Comments by "TeeKay" (@teekay_1) on "Can Green Energy Actually Work? (Exploring Clean Energy Economics) || Peter Zeihan" video.

I looked into solar for my home, and considering construction costs, the payback was 25 years, which ironically was the lifespan of the solar cells.
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@MarkRose1337 Those batteries last 10 years, so that's a reoccurring cost that has to be baked into the operating costs.
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@whazzat8015 When people say "we need fewer people", I always ask them if they're volunteering.
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@whazzat8015 Except we're not overpopulated. What I will agree with you is the social net will have to shrink and people will have to become more self-sufficient or else society will fail. In general when you have a system like ours where less than 50% can pay their own way through life, we're ripe for failure when another massive economic disruption occurs.
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@serafinacosta7118 " In once communist and socialist systems it might work" Probably not. Those countries have been through the horrors of communism and socialism and look at everything through a cost lens.
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@SkyRiver1 " this is just lies and spin" Actually it's not. Independent analysis has demonstrated the pollution created by creating electric cars takes 10 years to break even in terms of environmental impact. And it's only shortly after that the electric car will no longer function because the battery needs to be replaced at a cost of roughly $20K for a Tesla. But good luck with the "this is just lies and spin" theory.
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@riley_oneill " and 24 hours of storage at 25GW output for under $10B." If that storage is batteries, they will have to be replace on a 10 year basis. There ain't no free lunch with batteries.
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@riley_oneill There are currently not cost-effective ways of recycling car batteries, even in 2023. And EV fanatics seem to keep telling us that battery technology is making leaps and bounds in terms of capacity, but here we are in 2023, and we're using the same basic technology pioneered in 2005. So if people are going to point to fairy dust and unicorn farts as a reason to invest in a technology that's not sustainable today, then the onus is on them for investing billions in technology that may not be cost effective. Even today EV vehicles have a higher total lifetime cost than gas powered cars as confirmed by Consumer Reports last month.
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@riley_oneill But the battery recycling hasn't. And let's not kid ourselves, the core battery function of a battery....energy density... has not improved since 2005 and will not improve until we move away from lithium. Lithium can have high energy density but it will never have fast charge times. This is science problem, it's not an engineering problem. Lithium is the wrong material to use except for phones and Black and Decker power tools.
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@riley_oneill Energy Is is an issue for EV's though, which is the biggest use case at present for these large batteries in cars. That's why it makes the most sense to stay with gas cars until we get energy density and charge times at roughly par with conventional cars. As to nuclear, there's a whole breed of reactors that essentially are predictable costs and don't suffer from the "China Syndrome" issue. That should be explored aggressively. Solar and Wind should be considered auxiliary power only at this point. We don't have anything to replace oil.
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@MarkRose1337 People don't operate critical infrastructure like that. If we're smart, we'll aggressively build natural gas power stations with lower-cost, safer nuclear for existing nuclear plants. Some day when we actually invest something worth switching to, we can do it when it makes financial sense.
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The problem is twofold: 1) We have nothing to transition to. Solar and wind are great auxiliary sources, but they can never be primary by definition 2) The people saying that the world is in danger RIGHT NOW are generally not scientists or they're people who profit by social upheaval by making this a crisis. Until we know where the money is coming from and going to, you should reject admonitions of "you need to do something right now", because it comes across like someone selling a used car.
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