Quote:
Originally Posted by Talos Woten
Let me share with you a story that deeply affected me. I consulted for many years in the energy industry. It was obvious decades ago that we (as a species) needed to transition off fossil fuels and onto sustainable and renewable energy. But the major energy companies refused to do so because it was too expensive.
Enter renewables over the last couple decades. The price per kWh installed of things like solar and wind kept dropping, but were still more expensive than fossil fuel plants. Eventually they became lower total cost of ownership, and still energy companies resisted transitioning. And then the literal second it became cheaper to build renewable plants than fossil fuel burning ones, every major energy company on the planet rebranded themselves as green and started building environmentally friendly power plants.
The lesson I took away from that experience was that the way to catalyze large scale positive change is to arrange things so that people make more money doing the right thing. All too often "doing the right thing" is synonymous with "paying a premium". What to eat healthy and organic? That will cost you more. Want to use ecologically friendly products? +15% markup.
Ecomods are an enviable position that it's one of the few strategies out there where doing the right thing (use less transportation energy) already makes more money (by paying less for fuel). It's also a double whammy where the ROI horizon is something a real consumer would consider investing in, i.e. something that pays back within 1-4 years.
Anyhoo, my goal is catalyzing positive social change, and ecomods seem like a ripe area. That's why I'm so keen on getting fiscal data in addition to the FE. It will identify the mods / products most suitable for widescale deployment. Oh, and I'm also a cheap *******, so it also suits my misery mindset.  |
Total agreement with the sentiment of this post. Also in agreement with the statement that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel generators.
Problem is, that isn't the whole picture. Renewables generally don't displace fossil fuel generators, but instead are in addition to them. While renewable electricity is cheap, it drives the cost of dispatchable (responds to demand) sources up. This is because utilities end up utilizing renewable electricity first since it's cheapest, which displaces dispatchable generation. With less utilization of those dispatchable generators, the cost per delivered kWh goes up. These plants were built assuming amortizing the cost over a certain duration and certain production quantity. All of a sudden much less production capacity is utilized when renewables come online.
Renewables will be fantastic when they have no dependence on dispatchable generation AND they are cost competitive. That means lots of storage so that renewables become dispatchable and capable of totally displacing other demand-following generators. As of right now, they add to the overall cost of electricity because they lack the most important feature; responding to consumer demand.