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
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.
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