I thought with the explosion of electric power and windmills and the electric vehicle boom, fossil fuels would not be required…
Yet, a lot of countries still generate coal and other fossil fuels, is it because there is still filthy amounts of profit there to be made? Maybe they are just so used to it they don’t wanna swap to another resource?
I thought with Solar panels being massively produced, it would sell like hot cakes and you’re literally having the power of the sun in your hand.
Despite the replies, the real answer is that it’s not as simple as “stopping drilling”.
The fossil fuel industry isn’t just oil and fuel…it’s quite literally everything.
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The vulkanized rubber in the tires of your electric vehicle…yep…petroleum based.
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The hard plastic that forms the interior panels, and the side walls, the steering wheel and literally everything else made of plastic on the planet? You guessed it…petroleum based.
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The lubricants that keep the chains chaining, the gears gearing, the whirligigs whirling and the moving parts moving…once again…petroleum based.
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Much of the cosmetics industry, as well as chapsticks, lotions, sunscreens, etc… Yep…all have at least some petroleum based ingredients.
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The calking and rubber cement that keeps the tiles your walking on stuck to the floor…yep…you guessed it.
Are you starting to get it?
Hippies can complain all they want, and I ABSOLUTELY agree that we need to be moving away from the petroleum industry faster. But it’s not a matter of switching to electric cars because EVERY part of modern life is from the roads we drive on to the keyboard I’m typing this one, is in some way or another making use of a petroleum based product.
We have a long hard road before that’s not the case anymore.
If we stopped drilling except for those use cases, I’d be a happy hippie. I’m not a hippie today, but I’m willing to change.
Oh believe me. I would be too. We’d buy ourselves a hell of a lot of time. I’m just pointing out that the solution is never black and white.
My Kia EV has plant based leather seats. I’m not saying they’re good seats though
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Geopolitics. Coal is available in tons of places and cheap to use and extract.
Money mostly. It generates a lot of profit and it costs money to switch. In many of countries oil, gas, etc. are like a huge portion of their GDP. It’s like trying to get people to eat less meat. It would be better and more environmentally friendly, but everyone is too dependent on meat.
This dependence on meat is mostly imaginary.
but it tastes so good…
Yeah, I remember. But how important is that?
Because a cabal of evil rich people are holding the human race hostage so they can extract money from everyone so they can rape children on private islands.
They is used because of ignorance
Correction, because a group of rich and powerful vested interests exploit that ignorance for shortsighted profit.
Established supply chain, workforce knowledge. Energy density. Ease of use.
The cost of the raw material is low enough to make it a viable option for the time being. There are also costs associated with switching to renewable options, which makes the transition slower.
Think of it from the perspective of a coal plant owner. You’ve already spent millions into construction and maintenance, so you really want some return on that investment.
When the plant reaches its end of life, that’s usually the best time to start considering other options. If the running costs rise dramatically or you are required to modernize the plant, that could be another time to take a look at other options.
BTW this is the reason why environmental legislation is so important. Companies listen to money, and governments decide what makes economic sense and what doesn’t.
Energy density and entrenched profit structures are big ones for sure. :/
Most if not all power used is generated almost instantly as needed. So when you look at solar (which is a great renewable) you run into the fact that it only generates power while the sun is out, and a specific amount of power.
This causes the problem of, how do you generate power at night and what do you do on rainy days or if a cloud covers the panels. You can substitute this with other renewable energy sources: wind, hydro, and nuclear, but wind has similar issues as solar and hydro and nuclear have huge upfront costs and take years to build.
So this is where coal and natural gas come in. Coal has the downside of being really bad for the environment but can start up within 10ish minutes of being needed. Gas is better for emissions (not great), but takes more time to startup.
A lot of companies use a mix of things along with buying and selling power with other companies (similar to a stock market). There are thoughts of trying to store power or looking at small scale nuclear plants.
Solar chart through the day:
Power use throughout the day:
Source: I work for a large power company
That’s where batteries and other storage systems come into play.
Yeah, people are working on it.
The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.
That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.
It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.
Ya! And there is a lot of research and investment into them. The problem is they lose capacity over time from being powered and drained (think phone batteries and other lithium batteries).
From what I know hydro batteries are actually really big with power companies. Basically pumping a bunch of water uphill when you have excess power, then using the reservoir like a hydro plant when you need power. They are really inefficient, but work surprisingly well at storing a lot of power
I’ve seen some videos talking about iron based battery tech. My understanding is that is doesn’t wear out nearly as fast as lithium based tech and less of a fire risk. Downside is that it is less energy dense, so doesn’t work for mobile applications. But that shouldn’t be a problem for stationary applications, like the power grid.
They were still more expensive than fossil power on standby last time I looked.
Lots being installed around Australia and are a lot cheaper than gas power generation for covering peaks.
Can you show me the numbers?
The numbers I found unsubsidized gas is about USD0.5/kWh and battery is USD150 per kWh. This is a 10 minute search so the quality of those numbers are dubious, I’m prepared to have my mind changed.
Lazard is a pretty respected analyst for energy costs. Here’s their report from June 2024.
In the U.S., peaker gas plants that are only fired up between 5-20% of the time, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is between $110 to $230 per MWh. The levelized cost of storage for utility scale 4-hour storage ranges from $124-$226 per MWh, after subsidies. Before subsidies, that 4-hour storage costs $170-$296.
Residential storage, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. That’s $882 to $1101 before subsidies, or $653 to $855 after subsidies.
