but just don’t understand the implications.
Tim H. 10.26.23 at 1:46 pm
Not exactly baseload, but overbuilt wind and solar and a lot of storage capacity should be close enough.
bekabot 10.26.23 at 2:33 pm
I’ve never seen the word ‘baseload’ used in such a ceremonial way before. Interesting effect.
Doug M. 10.26.23 at 4:18 pm
“As always, I am puzzled why, if my territory of ca. 400k people is running on 100% renewable electricity, it wouldn’t be possible to do the same for a nation of 40M people by building 100x the amount of solar, wind, and storage.”
See my repeated use of the word “scalable”, above.
Also, note that there’s a difference between “my little territory produces electricity equal to its needs” and “my little territory produces all the electricity it needs”.
“do not seem to realise that uranium will, just like fossil fuels, run out one day”
Go and google “breeder reactors”, what say.
(Breeder reactors aren’t a magical solution. But TLDR at least in theory, no, the uranium wouldn’t have to run out for a very long time.)
Doug M.
Doug M. 10.26.23 at 4:21 pm
“Not exactly baseload, but overbuilt wind and solar and a lot of storage capacity should be close enough.”
— Alas, no.
Really, no. Not close enough or even close to close enough. The storage problem is actually quite hard.
Again: we’re about two orders of magnitude short of the storage that we’d need, and there is no current or plausible near-future technology that is going to close that gap.
Doug M.
Doug M. 10.26.23 at 4:27 pm
“I’ve never seen the word ‘baseload’ used in such a ceremonial way before. Interesting effect.”
— It bears repeating, because I keep seeing people who should know better claiming that wind and solar have solved our problems.
They have not. They are wonderful, they’re a huge help, they’re a great step in the right direction. They’ve prevented gigatonnes of carbon emission already! They’re going to prevent still more! All good!
But the world needs power that runs 24/7 — baseload.
Doug M.
John Q 10.26.23 at 6:23 pm
@Doug M
My thoughts on “baseload” from 2009
https://johnquiggin.com/2009/07/22/the-myth-of-baseload-power-demand/
As regards storage, additions of battery storage capacity are already outpacing new nuclear plants, and growing fast
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/09/28/us-set-to-install-66-gw-of-storage-on-2023-27-period-says-woodmac/
But even if all your claims were accepted, nuclear would still be no more than an expensive backup technology, providing reliability to a system based primarily on solar and wind. That’s a long way short of Andreesen’s claims.
Doug M. 10.26.23 at 7:35 pm
I’m sorry, but that post from 2009 was wrong then and is still wrong now. Just for starters, you estimate baseload demand based on a couple of airy assumptions, instead of… just googling it? Which was doable in 2009, and is even more so today?
And then this: “Any electricity supply system likely to exist in the next 40 years and capable of meeting peak power demand will have no problems meeting baseload demand” — no, that is a non-fact statement. It looks like you’re confusing nameplate capacity with capacity factor, and those are two completely different things.
Additions of battery storage capacity: yes, and total storage capacity is still about two orders of magnitude smaller than what we need. (That’s without going into the particular issues — environmental, waste disposal, lifecycle — with building hundreds of gigawatts of batteries; at this level we can handwave those.)
The USA currently burns through about 4 million gigawatt hours of energy per year, give or take. Total electrical storage capacity is currently about 22,000 gigawatt hours. By 2030 we’re going to double that — woo! — to about 45,000 gigawatt hours. That’s still nowhere near enough.
Andreesen’s claims: no, I’m addressing your claim, that “nuclear power is a dead duck”. Nuclear power is stupidly expensive, and that’s a huge problem. But if that problem were solved, nuclear might suddenly become a very active waterfowl indeed. IIUC, you’re saying that nuke plants are somehow /necessarily/ too expensive and that they can /never/ be made cheap. I’m saying, you’re assuming your conclusion; citation needed.
(Weirdly, this is reminiscent of critics of solar power back in the 1980s, who correctly pointed out that solar electricity was several times more expensive than electricity from good old coal. Which, at the time, it was!)
Doug M.
bekabot 10.26.23 at 9:03 pm
“It bears repeating”
…and you repeated it. Well done, sir. Mission accomplished.
Alex SL 10.26.23 at 10:20 pm
Doug M,
I am sorry if I somehow miss your point, but I really don’t get how being two orders of magnitude short on storage can’t be solved by building more storage. There are various technological options, and they can be rolled out in a fraction of the time it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. Indeed it can be expected that even just chemical batteries will get significantly better and cheaper in half the time it takes to build another nuclear power plant. (This isn’t, you just wait, in ten years we will have god-like super-AI, these should be plausibly solvable engineering problems.)
To put it another way, nuclear power only makes sense as a bridging technology, but building new nuclear power plants is too slow and expensive for it to work as a bridging technology.
Unless fusion finally comes into its own, but after decades of being a decade away from a break-through, I will believe that the moment the first fusion reactor that actually contributes to power production is turned on, and not a minute earlier. In the meantime, wind and solar just keep expanding.
John Q 10.27.23 at 2:13 am
Doug M. You seem to have missed my point. You can’t “just Google” baseload demand, because demand for electricity, like everything else, depends on prices. When the post was written, there wasn’t enough demand to keep coal-fired generators running at night, so we had off-peak discounts of around 50 per cent. As solar becomes the dominant source, night-time electricity becomes more expensive and (assuming prices are allowed to adjust) “baseload” demand falls.
Ultimately, “baseload” demand consists of that part of demand for which “always-on” power is essential, leading to willingness to pay high prices: for your argument to work, the price has to be high enough to cover the cost of new nuclear. Some industrial processes meet that definition, such as aluminium smelters, but not manyy,
In any case, we don’t really need to speculate. If you are right, we should see an upsurge in new nuclear, particularly in China and India, where there isn’t much of a problem with anti-nuclear activists. It’s not happening so far.
Neville Morley 10.27.23 at 5:33 am
Doug M @18: “The USA currently burns through about 4 million gigawatt hours of energy per year, give or take. Total electrical storage capacity is currently about 22,000 gigawatt hours. By 2030 we’re going to double that — woo! — to about 45,000 gigawatt hours. That’s still nowhere near enough.“
Contrasting these numbers – enormous current use, tiny storage capacity – seems to imply that storage capacity needs to be equal to current/anticipated use. Really? The sun never shines, the wind never blows, for a whole year? I can’t imagine you actually mean that, but what is the calculation for how much storage is actually required?
Doug M. 10.27.23 at 10:18 am
Doug M,
“I really don’t get how being two orders of magnitude short on storage can’t be solved by building more storage.”
