{"id":15562,"date":"2015-12-22T11:52:03","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T16:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15562"},"modified":"2015-12-22T11:52:03","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T16:52:03","slug":"we-are-at-peak-oil-now-we-need-very-low-cost-energy-to-fix-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15562","title":{"rendered":"We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix it"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix\u00a0it<\/a><\/h3>\n
This past week, I gave a presentation to a group interested in a particular type of renewable energy\u2013solar energy that is deployed in space, so it would provide electricity 24 hours per day. Their question was: how low does the production cost of electricity really need to be?<\/div>\n
\n

I gave them this two-fold answer:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0We are hitting something similar to \u201cPeak Oil\u201d right now<\/strong>. The symptoms are the opposite of the ones that most people expected. There is a glut of supply, and prices are far below the cost of production. Many commodities besides oil are affected; these include natural gas, coal, iron ore, many metals, and many types of food. Our concern should be that low prices will bring down production, quite possibly for many commodities simultaneously. Perhaps the problem should be called \u201cLimits to Growth,\u201d rather than \u201cPeak Oil,\u201d because it is a different type of problem than most people expected.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0The only theoretical solution would be to create a huge supply of renewable energy that would work in today\u2019s devices. It would need to be cheap to produce and be available in the immediate future<\/strong>. Electricity would need to be produced for no more than four cents per kWh, and liquid fuels would need to be produced for less than $20 per barrel of oil equivalent.\u00a0The low cost would need to be the result of very sparing use of resources, rather than the result of government subsidies.<\/p>\n

Of course, we have many other problems associated with a finite world, including rising population, water limits, and climate change. For this reason, even a huge supply of very cheap renewable energy would not be a permanent solution.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a link to the presentation:\u00a0Energy Economics Outlook<\/a>. I will not attempt to explain the slides in detail.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are at Peak Oil now; we need very low-cost energy to fix\u00a0it This past week, I gave a presentation to a group interested in a particular type of renewable energy\u2013solar energy that is deployed in space, so it would provide electricity 24 hours per day. Their question was: how low does the production cost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[1720,1103,341,1233,1039,592,5741,617,674],"class_list":["post-15562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-2","tag-commodity-prices","tag-electricity","tag-future","tag-gail-tverberg","tag-oil-consumption","tag-oil-price","tag-ourfiniteworld","tag-peak-oil","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15563,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15562\/revisions\/15563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}