So in other words, utility scale storage has dropped down to around the same price as gas peaker plants, in the U.S., after subsidies.
There are a couple of things about battery storage, a grid built on renewables needs ride through capacity and it needs to be able to meet surges in demand. In fact all grids do. Batteries do that and remove the need for hot standby gas generators but at the moment due to lack of capacity, not all fossil fuel generators. A lot of focus is on batteries as the backup for loss of wind or sun, the spread of renewables over a large geographical area and interconnected grids provides greater assurance.
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= capitalism.
Money, They cornered the market and then they started yielding the profits from it to exert political influence. That’s why molten Salt Thorium Reactors were abandoned by american scientists in the 60s. With nuclear power it would mean the end of for profit energy consumption. That plus the surveillance network of the billionaire class is what’s fueling all of the political tensions and far-right (See Fascism) around the world. Denmark is already capable of producing over 140% of its daily energy usage through wind alone. The guardian wrote an article about it in 2015. Wind is still less than 1% of all global energy production. Alberta gets 300 days of sun a year, but have been brainwashed by big oil to invent and reflexively disavow any information otherwise. Then the fossil fuel industry and tech industry launched the Brexit disinformation campaign to weaken the EU that same year. With the advent of China as well as Copenhagen Atomics producing working prototype reactors capable of producing staggeringly vast amounts of energy with less than 1000x the nuclear waste of traditional light water reactors, the change is inevitable. That’s what all of this is for them the war in Ukraine, Trump, Italy, Romania. It’s the fossil fuel industry. With the advent of nuclear power, the obviousness of the effects of climate change and advanced battery technology, the only way they can ensure a continuous demand is war. There are no electric tanks. Russia is a petro state, Saudi Arabia is a petro state, trump is trying to turn the US into an authoritarian petro state. It’s oil, they are the reason for all of this bullshit. Coal power plants are the most dangerous form of energy production, they kill approximately 1,000,000 people a year. We’ve had the technology to move away from them for over 70 years. That’s 70,000,000 dead people. That is more people than died in the entire second world war and we aren’t even talking about it because we’d rather just fall into arguing about transgenderism online than actually stopping them. It all goes back to fossil fuels.
I don’t think the average person truly understands exactly how much of the stuff they use every single day is a byproduct of the petroleum industry.
The obvious ones are oils as lubricants and fuel to burn for vehicles, but it goes soooooooooc much further than that.
Here are some quick examples of things many people do not realize use petroleum byproducts in one way or another.
So while we very well may be able to stop using traditional fuel to run vehicles in the future we still have to find alternatives for a lot of other things. The industry is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Thing is, a lot of these aren’t that bad? Making an oxygen mask feels really different to just setting fire to the fossil fuel to shift a 3-ton vanity pickup truck half a mile to Starbucks. And lots of the others can readily be replaced. Clothes, for example: rayon from bamboo can replace a lot of polyester and nylon
Yeah we have stuff that can outright replace a lot of these things but for mist there is nothing else we have that can take over.
We are heavily dependent on oil even as we try to shift away from fuel as out primary means of transportation.
The correct answer.
Yes, yes, fossil fuel companies have a lot of political influence and are actively hindering the adoption of clean technology. But also, the world uses a lot of energy, and it takes time to build the capacity in renewables to make headway. More money would make things faster, but there is no real monetary incentive right now.
but there is no real monetary incentive right now.
dude, solar energy is literally the cheapest form of energy right now. there is a real monetary incentive.
Cheapest to collect and use there and then? Sure, out of all new power generation.
But when it comes to using the power when it’s needed most, solar is very expensive because….well it produces nothing when the sun goes down and people need power. It then relies on storage, which is expensive.
But you know what is cheaper than building a bunch of new solar? Not building that solar and continuing to use the coal plant that already exists. Hence the need to price CO2eq so that the coal plant is paying out the ass and becomes non-viable.
Renewable power is increasing, yes, but power demand is also increasing. Most of the power to run those electric engines is still being generated by coal. Solar panels are actually kinda energy-intensive to produce, too, and most of that energy is also coming from coal.
Swapping entirely to renewable energy is cool and all but not as easy as “just use a bunch of solar panels???” The issue is that most renewables are some mix of a: unreliable, and b: geographical.
Wind isn’t going to be blowing 24/7 in most places, so wind is unreliable. The sun isn’t always shining in most places, so solar power is unreliable. Hydro is amazing if you have it, but it isn’t the kind of thing you can just build anywhere. Geothermal is also great if you have it, but again isn’t the kind of thing you can just build.
Meanwhile, the power grid requires reliability. It’s incredibly important. The obvious kneejerk response is “but batteries?” which would work and all but you’re basically suggesting we produce enough power during the day to cover usage overnight, which is a tall order. There’s also the fact that the kind of battery banks we’re talking about would be ruinously expensive, and probably some amount of dangerous.
Also, like other people have said: coal/gas are cheap and ubiquitous. Both of those words might as well be synonyms for ‘more money’. Realistically, that’s the primary reason.
cheap and easy.
It’s many thousands of years of solar power , concentated in to a storable, portable and fairly accessible and transmutable form.
Countries don’t “generate” coal and oil, they suck it out of the ground. It was generated by thousands to millions of years of life and accumulated geological processes.
cheap and easy.
My Gen X ass is obligated to respond “like your mom?”
Fossil fuels are actually older than the dinosaurs. Oil and gas form from ancient algae type organisms. Coal is from ancient tree type organisms.
I say type because they only resemble those, and aren’t closely related.