— because none of the technological options currently on hand can easily be scaled up by two orders of magnitude.
So, for instance, batteries. The longest-lived grid scale batteries right now, and the most promising for large scale storage generally, are lithium ferrophosphate. They’re not necessarily the best, mind. There are other battery types that have higher energy density, and LiPO3 batteries can undergo mechanical expansion as they age, which causes nontrivial engineering problems. On the other hand, they’re cheap-ish and safe. And while they require an uncommon element (lithium), it’s one that can be recycled with a high degree of efficiency (~96%). More to the point, at grid scale they can survive ~~10,000 cycles, which is a lot.
Okay so in an all-wind and solar grid they would be cycling at least once per day, sometimes more. At 1.5 cycles /day, that’s a lifetime of ~21 years, meaning we have to replace 5% of them every year. So… every year we have to build 5X more LiPO3 batteries than all the batteries of all sorts that exist in the world right now.
That’s kind of a lot, and we start to run into some scaling problems. Like, 96% recycling efficiency for the lithium sounds great! But (1) the recycling process itself is energy-intensive. As in, we’re going to have to dedicate gigawatt-hours of power, a nontrivial fraction of total output, to recycling our batteries. And then, (2) when we’re talking about an entire planet using LiPO3 batteries, it turns out that to make up that missing 4% we’ll need to mine a lot more lithium. Like, a LOT more. Like, so much that we’ll run out of lithium in just 20 years or so.
(People keep overlooking this: most storage technologies require limited resources! Batteries require rare elements, pumped storage can only be done at a limited number of specific sites, and so forth.)
Now this stuff gets fractally complicated. If we improve the efficiency of lithium recycling from 96% to 98%, we double the amount of time before we run out lithium. (This is much easier said than done, because physics, but it’s not formally impossible, also because physics.) Also, getting lithium from seawater is a potentially interesting option that is being explored right now. (We can totally do it already; it’s just stupidly expensive.)
So I’m not going to say it’s impossible. I /am/ going to say that it’s a hard problem, and we don’t have current solutions on hand, and that it’s lazy to just airily assume that Technological Progress and The Market will just magically solve it. You can’t just say “these should be plausibly solvable engineering problems” without at least looking at why these particular problems are problems and why they haven’t yet been solved.
“after decades of being a decade away from a break-through, I will believe that the moment the first fusion reactor that actually contributes to power production is turned on, and not a minute earlier.”
Here we agree. There’s been a lot of buzz about fusion pilots lately, but when you look closely at them it’s stuff like “we achieved Q(reaction) > 1, producing over a megajoule of energy!” yeah dudes a megajoule woo that’s about 20 kilowatt-minutes. If you could convert it into electricity at 100% efficiency, it would let me watch a single episode of live-action One Piece. For grid scale you need to scale that reaction up by… six orders of magnitude? seven? and that’s before you build an actual fusion plant around it.
I’m on record as saying that I don’t expect to see commercial fusion before 2050 at the earliest, and I won’t be surprised if we never see it at all.
Doug M.
Zamfir 10.27.23 at 10:19 am
@ Neville, the US does not have 22,000 GWh of electricity storage capacity! 22,000 GWh/year is the amount of electricity stored each year in the US, nearly all in pumped hydro sites. That number represents the same storage being filled and emptied many times within one year. Simultaneuous storage capcity of pumped hydro is in the order of 500 GWh, not tens of thousands. Battery storage capacity is around 25 GWh. These are used pretty much daily, so batteries store some thousands of GWh/year.
If you use storage daily, or perhaps weekly, then the cost of that storage can be divided over all those cycles, and this justifies fairly high costs. Batteries are now getting in the cost range ballpark if they can be used daily.
The difficult part is storage for only a few times a year, or even less. In a system based on wind and sun, you need that. If that were done as batteries, the cost is staggering. Roughly put, if you build a battery that can store 3 days of power that you plan to use once a year, then it would be cheaper to build a nuclear plant (at Olkiluoto costs), run it for those 3 days, then turn it off for the rest of the year. Improvements in battery cost have to be massive, to make it viable for infrequently used storage.
In current European models for future low-CO2 grids, the bulk of long term storage would come from hydrogen generated in summer, stored underground like we do with NG today, then burned in a massive fleet of OCGTs in winter to cover periods when wind speeds are low. That storage system has low cycle efficiency, but also much lower capex than alternatives (under fairly reasonable extrapolations of costs for PV and electrolysers).
John Q 10.27.23 at 7:33 pm
A crucial point in this discussion is that any reversible physical process is an energy storage technology. You put energy in going one way, and extract it, with a loss, going the other. That’s true of chemical processes (batteries, electrolysis), pumped hydro, coiled springs, even just raising heavy weights.
That makes for a complicated, but almost certainly soluble, problem when you want to store lots of energy over different durations, different requirements for discharge speeds etc.
The other crucial point, as I’ve already mentioned is that prices matter. If 100 % reliability is super-expensive, most users will pay less and accept occasional interruptions. That’s why most people don’t have backup generators in their homes.
Maybe a few new nuclear plants will form part of the response, but at this stage it doesn’t look likely that this will happen without massive government subsidies.
notGoodenough 10.27.23 at 11:39 pm
While I am reluctant to comment too much, given that I already made my thoughts fairly clear on previous posts (which have, as yet, not appreciably changed) and am in danger of repeating myself, I am sufficiently provoked. Setting aside the complexities of modern energy systems in societies are so great that I have little confidence in anything someone says without a great deal of data and modelling to back it up, and that I have a great deal of suspicion for those talking about storage while neglecting transmission, I will try to be brief.
Regarding specific batteries, lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4, not LiPO3 – it contains iron, after all, and the clue is in the name) is not “the” most promising storage technology – it is “a” promising storage technology (the position that there will be a one-size-fits-all technology is one which is…dubious, to put it very charitably). Rate capability, cyclability, floating voltage resilience, cost per kWh per cycle, supply risk, etc. are all factors which have to be considered within an application lead KPI determination. Certainly LFP has many attractive characteristics for certain specific applications, but even within stationary storage so too do lead carbon (in particular), Na-ion, sodium sulphur, etc. – and that is before we consider the more speculative but supposedly arriving soon technologies such as iron-air. Which is, of course, just batteries alone. The notion that batteries would be fully cycling is also one I take issue with – this is rarely the case. Even the most evangelic of VRE advocates (who, as I’ve previously noted, I disagree with) rarely advocate for ignoring hydro and geothermal – and more likely case scenarios would probably be closer to 75-85%DOD. It should also be noted that reducing from 100% VRE to 80% VRE dramatically reduces requirements (storage to VRE mix not being a linear relationship). Of course, it is likely there would be other usage considerations (arbitrage and the like, so that the batteries are not just sat there), but again this would be unlikely to be full DOD (for economic reasons, if nothing else). Pretty much any energy system will require storage – indeed, one of the largest battery storage systems in Europe was that for Olkiluoto 3 (while I am not a nuclear engineer, I suspect it may not be purely for decorative purposes). But if someone were interested in comparing how much storage is required under various different “basket” scenarios (e.g. baskets of generation, transmission, storage, demand, etc.), I’d say they could do worse than looking at the research coming out from Caldeira’s group and Breakthrough in general, as well as Chris Clack’s company Vibrant Clean Energy (both of whom seem relatively fair, and neither of whom seem to be against or for any particular technology – something which I appreciate as that is my own position).
