Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on May 24, 2017
Moving from age of Energy Scarcity to Abundance
The naysayers have always been wrong when it comes to the staying power of energies.
Take peak oil, for instance. Nineteenth century swamis were preaching a flat-earth dreamer’s world when they said that oil production would begin falling and never recover by the early 1900s. The United Nations predicted in 1972 that hydrocarbons would jump the shark by 2000. But then shale drilling happened and the rest is history.
These good-hearted, but wrong-headed assumptions about electrical power have so far missed the mark then they predict deprivation and rising cost. A reasonable soul paying 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour in the 1920s might assume that the cost would skyrocket to dollars per kWh until our very economic center collapsed under the weight of scarcity and energy prices.
Surely, we’ve had spikes now and again, but actually the opposite has happened. A utility customer today in the U.S. is not paying much differently than 8.5 cents per kWh, except that it’s 95 years later and our economy has expanded multiple times over since then.
We live in an age of energy abundance, or it is fast approaching, “Exponential Organizations” author Salim Ismail said during his talk at the Accenture International Utilities and Energy Conference earlier this month in Miami. Computer power gets exponentially faster and cheaper every few years, and now solar panels are following the same upward trajectory and downward pricing signals.
This is going to change our world both politically and economically if it continues, he predicted. Capacity is doubling and costs are constricting by halves at a stunning pace.
“That doubling pattern keeps going,” Ismail said. “That doubling pattern does not stop. All of our business models are built around the scarcity of energy; it’s about to become abundant. The poorest countries in the world are some of the sunniest countries in the world.”
Imagine that some impoverished, sun-kissed region suddenly becomes the OPEC of daylight’s power. Things are going to get real different, real fast.
It already has happened with the frontier of science, if not the self-protective health care profession. Remember not so long ago when DNA sequencing was a rarity costing $350,000 to now about $1,000 or less per genome.
The cost of light went from prohibitive over hundreds of years to almost nothing today, Ismail pointed out. Film stock de-escalated from relatively pricey to almost nil by the digital revolution’s arrival.
Utilities will have to figure this out for themselves, because the solar revolution isn’t stopping either.
“The problem for you folks is how to build business models around abundance.”
12 Comments on "Moving from age of Energy Scarcity to Abundance"
onlooker on Wed, 24th May 2017 7:06 am
Amazing, the stupidity of this article
rockman on Wed, 24th May 2017 8:51 am
Looker – You’re such a silly. Didn’t you read what they just said: “Remember not so long ago when DNA sequencing was a rarity costing $350,000 to now about $1,000 or less per genome.” Based on that logic thanks to tech advances energy cost will decline 99%+ before you know it. And some folks call me a “dinosaur”. LOL.
Cloggie on Wed, 24th May 2017 9:40 am
A 285 peak watt solar panel costs 250,- euro. By 2020 that will be something like 100,- euro.
Under not too good Dutch solar circumstances, X peak watt translates in 0.85 times X in kWh or ca. 250 kWh/year. Over 30 years that would mean 7500 kWh. Allow for slow yield degradation factor of 0.9 and you arrive at lifetime 6750 kWh or 1.5 euro cent/kWh in 2017 euro cents.
You see? There is no energy problem.
Too cheap to meter.
Using oil and gas is like shooting yourself in the foot financially, not to mention environmentally.
onlooker on Wed, 24th May 2017 9:40 am
Haha Rock, I don’t know if your being satirical but somehow I have to think that depletion and less accessible energy will outrace tech advances. Just a hunch
Sissyfuss on Wed, 24th May 2017 12:16 pm
“The doubling pattern does not stop.” Precisely describes the exponential property of population growth.But without abundant FFs for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides you’ll have to lick your solar cells for sustenance. Then again, once the harvest cycle is completely disrupted there will be abundance without anyone to enjoy it.
Cloggie on Wed, 24th May 2017 12:24 pm
Well Siss, at least we seem to agree that we don’t have an energy problem.
Outcast_Searcher on Wed, 24th May 2017 2:12 pm
The exponential cost model for solar panels COMPLETELY ignores installation and maintenance costs.
Physical things outside electronics are generally NOT on a long term exponential cost reduction curve.
Also, growth is nice for the economy in the short term, but we live on a finite planet with finite resources. Pollution and AGW should be very big signals that we can’t just blindly continue BAU growth and pretend that there aren’t disastrous consequences over time.
We may indeed, over the next 30 to 50 years or so, manage to reach a point of relative energy abundance in the first world with green energy.
However, it WON’T be on an exponentially cheaper cost curve. And it WON’T lead to some sort of global paradise if BAU population and consumption growth continue to occur — as every sign points to happening — regardless of all the obvious negative consequences.
However,
Outcast_Searcher on Wed, 24th May 2017 2:16 pm
Cloggie, why do you ignore the installation and maintenance costs. Panel and windmill, etc. technology could be FREE. The total costs would still be significant.
This is something the green dreamers seem to deliberately and constantly forget — which greatly detracts from their credibility.
I’m not saying green isn’t great, or that green isn’t coming over time in the first world.
But pretending like it will be free or even too cheap to meter (for at least several decades) seems to ignore rather obvious physical issues that reality imposes.
dave thompson on Wed, 24th May 2017 5:23 pm
solar panels only work in the sun shine and daylight. What is the current rate of solar electricity battery storage?
Cloggie on Thu, 25th May 2017 3:31 am
Switserland moving away from nuclear energy after approving binding referendum to that effect with 58%:
https://www.trouw.nl/home/zwitsers-kiezen-voor-meer-duurzame-energie-~abc408dc/
Billions will be invested in renewable energy instead.
Cloggie on Thu, 25th May 2017 3:34 am
Cloggie, why do you ignore the installation and maintenance costs. Panel and windmill, etc. technology could be FREE. The total costs would still be significant.
I do not ignore them and explicitly stated the cost of the “naked solar panel” in order to illustrate the price decay.
No such decay will take place with installation cost, for sure. But so what? Renewable energy won on price, even if you ignore environmental aspects. The race is over, renewable won.
brough on Thu, 25th May 2017 9:35 am
Brough, aged 12 years old.
Science teacher giving lesson on the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.
The author of this article must have missed class on that day.
Either that or he’s an idiot.