Was the technology available where the world could have actually gone green sooner without a long term impact on society?

Question

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.

In: 403

Answer 1

No it really wouldn’t have been viable 20-30 years ago.

In 90ies solar panels were for calculators and satellites, for residential use they were completely unaffordable.

Same for batteries, lithium ion batteries back then were expensive and shitty. They were usable for absolute bare minimum of electronics, but already for power tools they were not really an option. Power tools used much cheaper nickel batteries then. Forget about cars or grid scale batteries.

We couldn’t even build windmills the way we can today, the rotors were way smaller which made for much less power. The expertise in building composite structures wasn’t there for things that large.

The world has been sinking decades of basic research, process engineering and automation development into these topics. That’s life work of millions of people that make this modern technology possible. All that effort cannot be just skipped. It’s not about money, that money represents labor, effort and expertise spent, you can’t make a baby in one month if you just throw 9 women at the problem.