Certainly the challenges of reducing and eliminating GHGs are considerable – I by no means discount the technical, social, political, and economic difficulties, even in the more “developed” fields (such as energy grids). But generally speaking the biggest issue has been that it has long been a can kicked down the road – and there has only relatively recently (probably the last 10 years?) been any serious efforts made to address these problems, with commensurate increases in funding and support (and the effect of that has been pretty noticeable). To be bluntly cynical, the biggest obstacle facing rapid decarbonisation has largely been that it would cost to do so, and that rather wealthy and powerful people/companies/political organisations/etc. would rather prefer it didn’t happen until they extracted everything they can from the status quo. In short, the main challenges are not technical, but political and financial – which are, frankly speaking, far harder to solve.
Just my quick thoughts.
KT2 10.28.23 at 3:01 am
+1 As Doug M says about renewables, it applies to nuclear fantasies; “we don’t have current solutions on hand, and that it’s lazy to just airily assume that Technological Progress and The Market will just magically solve it. You can’t just say “these should be plausibly solvable engineering problems” without at least looking at why these particular problems are problems and why they haven’t yet been solved.”.
As JQ said “after some generous initial support from government, most of the process is being driven by markets. There is no better case of creative destruction than the rise of solar PV”
Doug, you’ll need to convince the maket. Tricky, and at this stage, convincing the market re nuclear is imo more of a wicked problem than global heating itself.
And as Yoshua Bengio says re AI:
“With AI, you need to ensure no one is going to do something dangerous”.
So too with nuclear.
One person / group may may cause a failure in renewables, yet I see no comparable downside for a renewables disaster compared to a nuclear disaster. Terrorists, break that wind farm / panels array / battery. Nope. Not comparable.
Bengio
“Climate change is easier. It’s alright if we only convince 99 percent of humans to behave well. With AI, you need to ensure no one is going to do something dangerous.
From ” ‘AI Godfather’ Yoshua Bengio: We need a humanity defense organization”
By Susan D’Agostino |
October 17, 2023
https://thebulletin.org/2023/10/ai-godfather-yoshua-bengio-we-need-a-humanity-defense-organization/
Zamfir 10.28.23 at 7:04 am
Jq, you said you were a techno-optimist ;-) I am more worried, or at least less certain than I wish I was Perhaps also from living in place with more people and less sunlight than Australia.
As you say, prices matter, but that cuts in two directions. At some level of cost and inconvenience, people will drop the CO2 reduction as a requirement andgo for an ewsier fossil option.Right now, renewables are in the zone. I’d like them deeper in the zone, for faster expansion, and even that seems feasible for the coming decade.
My worry is simple: if further cost reductions disappoint, then rising system complications might push them out of the zone agafromI’d like to have many options around, so if some disappoint, we can shift to others. We know from the past and form other countries that nuclear power can be in the zone. Bringing down nuclear construction costs seems hard but not obviously harder than the other cost reductions we need. If those other reductions pan out, then we don’t need nuclear power. But please let’s keep the option open, at least in Europe, which means building some plants now, both at scale and prototypes.
There is organised opposition to bloody everything. To nuclear plants. Onshore wind around here is losing the fight to nimbyism. Just last week, we got a ban on non-rooftop solar. People fight power cabgood They fight CCS. Offshore wind might survive because it is out of sight, but it is expensive – and yes people are gearing up to fight the subsidies for it. And all these people say, I oppose this because there a good other options.
Tim Worstall 10.28.23 at 11:29 am
“And then, (2) when we’re talking about an entire planet using LiPO3 batteries, it turns out that to make up that missing 4% we’ll need to mine a lot more lithium. Like, a LOT more. Like, so much that we’ll run out of lithium in just 20 years or so.”
That is not true in the slightest.
2,850,000 billion tonnes. To the best of human knowledge that’s the amount of the element lithium in the lithosphere (the Clark Number times weight of crust of planet). Clearly, that’s the outer and ludicrous extreme of what is available. Currently the Tesla Master Plan (for whatever worth that has) says we’ll need some 20 million tonnes of Li (they actually say 20% of mineral resources, which are around 100 million tonnes).
We really probably do have enough lithium to be getting on with.
And please don’t start saying that mineral resources are limited and so on. That’s to betray a lack of knowledge of what mineral resources are – roughly, in commonplace, the amount that mining companies currently claim they have which is likely economic. Exploration continually adds to resources – some 8 or 9 million tonnes last year actually. Resources absolutely are not the result of some general survey of the planet and then a calculation. That has never been done (other than whatever was used to get to the Clark number). The official numbers (so, the USGS ones) are a totting up of claims by mining companies.
I have indeed been down this rathole. The USGS numbers for mineral resources (and also reserves, the more limited number where economic is proven) come from the national bods. So, in Oz, JORC. But the JORC numbers are the aggregate of what mining companies are claiming to have in Oz. So, it’s mining company claims all the way down – not an estimation, at all, of what is generally available.
Do we have enough economic lithium? Dunno. Depends on the price we call economic. Do we have enough lithium? Sure.
Tim Worstall 10.28.23 at 11:35 am
“Scientific progress provides us, collectively, with a range of technological options. The choice between them should be made wisely and democratically, not by the whims of venture capitalists.”
Doesn’t that back you, rather nastily, into an insistence upon a planned economy? “Democratic” is clearly a close (at least) synonym for politics and thus government. So, only things which government allows can be done? So, well, that pretty much is a planned economy, no? Or, perhaps a milder form, the only new things that can be done are those that those with political power will allow to be done?
An obvious example, taxi companies have a veto over Uber (as near happened). Or less well known, newspapers have a veto over Autotrader, e-Bay and Monster.com stealing their classified ads which used to be a third of their revenues?
