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RomeoStevens comments on What are your contrarian views? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It isn't very hard to do a little digging here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#mediaviewer/File:Annual_electricity_net_generation_in_the_world.svg
China's aggressive nuclear strategy seems reasonable.
Not exactly sure what you mean by "digging." I already comprehend the quantities of energy being consumed because of my education and experience in related fields, it's the average person who I think does not, since I hear them saying things about how a small increase in solar panel efficiency is going to completely and rapidly "cure us of our fossil fuel addiction."
Also, your figure only reflects electricity generation, not total energy consumption which is a much higher figure. Currently non-hydrocarbon fuel sources for transportation is very fringe.
The truth is that the price of fossil fuels has always and will continue to fluctuate in accord with simple supply-demand economics for a long time to come; the cheaper it gets to make energy via alternative methods, the cheaper fossil fuels will become to undercut those alternative sources.
I looked through the numbers and the trend line. I updated in your direction. Even nuclear can't make a big dent without true mass production of reactors, which almost certainly will not happen.
I give it well over 70 percent chance of happening. Mostly because I am expecting coal and gas to get really unpleasantly expensive in the next two decades. The remaining 30 percent is mostly taken up by "Technological surprise rendering all extant generation tech obsolete. One of the small-scale fusion plants working out very well, for example.
The only reason they have been getting expensive at all is that governments have been over-regulating them.
If you don't regulate them you don't pay directly but pay in medical cost for conditions such as asthma. You also get lower children IQ which is worth something. According to the EPA calculations the children IQ is worth more than the increased monetary cost of coal plants due to mercury regulation.
Ehrr.. Just No. Nuclear might be able to make that case, tough mostly the problem there is sticking with over-grown submarine reactors (pwr's are an asinine choice for use on land) but coal and gas? Those are, if anything underregulated due to excessive political clout. Fossil fuels will get more costly for straightforward reasons of supply and demand. The third world is industrializing, and the first world is going to use ever more electricity due to very predictable changes like the coming switch to all-electric motoring (Which, again, will not be driven by government policy, but by better batteries making the combustion engine a strictly inferior technology for cars) Thus, world wide electricity demand is going to go up. By a lot. That, in turn is going to bid up sea-borne coal and liquified natural gas to ridiculous heights because there just isn't any way to increase the supply to match. Very shortly after that, Resistance to more reactors is going to keel over and die - high electricity costs to industry being entirely unacceptable to people with lots of political clout and lots of media ownership, and suddenly mass-production is going to be on the menu. Hopefully of more sensible designs. Molten salt, molten lead, even sodium. Any design that doesn't require the power to be on for shut-down cooling to work, basically.
Unfortunately it is not quite this simple. The current oil price is on the order of $100 per barrel, but it never broke $40 per barrel prior to 1998. See figure. Also see this figure which is in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, and shows another huge spike around 1980. The reason for these tremendous spike in price isn't simple supply-demand - complex nonlinear political factors are almost certainly to blame, and price stickiness is partially why oil remains as expensive as it is. It doesn't cost even in the ballpark of $100 per barrel to get oil out of the ground and it won't for a very very long time. The upshot is that the price of oil will continue to beat out other sources of energy by just enough to keep those sources of energy at a marginal level of profitability, because oil (and other fossil fuels) can remain profitable at much lower prices.
I would also point out that the scenario you have just described is highly complex and conjunctive, while "oil continues to do what it has been doing" is an intrinsically simple hypothesis.
Price is set on the margins. The marginal barrels of oil coming out of the ground are certainly in the ballpark of $100, from various shale and tight deposits.
The oil prices do not play by the economics textbook rules because most of the world's oil production is controlled by governments and governments have a variety of interests and incentives beyond what a profit-maximizing purely economic agent might have.
Oil is nearly utterly irrelevant to electricity, however. Nobody sane produces electricity on anything but the most minor of scales using it, and given mass-market electric cars, it is never going to be able to compete on price with electricity. charging a 100 kwh battery pack from bone dry to full would cost an average of 12 dollars and change in the US. That is the equivalent of a gas price of <60 cents per gallon, and electric cars are a better driving experience. (well, a car with a 100 kwh battery back certainly will be. That's a lot of oomp.) The sauds aren't going to be able to beat this transition just by dropping the price of oil for a year or two, nor are price hikes on the electric side going to do it - most of the cost of electricity to private consumers is taxes, so even quite large rises in the cost of coal and gas will not translate one-to-one as end-customer pain, and the differential in price is simply to large. More importantly, the electrification of the world continues apace, and most of the places joining the age of the electron do not have vast coal reserves of their own. The secular pressure to go nuclear is only going to rise, and most of the world is well beyond the reach of the various groups dedicated to the defense of helpless Actinides.
I assure you that this is not true, unless I misunderstand you.
edit:
The Finding and Development cost of a typical worthwhile shale play is $1.50/Mcf (many are even better), the current natural gas price is $3.50/Mcf. Of course there are crappy fields with higher F&D cost, and these won't be drilled until prices are high enough to justify it. In effect there is a continuum of price/barrel out there in the world and this is not what controls present day prices.
Eh, Ill stand by my reasoning, but I agree other people might not assign as high probabilities to each step in the chain as I do, so here is a much simpler causative chain that is going to lead to the same place.
China isn't going to keep sacrificing tens of thousands of it's people to the demon smog every year. And once the chinese are knocking of reactors at a high pace, the rest of the world will follow.
And a simple solution to this is just to copy the current-day US which does not use a lot of nuclear power and also does not sacrifice many people to the demon smog.
We have roughly doubling in solar panel efficiency every 7 years. That's not what I would call "small increase".
Even if solar panels were 100% efficient it would not change the overall picture very much. Solar panels are expensive and do not use space efficiently.
With efficiency I meant the amount you pay per kilowatt hour. It's a variable that has seen consistent doubling every 7 years over the last two decades.
Space on top of most buildings is unused and there are huge deserts that aren't used.
Does the include the subsidies many governments have been providing to solar?
Subsidies per kilowatt hour didn't raise exponentially. I'm not sure to what extend they are factored out.
Solar is also not the only form of energy that get's subventioned. In Germany we used to pay billions per year in coal subventions.
They started from zero, so it's technically super-exponential.