The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.
If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?
Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.
My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.
Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.
sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand
which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid.
lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech
so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!
The world’s dependence on China for solar panel manufacturing is troubling, but unlike oil, once the generating facility is installed you’re no longer dependent on your supplier (at least for a decade or two). I would be more concerned about batteries if I was in government
There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
It is very funny that Nord Stream had to be sabotaged while all the Nord Stream money was wasted (Russia had a weak army while the pipeline was operational).
Now we are supposed to buy solar panels from China while the US is depicting China as the greatest threat, senate hearings demand usage of US bases in Asia without the approval of the host countries and the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China.
I wonder if Bilderberg group member Radoslav Sikorski will be gloating on Twitter when secondary sanctions will be imposed on the EU if they import Chinese solar panels.
It's clear the net effect is a subsidy to the North American hydrocarbon sector at the expense of Europe and China and India. Oil prices were falling, now they're not. Places like Alberta were going to run a deficit because oil prices were low. Now they're not. People were buying from the middle east. Now they're less-so.
Stated goals and whether this was accidental is a whole other question.
I'm not sure why people as a whole don't seem to have absorbed the fact that North America is an energy exporting economy now, not a net importer.
The question is whether North American consumers really like that they're paying so much more at the pump (and, shortly, for food prices) on account of oil executives making off like bandits.
e.g. they've cultivated / funded and basically created a formerly extremely fringe "Alberta separatism" movement and are actively trying to disassemble the Canadian state. Things have gotten to the point that they're willing to light fires of instability right in the heart of the "stable" heartland of North America.
Formerly international capital benefited from stability. But the fossil fuel sector sees the writing on the wall and is trying to make as much hay while the sun shines as it can. They profit from the chaos, as we've seen from the last two months.
Funny, physics and economics don't just behave the way we want. The reason we use liquid and gaseous fossil fuels is not a cultural quirk but a function of energy density and fungibility. Each barell of crude pumped from the ground is a natural battery storing energy from hundreds, maybe thousands of years of biosolar collection millions of years ago. Until something is cheaper at scale and of comparable density there is no economic alternative to hydrocarbons. Maybe massive nuclear investment or ocean thermal extraction will be away out. Oil is literally solar power comprrssed in carbon hydrogen bonds and stored for aeons.
All of this can be true and at the same time it's massively harmful to use.
It remains true that the actual total costs of using hydrocarbons are not factored into their actual real world market exchange rate. And every time we've made modest steps to try to make that happen (carbon taxes, regulation) the resistance has been swift and brutal.
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
I think the Natural Gas producers in the US are missing a massive opportunity by not fully pushing Fuel Cell technology. The industry (Nat Gas) has two main issues, 1) Production ie fracking and 2) Emissions.
Fuel Cells take care of #2 completely and for #1 the argument is easily made that since you solve the emissions problem, you have to accept a certain amount of impact on any extraction of energy (lithium, etc). We however control the production within our borders (national/energy security) and are not pushing the messy extraction on third world countries (dealing with our own trash - similar to dealing with nuclear waste)
Bloom has done a good job of late and Watt Fuel Cell is another company I am keeping an eye on. I truly believe that this is a major path forward in the US as the infrastructure already exists and we are the best in the world at gas extraction.
The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
> thanks to China
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Stock vs flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow
Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.
If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.
> resulted out of depending on an adversary
being from a 3rd world country and having lived in Europe & the US.
you quickly learn there's nothing called an adversary when adopting technology.
you adopt what works - ruminating about where something comes from, is a luxury.
then after you can either work towards self-sufficiency or keep being vulnerable.
Europe has been kept in this loop of talking about problems while not solving them.
the US - knowin' about the problems, but actively ignoring them due to politics.
1 reply →
Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
16 replies →
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
2 replies →
This really seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
Sure, it's great to be independent when you can, but of all the groups you depend on, and all the ways you depend on them, this doesn't rank high!
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
2 replies →
it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources
How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?
Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.
My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.
Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.
sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid. lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!
All Europe has to do is let young people become billionaires with limited liability and an unencumbered team selection.
I know it sounds like satire, but there is a good reason tech exploded in the US 30 years ago while Europe is still making cars like it's the 1960's.
4 replies →
If anyone was serious about energy security in North America or Europe they would be building polysilicon, ingot, and wafer capacity.
The world’s dependence on China for solar panel manufacturing is troubling, but unlike oil, once the generating facility is installed you’re no longer dependent on your supplier (at least for a decade or two). I would be more concerned about batteries if I was in government
Our dependence on China for cars is even scarier.
There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
The US president and administration are very vocally against it. And are responsible for the ongoing crisis, with no sign of change
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
1 reply →
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
That used to be true, but things have really settled down. Notice the lack of rushing to start more fracking or refining projects during this crisis.