Even if we’re not agreeing that this would be a planned economy it does seem to be one where what is allowed would be limited by who currently has political power. Something of an indication of likely stasis, no? Even, the ultimate Nimby economy?
John Q 10.29.23 at 3:19 am
Zamfir, there are lots of carbon-free options that haven’t been explored as much as they might have been – wave power, concentrating solar power, a wide range of storage options, better ways of doing transmission. They are getting a lot less public funding than either Stage III large nuclear (Hinkley C, promise of more from UK and France) or Small Modular Reactors, or even fusion. I’d prefer to spread funding across more long shots.
John Q 10.29.23 at 3:33 am
“only things which government allows can be done? So, well, that pretty much is a planned economy, no” Umm, no. That’s built into the definition of governments – they decide what is legal and what is not, whether or not they engage in planning of any kind.
Looking at specific cases. Before Uber and AirBnB there were a bunch of regulations in most places limiting who could operate a taxi service, or provide short-term accommodation. That was a case of “”only things which government allows can be done”, but scarcely a planned economy. Uber and Airbnb got around this by pretending that people were just sharing lifts, or letting friends sleep on their couches.
In Uber’s case, most people decided that the regulations didn’t do much except enrich the owners of taxi licenses, so they were scrapped or relaxed (too bad for people who’d put their life savings into buying these licenses, but good for the rest of us). In the case of Airbnb, the regulations were mostly there for a reason, and have gradually been reworked to restrict Airbnb and its imitators. That’s probably the biggest factor behind the sharp decline in Airbnb over the last year or so.
More generally, the point of the precautionary principle is that, in some fields we need to be open to any innovation that is within the existing rules, while in others we should require processes for prior approval. That’s in fact what we do already (with new medicines for example), but our experience with finance and tech bros over the past 20 years suggests that balance ought to be shifted more in favor of caution.
Tim Worstall 10.29.23 at 9:28 am
“In Uber’s case, most people decided that the regulations didn’t do much except enrich the owners of taxi licenses, so they were scrapped or relaxed”
But we only a) found that out and b) then changed the regs because Uber did just go out there and do it. If they’d had to ask the permission first would it have happened? Arguable, obviously, but I’d argue that no, they would not have gained that permission. Which is rather the point.
engels 10.29.23 at 10:07 am
In Uber’s case, most people decided that the regulations didn’t do much except enrich the owners of taxi licenses, so they were scrapped or relaxed (too bad for people who’d put their life savings into buying these licenses, but good for the rest of us).
Because increasing private car rides in ultra-populated/polluted cities is a win-win…
hix 10.29.23 at 10:55 am
It seems to me we are still rather far away from caring about storage in a 100% renewable electricity grid for any practical purpose. If the last 3 or 5% of the grid are still cheaper, done with gas power plants in the next two decades, so be it. More realistic, we will still have to deal with ignite power plants as a significant part of the grid. Not for any rational reasons, just due to, let’s call it tradition. I don’t really get why a nuclear plant that has to run all the time to be somewhat economical would help grid stability, either. The usual problem with nuclear is too much electricity when no one needs it.
Alex SL 10.29.23 at 10:00 pm
KT2,
I kind of upsets me that AI is even mentioned in the same context as global heating. Global heating will, over time, flood coastal areas to displace hundreds of millions of people, make other areas too hot to live in, disrupt freshwater supplies depending on winter snow and glaciers, make some of our most productive agricultural lands unproductive, and in consequence lead to societal and population collapse.
What is AI going to do, in turn? Realistic concerns are automated plagiarism driving out good writers and artists (which would, ironically, lead to model collapse, as new training data dries up), increased unemployment more broadly, a flood of poor quality AI generated content everywhere from Amazon to social media, making it impossible for most people to find high quality content, and, perhaps most pernicious, biases being trained into the models while selling them as objective. None of this is remotely on the same level of concern as 80% of humanity dying from starvation, disease, heat shock, dehydration, and age-of-migration-style constant warfare. All of these realistic concerns also require broad uptake of the technology, not just one rogue developer working in isolation.
More dramatic concerns are inevitably magical thinking. I have yet to hear a potential scenario that isn’t biologically and/or physically impossible. The best answer I ever got was about an AI designing and releasing a GMO that will wipe out humanity, and the hypothesised mechanism of action included several steps that I as biologist recognised as impossible. The argument is then that I can’t know what a superintelligence will come up with, because I am just not as smart as that intelligence is. But scientific progress isn’t primarily about learning how to be able to do what previously looked like magic; it is primarily about excluding what is impossible, and by now, we know that a lot of stuff that our ancestors would have found plausible is impossible, like traveling to the moon by being fired out of a cannon (I mean, it could perhaps be done, but the salient point is, we wouldn’t survive it) or building a perpetual motion machine. It is mostly falsification.
Point is, AI apocalypse is generally based on the claim that, you just wait, the AI will be able to do things that are impossible, because it is just THAT smart. It is hype-fueled claims presented without evidence, and thus dismissible without evidence.
Zamfir,
If the energy transition is sabotaged because people go full NIMBY on any solution that could save their grandchildren’s lives, maybe our civilisation deserves to collapse.
Tim Worstall,
As John Q wrote, fallacy of the excluded middle. (Although I must strongly disagree regarding Uber. “enrich the owners of taxi licenses” is an odd way of saying “made it possible for taxi drivers to earn a living and retire in dignity”. Because so many people own cars, an unregulated taxi market has such a low barrier of entry that it leads to a ruinous competition for passengers, leaving drivers unable to make a living wage/income. That happened before the introduction of licenses, which is exactly why licenses were introduced, and as was completely predictable, it is now happening again after they have been undermined.)
I am continually fascinated by the libertarian ideology of enormous distrust of democratically elected decision makers who we can collectively replace if we want and of public servants who have been hired explicitly with the mission to serve the public good but, conversely, of full trust in organisations whose stated goal is to maximise shareholder value, at the expense of the public good if need be, and of owners and CEOs who we cannot replace no matter how much we dislike what they do. (And given how much of our current experience is somewhere between monopoly and vendor lock-in, we can’t even realistically vote with our money as the theory of the market requires. For example, all major organisations are using Microsoft products and Amazon servers/storage. How many at-scale, similarly well-developed alternatives are there? How much disruption would be caused by switching the entire of operations of an organisation of five thousand people over to using e.g. Ubuntu, LibreOffice, and Protonmail instead? There is no functioning market in this strategically critical area.)
