svetz
Works in theory! Practice? That's something else
I'd prefer phased out to minimize economic impacts.Subsidies should all be rescinded.
Even gas and coal plants have landfill and cleanup costs. Natural gas might be on par with solar, Nuclear and Coal are pretty expensive to dispose of and end of life.The actual cost of renewables isn't what is advertised. And doesn't include the land and lifetime recycling costs of the equipment in most estimates.
LCOEs cover the entire life-cycle, so those unsubsidized costs should be representative from cradle to grave. However, I'm not sure they cover associated things like building pipelines for the transmission of gas to a power plant, so fossil fuels might be higher.
There are a lot of promising nuclear technologies out there including thorium and fusion tech (like the idea of this one); but none are commercialized yet.Thorium will never run out and is a better (safer) fuel than uranium. Our Dept of Energy decided in the 50s to pursue/permit/encourage uranium reactors for power generation because they _wanted_ the plutonium and other byproducts of those reactions for nuclear weapons.
Child Labor: These issues AFAIK are about cobalt which is only in NMC battery and given the fire issues with them; most are getting away from that chemistry.If batteries continue to come down, and the material supply chain can scale, and doesn't involve kids mining stuff in third world countries, and the used batteries can be recycled or trashed safely, excellent!
Recycled: Lithium batteries are said to be 95% recyclable, making them almost as recyclable as aluminum cans (100% recyclable, although a lot end up in dumps rather than recycled) and far better than plastic. There are several good videos doing tours of recycling plants. Batteries also have second-life applications similar to solar panels. Old wind turbine blades do sit in dumps, but new ones are now designed for recycling and there are recycling plants even for old ones.
Supply chain: A new deposit of lithium was recently found beyond Will's backyard that's thought to be large enough to resolve world demand through electrification (ref). Of course, there are lots of other big deposits in Australia, Bolivia, and even other places in Nevada.
The point is there are always problems discovered with new technology. That doesn't mean we stop, it means we find solutions and factor them into the price. Solar and wind, we know what those are now for land-based deployments. We don't know what they are for new technologies, but it's stuff we can probably solve even if like nuclear waste the solution is to bury it.
Most information is out of date by the time it's printed, something about the speed of business. But... trends can be your guide here.Nice chart. It might even be mostly accurate.... If I have learned anything in the last 10 years, it is that no data is trustworthy.
What I believe is technological innovations (and yes subsidies) will help with renewable and nuclear, and not help with fossil fuels.
I was looking at the graph in the link you provided, and think I've figured out why it looked odd to me. It's limited to "energy" related subsidies; that is it's a worst-case scenario for renewables. The reason I thought it odd was that the total amount on the chart is $18.4 billion. But that seemed low given the worldwide, subsidies for fossil fuels are around $7 trillion. I suspect those numbers do not include subsidies for things like fossil fuel exploration, pipelines, etc. which must all be in place for the energy to be delivered. For example, the U.S. approved a billion in funding for natural gas distribution alone in one bill. But there are a lot of projects like that. |
In fact, it must be so as the U.S. Senate says taxpayers paid out $20 billion just to fossil fuel companies as subsidies, that's more than 100% of the chart above. But it's hard to get a cradle-to-grave total of what all the subsidies are.
On the flip side, the U.S. also subsidizes EVs, battery technology, and other things that are all a part of electrification. So, those would need to be included too for a true apples-to-apples. But ideally, as electrification happens, the fossil fuel subsidies are reduced accordingly (we'll still need them for our plastics addiction ).