2 replies →
Typical commodity cycle...most commodities work like this
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
Panasonic has a big US battery plant.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
not at a meaningful scale, and the environment for this under the current administration is increasingly hostile so it won't be for years
It is very funny that Nord Stream had to be sabotaged while all the Nord Stream money was wasted (Russia had a weak army while the pipeline was operational).
Now we are supposed to buy solar panels from China while the US is depicting China as the greatest threat, senate hearings demand usage of US bases in Asia without the approval of the host countries and the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China.
I wonder if Bilderberg group member Radoslav Sikorski will be gloating on Twitter when secondary sanctions will be imposed on the EU if they import Chinese solar panels.
> the US started the Iran war to maintain a blockade to control both the EU and China
Where are you getting this from? That’s not even remotely close to my understanding of the situation
It's clear the net effect is a subsidy to the North American hydrocarbon sector at the expense of Europe and China and India. Oil prices were falling, now they're not. Places like Alberta were going to run a deficit because oil prices were low. Now they're not. People were buying from the middle east. Now they're less-so.
Stated goals and whether this was accidental is a whole other question.
I'm not sure why people as a whole don't seem to have absorbed the fact that North America is an energy exporting economy now, not a net importer.
The question is whether North American consumers really like that they're paying so much more at the pump (and, shortly, for food prices) on account of oil executives making off like bandits.
Fossil fuels are also funding terrorism around the world. Getting rid of it is good for peace too
It is remarkable the way fossil fuels often seem to be found in violent, barbarous places like Iran, Venezuela, and Texas.
It's because the peaceful places where they're also found don't make the news.
Terrorism and political disruption and chaos.
e.g. they've cultivated / funded and basically created a formerly extremely fringe "Alberta separatism" movement and are actively trying to disassemble the Canadian state. Things have gotten to the point that they're willing to light fires of instability right in the heart of the "stable" heartland of North America.
Formerly international capital benefited from stability. But the fossil fuel sector sees the writing on the wall and is trying to make as much hay while the sun shines as it can. They profit from the chaos, as we've seen from the last two months.
Funny, physics and economics don't just behave the way we want. The reason we use liquid and gaseous fossil fuels is not a cultural quirk but a function of energy density and fungibility. Each barell of crude pumped from the ground is a natural battery storing energy from hundreds, maybe thousands of years of biosolar collection millions of years ago. Until something is cheaper at scale and of comparable density there is no economic alternative to hydrocarbons. Maybe massive nuclear investment or ocean thermal extraction will be away out. Oil is literally solar power comprrssed in carbon hydrogen bonds and stored for aeons.
All of this can be true and at the same time it's massively harmful to use.
It remains true that the actual total costs of using hydrocarbons are not factored into their actual real world market exchange rate. And every time we've made modest steps to try to make that happen (carbon taxes, regulation) the resistance has been swift and brutal.
Seems to be an energy security trade, when oil goes up and geopolitics heats dependence gets priced again quickly
Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
That could make plastics even more cheaper. We need to encourage bio degradables before that happens
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
Did horses need to be banned for them to become irrelevant? The next car I buy voluntarily won't be ICE.
Heating is slower to change, but new homes and buildings could come with solar walls and ceilings.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
[1] https://www.loriferber.com/amp/research/presidential-facts-s...
2 replies →
Fossil fuels hopefully aren't going anywhere.
We should absolutely stop burning them, though.
For instance, modern medicine requires petroleum and there's no real alternatives at this time.
Doesn’t the term “fuel” imply they are burnt? Genuine question, I’m not native speaker
1 reply →
This is exactly what I came to post. It's like Trump was designed in a lab to destroy the US :-(
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
1 reply →
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
1 reply →
The North Sea has given us free fish, trade with all corners of the world and now it's one giant windmill farm.
Are you saying there is no trade anymore via the North Sea because of windmills?
…did the fish run away?
maybe the all died of windmill cancer
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
I think the Natural Gas producers in the US are missing a massive opportunity by not fully pushing Fuel Cell technology. The industry (Nat Gas) has two main issues, 1) Production ie fracking and 2) Emissions. Fuel Cells take care of #2 completely and for #1 the argument is easily made that since you solve the emissions problem, you have to accept a certain amount of impact on any extraction of energy (lithium, etc). We however control the production within our borders (national/energy security) and are not pushing the messy extraction on third world countries (dealing with our own trash - similar to dealing with nuclear waste)
Bloom has done a good job of late and Watt Fuel Cell is another company I am keeping an eye on. I truly believe that this is a major path forward in the US as the infrastructure already exists and we are the best in the world at gas extraction.