I mean, here is a public servant whose job description on hiring was to draft a sustainable energy policy. Here is an oil company executive who stands to profit handsomely from delaying the energy transition, even if that will kill hundreds of millions in the starvation riots of the 2090s, over there is Marc Andreessen ranting about how any regulation is evil that limits his ability to earn even more money than more than he will ever spend in a hundred lifetimes, and over there is Sam Altman harvesting everybody’s IP without asking to feed his automated plagiarism generator. The libertarians’ strongest argument is that they are worried about the latter three capturing the former, but instead of arriving at the obvious conclusion that the problem is the existence of billionaires and of large corporations rich enough to do a regulatory capture in the first place, the libertarian solution is to just hand the steering wheel directly to the people trying to do the capture. It is working backwards from the predetermined conclusion that government must be bad, and entrepreneurs good, and at no point do logic or observable evidence come into it.
John Q 10.30.23 at 12:44 am
Engels, your reflexive urge to snark is annoying and undermines the value of useful comments you make. I’ll make a couple of points, not as a response, but to point out how little thought you gave to this drive-by (sic)
1. Making taxis cheaper probably reduces car use on balance, by reducing the need for private car ownership
2. Regardless of that, there are much better ways to deal with congestion.
Please, no reply on this. Rather, take as an invitation to do some thinking before you next hit reply.
Alex SL: Taxi licenses don’t work that way. They are typically tied to the car, not the driver. Commonly, one person holds multiple licenses and hires drivers, with exactly the bad outcomes licensing was supposed to prevent. New York had a particularly disastrous scheme, which collapsed when Uber came along, but was already unsustainable
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/nyc-taxis-medallions-suicides.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article
J-D 10.30.23 at 2:10 am
I recall some years ago discussing with somebody my misgivings about Uber, and being confronted with the response that the proprietors in the taxi industry were notoriously awful. I thought about this and decided to check what the union representing drivers had to say on the subject. What I found, after a cursory investigation, was that the union regarded the taxi proprietors as awful employers and Uber as substantially worse: a discovery which confirmed me in my continuing preference for taxis over Uber. Maybe I’m paying more as a result (although I’ve never used taxis much, and I still don’t), but I can afford it (I’ve never used taxis much, and I still don’t) and I still feel better that way.
Alex SL 10.30.23 at 3:21 am
John Q,
The problem appears to be that I do not know enough about the situation in the USA, so I should caveat my contributions with that. People keep bringing up New York, very specifically, as the bad old situation that needed to be disrupted. I cannot say that I have ever, in the years before Uber was a sparkle in anybody’s eye, had an issue with getting a taxi ride in any town of Germany except to the degree that, well, smartphones didn’t exist, so requesting a ride was less convenient than it is now. And right now here in Australia, it is very convenient to order a normal taxi through an app, so that I can boycott Uber and not lose any amenity doing so. (I may pay a bit more, but if that means the driver has a stable job, then I am happy to do so out of solidarity.)
As such, Uber adds nothing compared to any taxi company I have ever interacted with across several countries from Argentina to the UK and from Mexico to New Zealand except undermine labour protections and drive competitors out of business by undercutting them at a loss, which should IMO really be an illegal business practice all by itself. If New York was different, then so be it, there is an exception, only I did cannot personally attest to that.
J-D 10.30.23 at 4:25 am
Their stated goal. When executives have a choice between more money for shareholders and more money for themselves, which do you think they are likelier to choose?
Tim Worstall 10.30.23 at 7:56 am
“I am continually fascinated by the libertarian ideology of enormous distrust of democratically elected decision makers who we can collectively replace if we want and of public servants who have been hired explicitly with the mission to serve the public good but, conversely, of full trust in organisations whose stated goal is to maximise shareholder value, at the expense of the public good if need be, and of owners and CEOs who we cannot replace no matter how much we dislike what they do. ”
Oh, I believe in both. The principal-agent problem, that the managements of companies quite probably are out to screw us and pursue their own interests and not those of society at large. And also in public choice theory which is that the bureaucrats quite probably are out to screw us and pursue their own interests and not those of society at large. Humans feather their own nests, film at 11!
The question is, to me at least, how do we control this clear and obvious outcome of base human nature? Casting a wary eye around economic history makes me think that markets do a better job of controlling managements than political oversight does of bureaucrats. But agreed, that’s an opinion not a proof. But there’s no conflict in the initial observation – of course they’re out to better themselves, that’s just what people do. Putting them on a civil service pay grade instead of share options doesn’t change that.
Alex SL 10.30.23 at 8:56 am
Tim Worstall,
I am fascinated because it is really quite straightforward.
If you have a public servant and/or run something through the government, they can do something selfish or they can do something for the public good. Partly a question of who you hire and promote, partly a question of organisational incentives and suchlike. If you have a CEO and/or run something as a private enterprise, they will always make the selfish choice. Not because they are bad people, but because in contrast to public service the entire system of private enterprise is set up to do that. It is the purpose of private enterprise. Being selfish is their mission statement. It is in the C-suite’s job description (the successful candidate should have demonstrated skill in maximising shareholder value… as opposed to, say, keeping the environment healthy).
And at the same time, of course, you can still have incompetence in private enterprise, as demonstrated by the myriad companies that go bust, burn millions on daft ideas ranging from unsuccessful products to randomly moving departments to another city and back again, let managers bully their most competent staff away, or outsource critical functions to subcontractors who fail to deliver. Somehow, it is counted as a strike against government when that happens in government, but never counted as a strike against private enterprise when it happens there.
SamChevre 10.30.23 at 2:22 pm
Although I must strongly disagree regarding Uber. “enrich the owners of taxi licenses” is an odd way of saying “made it possible for taxi drivers to earn a living and retire in dignity”
Alex, I think you are mistaking how the US system worked. (At least in NYC, and in Miami when my grandfather drove a cab in the 1960’s.) Taxi licenses (“medallions”) were expensive, and were owned by people other than the drivers. The drivers paid the license owners so much a day for a car and a license, and kept the rest of what they earned. The licenses did almost nothing to provide security to drivers, it just provided a reliable revenue stream to owners of medallions. (For reference, in NYC pre-Uber, a medallion was worth about $700,000; it’s now worth about $70,000)
hix 10.30.23 at 6:52 pm
For what it’s worth, Uber is rather irrelevant in Germany for two reasons:
-Taxi licensing is just about the qualification of the driver*, minimum capital requirements for liability etc. and fixed prices every taxi has to stick to since quite a long time, not some extreme artificial scarcity of taxis. I am not going to argue the system is perfect as it is, but it’s obviously broken like New York either.
