I'm researching this to have some concrete data, but I doubt I'll have it together soon enough to share in this thread. Will definitely share on HN when this topic comes back around with what I find.
> Look around: all the ideas to replace them right now are wishful thinking.
I don't think this is true at all. Solar is improving at a rapid pace and is already cheaper. We need a large scale rollout, but that's a will issue, not a tech issue. Nuclear is always an option as well. You can see this in many places, here's a graph of solar production in the US, that rise looks amazing!
https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/index.php?tbl=T...
Solar is indeed improving at a rapid pace, but in a world full of cheap and abundant fossil energy. What will be its price in a world without fossil fuels?
Also it's obviously much easier to quickly go from "almost no solar" to "a little bit more solar", but it is not linear: the more solar you make, the harder it is to double the production.
It is most definitely a tech issue. Take absolutely whatever you want and try to get it to a whole different scale, and it will become a tech issue. And next to that, you can't control solar (if there is no sun, there is no electricity), and we don't have a convincing technical solution for that today.
> Nuclear is always an option as well.
Every year that we spend doing nothing, it becomes less and less of an option. It's pretty clear that fusion is way too late for the party. Now for fission plants, it takes decades to build, so we don't have a whole lot of time to start. Still you will get the scale problems again: you can't replace fossils entirely with fission.
Don't get me wrong: we absolutely need fission and nuclear and all the renewables. But we have to realize that they won't completely replace oil, and therefore we won't have enough energy to keep doing everything we are doing the way we are doing it today. Therefore we will have to choose what we prioritize, and that is called "degrowth".
> Now, you can choose to be a techno-pessimist about all this if you want. You can assume, if you like, [... adds an incomplete list of stuff that could prevent technology from solving the problem ...]. Yes, with enough mental effort, you can ignore a technological revolution in progress. > > But ignoring a technological revolution in progress will accomplish nothing.
Let's be real: this article does not prove that solar can replace fossil fuels. It has faith that it can, and believes that "anyway if that doesn't work, we're screwed, so we have to believe in it".
It merely extrapolates from the growth of solar in the last few years. That is not enough.
My turn to suggest a different view: https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Blain-Christophe-eb...