Quote from: c_atlas on July 17, 2021, 09:18:01 PM

Energy is a really complicated topic. There's a massive number of ways you can combine production and distribution, and figuring out the optimal balance for any geographic area requires a lot of surveying and understanding of the local environment, natural resources, as well as trade relationships between neighbouring countries.

I think renewables will be forced onto consumers in the developed world, especially in the West. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but depending on some of the factors I mentioned above, there will be pos/neg consequences at smaller geographic scales. For example, NYC just decommisioned a nuclear power planet, leading to blackouts throughout the state and NYC. California also voted to decommission Diablo Canyon, and they have no plan for an alternative source of energy, they just state it has to be carbon neutral. These are (in my opinion) poor choices, and will have extremely negative consequences regardless of the renewable energy source that may or may not fill in the gap.

Poor excuses for switching to renewables aside, there are legitimate problems with renewables. They're still much more unreliable than oil/natural gas, storage of excess energy is an issue (one that Bitcoin mining can actually help alleviate), and the actual production of things like solar panels require rare earth materials and metals which are mined in developing nations with poor regulatory oversight. Often, the extraction and purification of these materials results in environmental degradation that goes unchecked in parts of the world where end consumers tend to not care about (so much for "clean" energy). These issues will be resolved or become insignificant enough to ignore over time, but they exist for now and it's silly to pretend renewable energy is some holy grail that we can just have for free (which is how politicians treat it).

So in the short term, I expect a lot of decommissioning of functioning nuclear plants (bad) and aging coal/gas plants (better). In the medium term, these things will be replaced by renewables where they make sense, some countries/provinces/states may just decide to stop producing energy and start importing it entirely. In the long term, I think we're looking at nuclear, although if people were serious about stopping climate change, we would be building nuclear plants at a monotonically increasing rate.

I have just read the first page of this thread and two posts have hit the nail on the head,
the one above with my highlighted points.