-The let’s just ignore the current rules and start lobbying for a rule change while we keep breaking the rules approach did not go well with German bureaucrats, judges and politicians. Taxi lobbyists were not amused about Uber either, but for the most part, it looked less like their lobby power (which seems limited) than Uber just waltzing in completely ignorant of local culture, which could not be overcome by buying as many lawyers and lobbyists as money can buy.
*No more memorisation of local roads test any more by the way, that was abolished recently, a rather fast adaption of rules to changing technology (better navigation systems) by German standards if you ask me.
Tim Worstall 10.30.23 at 8:17 pm
“If you have a public servant and/or run something through the government, they can do something selfish or they can do something for the public good. Partly a question of who you hire and promote, partly a question of organisational incentives and suchlike. If you have a CEO and/or run something as a private enterprise, they will always make the selfish choice. Not because they are bad people, but because in contrast to public service the entire system of private enterprise is set up to do that.”
My belief in human cupidity is total. This is why MPs have the best pension system in the British Isles.
I simply do not doubt that people with the power to favour themselves will. What I’m interested in is systems to control this. Coal miners used to – used to – have considerable political power in the UK. In the mid 1970s they made some 2x median wages. Are those two related? As above MPs have the best pensions. I tend to – tend – to think that competition in markets moderates this tendency better than democratic oversight.
Soviet literature is full of stories about the starving commissar, right?
J-D 10.31.23 at 2:30 am
This is true as far as it goes, but going a little further there are important distinctions worth drawing.
In the case of a corporation, the executives are at least in theory supposed to be agents of the owners of the corporation (in the common structure, shareholders), but if their own personal interests conflict with the interests of their principals, there’s no way to guarantee excluding the possibility of their acting in their own interests instead of that of their principals. In the case of a government bureaucracy, the administrators are at least in theory supposed to be agents of the country as a whole, but if their own personal interests conflict with the interests of their principals, there’s no way to guarantee excluding the possibility of their acting in their own interests instead of that of their principals. However, when it does happen that the agents, in each case, act in the interests of their principals, the government bureaucrats will be acting in the interests of the public at large (because that’s who their principals are) while the corporate executives will not be (because that’s not who their principals are).
In addition, people are influenced to seek out different roles by different motives, and different roles influence people with different incentives. I’m sure there are plenty of instances of government bureaucrats being greedy and venal and of corporate executives not behaving that way; but the average expectation has to be that greedy, venal people are more likely to be interested in becoming corporate executives than they are in becoming government bureaucrats, and that the role of a corporate executive is more likely to influence the person performing it to become more greedy and venal than is the role of a government bureaucrat.
Tim Worstall 10.31.23 at 7:25 am
” However, when it does happen that the agents, in each case, act in the interests of their principals, the government bureaucrats will be acting in the interests of the public at large (because that’s who their principals are)”
Possibly, but I’d suggest reading a little more C Northcote Parkinson with that….
engels 10.31.23 at 8:03 am
Yet another study says Uber and Lyft are worse for traffic congestion
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/uber-lyft-traffic-congestion-car-ownership-study/
John Q 10.31.23 at 8:41 am
But as usual, here’s someone saying the opposite.
https://www.marketurbanist.com/blog/the-effect-of-uber-on-traffic-congestion
And you haven’t addressed my main point – if you want to reduce congestion penalise (that is, price it).
Making my policy clear. Any comment from you that I judge to be snarky will result in a weeklong suspension. I don’t have to deal with this and I won’t.
This meta-correspondene is now closed.
Doug M. 10.31.23 at 12:38 pm
“Do we have enough economic lithium? Dunno. Depends on the price we call economic.”
That was literally my point. I did talk about getting it from seawater, yes?
Okay, you can say that’s inconsistent with “running out in 20 years”. So, I will unpack that to “in ~20 years we would run out of proven reserves plausibly available within let’s say half an order of magnitude of market prices, and after that things get problematically expensive”.
Doug M.
Doug M. 10.31.23 at 1:10 pm
“wave power, concentrating solar power, a wide range of storage options, better ways of doing transmission. ”
Wave power is only feasible in a few nearshore locations; most of the biggest and best waves are well offshore. (Most of the /very/ best waves are in the Southern Ocean, around Antarctica. Good luck with that.) It’s never going to be more than a small-scale or local fix.
Concentrating solar, same-same — it’s not going to be much help for Oregon or Germany. Also, this is one of those technologies that has been 10 years away from wide commercial deployment for the last 50 years. The first commercial pilot was built in Italy in the 1960s. The Soviets built a concentrated solar facility in Uzbekistan in 1981; the US built Solar One in California just a few months later. There have been plants providing energy to the US grid on a >10 MW scale since 2006. But somehow it’s never taken off.
“Why” gets beyond my expertise, but I think the problem is that CSP falls between stools: it’s sort of dispatchable, but not consistently and reliably enough to justify its higher cost. Maybe more investment would fix this, but it’s kind of hard to see how.
“Improving transmission” can have two meanings. There are simple straightforward fixes: obvious stuff like smarter grids, catching up on deferred maintenance, upgrading all grids to current materials and designs, and connecting Texas to the rest of the world. Those are good, but they only gain you a few percentage points. From there it’s a fast discontinuous jump to MagicTech — high temperature superconductors, and the like. So when people talk about improving transmission, it’s important to make sure you’re talking about the same thing.
If you want a good example of a very promising technology that is massively underinvested, I would point to Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. OTEC has been around since the 1930s, there are several pilot plants, and it’s carbon-free (or even slightly carbon-negative) baseload power that can provide a bunch of positive externalities from cheap aircon in coastal towns to fish blooms. But nobody has yet built a >MW scale commercial OTEC plant.
In OTEC’s case, the problem is that there’s a big jump from pilot to commercial. Basically, someone has to drop ~$100 million or so on building a big damn pipe in the ocean, plus probably that amount over again on solving the first-time engineering problems. Meaning, the first person to build an OTEC plant probably won’t make money. So even though everyone afterwards probably will, nobody wants to be that first guy.
(TBC, OTEC needs warm surface water, preferably near a coast. So it won’t solve the world’s energy problems. However, it absolutely would solve Indonesia and Hawaii’s energy problems.)
Doug M.
Doug M. 10.31.23 at 1:44 pm
“Ultimately, “baseload” demand consists of that part of demand for which “always-on” power is essential, leading to willingness to pay high prices”
Gather round and hear my tale. I live in Germany. Germany has been undergoing the Energiewende, the attempted transition to 100% clean energy, since 2010. Depending on who you talk to, this has been either an astonishing success or a grim cautionary tale.
