It’s 2023, we are witnessing a huge shift towards clean energy and tons of money and research is being poured into renewables.
But it’s got me thinking, if we did this 20-30 years ago would all the new technology we see today be pretty standard by 2023? Or has there been some big innovations in recent years that would’ve only had been possible in recent times?
A couple examples
Batteries, we are still yet to fully utilise these for energy grid storage and electric vehicles are only now just getting up to the range that a petrol car can do. Would that have been possible in the past considering the first commercial lithium ion battery was released in the 90s?Solid state batteries seem to be like a real boost for renewables yet they are still to be properly used.
Solar panels, wind turbines and other power generation technology. Would they be stock standard or was their efficiency and cost just not possible to overcome until recent times?
Airplanes and other long haul transport, biofuels are what seems to the most likely alternative unless batteries get much better. But these seem to be much later down the track.
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It’s a mix.
We could have achieved a lot more if we started earlier, but there are also a bunch of key technologies that we lacked as prerequisites before.
Just as an example a huge factor are semiconductor power electronics. Without them you can’t efficiently transform DC (from batteries or PV) or wrong frequency AC (from high efficiency wind turbines) to transportable AC. We did huge steps in that regard through material science from the 90s until today. Solutions existed before, but they weren’t easy to scale to large sizes, so you’d have to work with much smaller wind turbines for example.
So if you started 30 years earlier you would maybe get a 20 year advantage compared to now, not the full 30 years
Yes. In the 1950s, humanity developed a revolutionary form of energy production. It emitted no CO2 and no other greenhouse gases, it used a fuel that was already used in massive quantities in weapons research, and while expensive to build it could last for decades with minimal upkeep. Some countries did invest massively in this form of generator, and those that did are today some of the world’s least CO2-polluting countries.
However, because the general public doesn’t understand how power is produced or what is dangerous and what isn’t, it was really easy for fossil fuel companies to fear-monger this new type of reactor. They exploited some mismanaged plant failures to create an image of these types of power plants as dangerous weapons, ready to destroy entire countries at a minute’s notice. This was of course not true, but people didn’t know that. So they turned against this type of energy production, and research and construction of them collapsed in the 80s and 90s. Had this not happened, had we kept building them and researching ways to make them safer and more efficient – at the same scales that we did in the 50s, 60s, and 70s – we might not have the looming climate catastrophe we today fear. We could be entirely off fossil fuels, but people were more scared of this clean form of electricity than they were of coal in the atmosphere.
I am of course talking about nuclear power.
There’s a whole lot of nuance in the question, but I think we would unquestionably be in a better position if we had gotten and stayed on that trajectory.
Given that people _still_ argue against it, there is a very real chance that the absence of evidence for warming would’ve caused a lapse of effort at some point (because, you know, we’re doing things to avoid the warming, so it doesn’t warm, so was it really going to happen to begin with?)
One very possible consequence even on-track would be that we would be far more nuclear-reliant than we are now, and because nuclear power enthusiasts tend to treat nuclear as the be-all-end-all, it’s very likely that renewable development would have lagged and adoption would be substantially lower. The end result would still be better on balance, for the time being, but no direction is without consequence.
Batteries. More material research we do the better they get. If we had done more earlier we could have been much further ahead in vehicle , and other appliances. Eg lawn mowers, etc.
The world’s 1st electric car was around 1890. Imagine how good the tech would be today if that avenue was followed instead of the internal combustion engine
Yes, just look at plastic, it was known from the start it doesn’t rot or decay yet millions of tonnes were produced without any form of collection or disposal as it was cheap. Now we have an estimated 5 trillion pieces floating around in oceans.
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The premise of your question is dubious, since “going green” inherently has a massive impact on society – oil’s byproducts were only cheaply available for research purposes because of the massive scale of oil production.
Shipping cheap things over the oceans is only inexpensive because of the massive scale of oil production.
Mining machinery and processing plants are only inexpensive because of the massive scale of oil production.
Even today we cannot just stop this without billions of people losing access to food, which is grown inexpensively using fertiliser being made available by the massive scale of oil production.
The richest countries got richer due to their investment in oil, they would not have “invested” in decentralised means of cheap energy production, since that business isn’t nearly as profitable or controllable.
You should not forget that the only reason we have 8 billion people around today, is due to the unsustainable practices since industrial revolution – anything that stops / impedes the growth will cause many, many people to die.
I mean I think its kind of a mistake to hinge everything on batteries and battery technologies and now and EVs
We’ve decided that every single person MUST own a car and they must own a car to do everything, want to go pick up some milk and a loaf of bread, better have a car. want to do any activity ever? buy a car and drive to it, etc.. etc..
and now the answer to getting rid of gas cars is now an EV which is even more expensive than a gas car, and given how much in North America doesn’t even want a car anymore the highest selling vehicles are large trucks and SUVs and would never drive anything as reasonable as a medium size car from 20 years ago the EVs have to be massive too
if we just gave even a reasonably small fraction of the money we spent on car infrastructure on public transportation, trains, busses and bike infrastructure we wouldn’t have to try and lean on the technology of batteries so heavily.
Everyone having to own a car to everyone having to own an EV and having to drive the EV for everything is going to be hard to do
Not really.
In theory, it probably could have been done a decade or two faster, but in reality, it doesn’t work that way. In research, you don’t know then end target, you just hop along, one invention/discovery at the time, along a crooked path with many dead ends. Hindsight is always easier than trying to predict where we should go in the future.
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