Astonishing success: Since 2010, German electricity generation went from 48% coal to 35% coal, while going from 14% renewable (wind/solar/biomass/hydro) to 42% renewable. Carbon emissions, both gross and per capita, have declined by over 20%. Keeping in mind that Germany is a densely populated, heavily industrialized country that is the world’s 5th largest economy, that’s a hell of a change in just 13 years.
Cautionary tale: German electrical prices have risen to the point where they are now a nontrivial drag on economic growth, a driver of inflation, a PITA to consumers and a significant political issue. Also, Germany is having to import electricity from its neighbors, who are either nuclear (France) or burning coal (Czechs and Poles). Also-also, there’s reason to think the Energiewende is hitting a wall, and that it will be difficult to move the needle much further without either significant technological advances or even more economic/political pain.
— A minor but (for Germans) exquisitely irritating point: Deutsche Bahn’s trains have become very irregular in recent years, with late arrivals and departures becoming (for Germans) far too common. Why? Well, a bunch of reasons, but one is that DB went all-in on electrification in the early 2000s — just before the Energiewende started, and so just before the cost of electricity began to soar. So now they’re trying to run an all-electrical system designed for electricity at 15 to 20 cents / kilowatt-hour when today electricity costs 35-40 cents / kilowatt-hour. That’s not working out so great.
But anyway, with particular regard to your “always-on” point — successive German governments tried different pricing regimes! “Dynamische Preiskalkulation” was all the rage for a while there. And yes, one of the tricks that they tried was cheap daytime solar, balanced by making electricity more expensive at night.
And a great cry went up across the land! Because in Germany, a whole bunch of the “always-on” utilities — street lights, sewage treatment plants, water pumps, police stations, hospitals — are run at the local level, usually by the city or the Kreis (the county, more or less). And these local governments saw their budgets being blown up by a double whammy: generally higher electricity prices, plus an additional penalty for keeping the street lights on and the hospital open.
So they screamed blue murder. And because of the way Germany’s political system works (TLDR, local governments are deeply involved in MP selection, so pissing off your Kreis is a good way to get delisted), the central government quickly said, whoops, our bad! Back to cheap electricity at night, as was written in the beginning.
Point being, it’s been tried, and it turned out to be Not Quite That Simple.
Doug M.
MrMr 10.31.23 at 2:08 pm
I’m not sure the extent to which approval of new medicines is an example of the precautionary principle in action (or, I suppose, it depends on how one formulates it).
New drugs require testing for safety and efficacy before they can be brought to market. They have to do what they say, more or less. However, there is no requirement to show that the drugs will not disrupt or harm society on a broader level, and in the US at least IRBs are explicitly forbidden from considering broader social effects when assessing clinical trials. So the drug testing regime here will eg certify that Ozempic makes people lose weight, and that it doesn’t cause seizures, but it will not certify or even address whether it will put personal trainers out of business, exacerbate social inequalities, or whether the underwhelming experience of finally getting skinny will make people more depressed in the long term. This makes sense, given that 1) reviewers lack technical capacity to forecast those more distant and speculative effects, and 2) the valuation of broad social effects is subject of legitimate democratic contestation, which is undesirable to decide in secret meetings of unaccountable bureaucrats (IRB review is neither public nor transparent).
But with a lot of tech products people aren’t really concerned with whether they do what they say without catastrophic individual side effects—Uber clearly does accurately summon cars, and they don’t explode en route—but instead about broader social effects, eg whether social media will degrade our political culture and destroy our teens’ mental health. While medicine does involve a lot of regulation, it isn’t a model for a regime that preemptively addresses those kinds of concerns.
bekabot 10.31.23 at 2:29 pm
“Soviet literature is full of stories about the starving commissar, right?”
Soviet life is full of stories (or used to be; by now the stories have turned into tradition) about the government functionary at a mid-to-high level who did well for himself and his family until he didn’t, at which point he disappeared in the middle of the night never to be seen again, or (alternatively) re-emerged as a skeleton several years or decades later.
Which is only to say that there is no safe path. Shut danger out by locking the door and it will come in through the window or tunnel under the basement. If you think a society’s worst danger inheres in the possibility of coal miners earning too much money, then you can prevent that. You can forestall the disease, or what you think is a disease. But the cure has consequences of its own, and so does everything else.
Doug M. 10.31.23 at 8:04 pm
“In current European models for future low-CO2 grids, the bulk of long term storage would come from hydrogen generated in summer, stored underground like we do with NG today, then burned in a massive fleet of OCGTs in winter to cover periods when wind speeds are low. That storage system has low cycle efficiency…”
Godawful low. Like, single digit low. And the problem with that is (1) you need a crapton of windmills and solar panels to produce a modest amount of burnable hydrogen, and (2) the resulting electricity is not cost competitive with, well, anything.
TBF there are reasons to believe that this can be improved significantly, both through plausible near-future engineering advances and things like economies of scale. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the research is happening right here in Germany.
Doug M.
Alex SL 10.31.23 at 10:26 pm
Tim Worstall,
What I’m interested in is systems to control this.
Well, yes, that’s what I am saying. What I am saying is that whether you pay somebody to do a Thing, and then they do the Thing because they are proud to do the Thing, or whether you pay somebody to maximise profits for themselves and/or their shareholders while coincidentally also doing the Thing, and then they may potentially do the Thing if that indeed is what makes them rich, or not, if it turns out that more money can be made by botching the Thing, is the most important dial you can turn in this context.
One system has controls like public accountability, regulations, and limitations to how much people can even enrich themselves (if the maximum potential payoff is a promotion from Public Service Level 7 to 8, it is worth taking less catastrophic risks to everybody else than if maximum potential payoff is tens of millions in stock options).
The other system is built explicitly around the idea that if every company tries to maximise profits at the expense of everybody else including their employees and customers, somehow everybody will benefit. To express it in sock gnomes logic:
I want to get rich, screw everybody else and the environment
????
Everybody is better off, and the environment is protected
May need a bit more work on phase 2, I would say, especially given that it involves items such as the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, Enron, Exxon Valdez, the Bandanese genocide, lung cancer denialism, global heating denialism, FTX/Alameda and all those other imploded ‘crypto’ companies, the Bhopal disaster, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, etc., plus a variety of instances of hired goons murdering everybody from environmental activists in Brazil to striking workers in the USA. On top of that is the distortion of power caused by having large for-profit enterprises and billionaires with outsized resources to lobby, bribe, re-direct ad spending at will, or even outright own entire news corps and social media networks to influence public opinion and political decisions, so that informed decision making is undermined left, right, and centre to serve primarily a small minority.
Of course, you could say that much of these negative externalities could be avoided by strong regulation. To which my answer would be, yes, quite so. Let’s regulate billionaires and the profit motive out of existence, and then we can have a sustainable, equitable, and humane society.
In turn, you cite “the market” as the solution, as if the economist’s caricature of rational actors with equal market power who have complete freedom of choice based on completely transparent information had any connection to reality, as if there was a functioning market anywhere in a world of monopsies and monopolies, some of them natural by necessity (e.g., infrastructure), others allowed to happen because of international competition putting nations that enforce anti-trust regulations at a strategic disadvantage, and others happening automatically through economies of scale and competition leaving only one or two winners, a world of vendor lock-in and of power differentials between one large, local employer and many employees who cannot easily move away because they are, well, human beings with friends and family instead of abstract model parameters.
I can only assume your motivation is that you worry not prioritising “the market” over everything will lead directly to the Gulag. But right now, in the world as it is in reality, we are talking about “the market” being so ingrained that people who complain about the concept of ID cards as government overreach have no problems handing profit-oriented Apple/Facebook/Google/etc all their location data, browsing history, and communications, that governments all over the world who worry about Chinese hacking hand their IT infrastructure and all the data in it over to profit-oriented Microsoft and Amazon, that companies explicitly set up to maximise profits are subcontracted to manage the unemployed, run schools, aged care facilities, hospitals, and prisons, or patrol the streets. We would have to move the Overton Window thousands of kilometers to the left to even get back to the concept of “maybe this shouldn’t be run by a private enterprise because they’d have an overwhelming monetary incentive to cut corners / under-invest in maintenance and safety / maximise the prison population / bilk patients / etc”. Instead of trying to figure out what works best based on evidence, “the market” (meaning really: a monopoly squeezing rent out of a situation) is reflexively prescribed for everything, because if anybody of prominence ever says that something would be better managed as a public utility, they get called “far left”. There is no rational discourse, only pure free enterprise ideology that permeates everything.
J-D 11.01.23 at 1:39 am
I’ve read a good deal of his work.
Alex SL 11.01.23 at 6:20 am
Doug M,
My wife and I are from Germany, and all our relatives back home tell us that the Deutsche Bahn troubles are because of underinvestment in infrastructure maintenance and understaffing. May have something to do with being run as a business instead of a public utility. Nobody has mentioned energy prices in this context. In the context where they do complain about energy prices, their take is that Merkel complacently watched while the nation became dependent on Russian gas imports instead of diversifying more. But I haven’t been there for over a decade, so I can only say what I hear.
As for the solution you promote, I tend towards the view that nuclear power that already existed should probably have been kept for a bit longer to help with transition to 100% renewables. But in terms of building new nuclear power plants, for me it comes down to a decision tree as follows.
Is there enough uranium to supply the entire planet’s electricity for centuries, ideally millenia, without any risk of contaminating entire areas either through accidents in power generation, or transport, or leakage from waste storage? If yes, great!, let’s shift to nuclear power. If no (which seems to be the correct answer), nuclear power is a dead end and should not be pursued except as a transitional technology; continue at 2.
Can nuclear power plants be built at scale and turned on within a decade, at most two? If yes, great!, this will work as a transitional technology to help us move from fossil fuels to zero carbon. If no (which seems to be the correct answer), it won’t work as a transitional technology, because we have to reduce our carbon output much faster than this would allow; continue at 3.
Now that we have established that nuclear power won’t serve, are the proponents of nuclear power incorrect or correct in their claims that a mixture of renewables and storage cannot work because of base load issues or lack of some important mineral? If they are incorrect, great!, we can achieve net zero but really have to hurry up with it now. If they are correct, any technological progress past early 17th century was a mistake and needs to be wound back, because there is no sustainable way of producing electricity at scale. We have to reserve electricity for niche use cases like speciality manufacturing or research, but most of humanity will have to make do with mechanical energy from water wheels and wind mills plus a bit of solar cookers or suchlike and charcoal or wood burning in winter. Probably won’t work with more than 1-2 billion people on the planet either. Note that the conclusion here isn’t even necessarily: we have to do it, or we will all die. It is that in the best case scenario this will happen unavoidably anyway, because one day fossil fuels and uranium will run out, although, yes, realistically we would make the planet uninhabitable before fossil fuels are depleted.
engels 11.01.23 at 1:27 pm
Leaving aside congestion and exploitative labour practices, Uber’s business strategy was always VC-funded monopoly followed by enshittification, and the second phase has now begun in earnest (friends tell me: I’m proud to say I’ve never used it myself).
https://slate.com/business/2022/05/uber-subsidy-lyft-cheap-rides.html
Seekonk 11.01.23 at 2:11 pm
@58
“Probably won’t work with more than 1-2 billion people on the planet”
There’s a 1999 Cornell University study that says: “Democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies could have the planet’s 2 billion people thriving in harmony with the environment. Lacking these approaches … 12 billion miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100.” http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1999/09/miserable-life-overcrowded-earth-2100
I think I understand the powerful impulse of businesses to seek markets, and the prevailing religious orthodoxy (“go ye forth and multiply”), and maybe I’m naïve, but I’m still kinda amazed that population control isn’t part of our resource-management toolkit.
hix 11.01.23 at 6:15 pm
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/financials?p=UBER
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2023/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2023/default.aspx
If only Uber had flushed all those billions into subsidies profiting the riders/drivers.
My guess is, most of the money was burned overpaying highly qualified people* to do complicated things that profit no one.
e.g.gross bookings of 33,6 billion , 9,2 billion revenue ~28%, and all that results in a meagre an operating income of 326 million…. (those are the numbers uber wants us to see, I am neither qualified nor patient enough to dig into the creative accounting, and it already looks horrible)
Maybe some of Ubers sinkhole e.g. part of marketing expenses does end up with drivers after some creative accounting… but that is just no sufficient explanation for all the money lost on what should be a very standardised system with little variable costs used at a huge scale.
*I do count drunk finance and tech bros as highly qualified, despite the rather non merit based selection of who gets outsized bonuses or the job.
916
152
%
Net cash provided by operating activities
$
439
$
1,190
171
%
Free cash flow (1)
$
382
$
1,140
198
%
Total Revenue
35,003,000
Operating Revenue
35,003,000
Cost of Revenue
21,254,000
Gross Profit
13,749,000
Operating Expense
14,322,000
Selling General and Administrative
7,841,000
General & Administrative Expense
3,086,000
Other G and A
3,086,000
Selling & Marketing Expense
4,755,000
Research & Development
3,090,000
Depreciation Amortization Depletion
865,000
Depreciation & amortization
865,000
Other Operating Expenses
2,526,000
Operating Income
-573,000
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