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
The technology was nascent, we had a pretty good idea that wind and solar could become cheaper, but initially it wasn’t. If we had passed regulations to require solar production back when it was inefficient and expensive to only build solar it would have damaged the economy but probably pushed the improvements faster.
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.
I mean we could’ve just stopped chopping trees like 50 years ago and we’d be in a pretty good spot too. It’s not really the technology but more so government policies and public opinion.
There’s was just too much profit in destroying the earth that no one stopped long enough to think of the consequences.
To some extent, yes. And even before we had the options we knew we needed them. Thing is, fossil fuels had already taken off and made nations rich and made oil company tycoons all over the world. Those folks have fought HARD to stifle progress in green energy as it would lose them money.
I’m taking this approach because top comment dealt with most of the history of the tech development. I wanted to give an example of why. It’s important to know these things, how a handful of greedy people can actually kill a planet and the living things on it. It’s important to remember because it’s wrong and awful.
We even had EVs ahead of ICE.. I could list off a few names from the last 100 years that indirectly did so much damage id be hard pressed to find a conventional weapon that could come close. Humanity is sick, but you’re asking the right questions.
Uh, absolutely?
The oil and gas industry tore up public transit all over north america to favour cars.
We used to be much more eco-friendly. Boomers didn’t throw away many pounds of plastic every day, like Gen Z does. Glass bottles, no takeaway, thermoses.
We consume way more today than we ever did. And it’s not a technology problem, it’s a moral problem.
[https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-story-of-jimmy-carters-white-house-solar-panels/](https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-story-of-jimmy-carters-white-house-solar-panels/)
Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the white house in 1978. Here’s what he said when he did so:
“A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.”
Yes. We tried.
In the 1940s and 50s we have found out how to use nuclear power on a large scale. Nuclear fission power, to be exact. It was invented around 80 years ago and was said to solve all energy problems.
It can create unbelievable amounts of energy from small amounts of minerals that are quite abundant. All the while, not producing anything that contributes global warming.
The only problem with them is, they create very very dangerous waste that we currently have no way of getting rid off for good. We can only lock the waste away as safe and as far away as possible.
Also, a bad accident happened in the 80s where many people lost their homes and lives. In fact, a part of a country was so badly damaged, that no human or animal will be able to safely live there anymore for thousands of years.
The accident was not caused because the energy was bad or the machines broke, but because a human who worked there made a big mistake when operating the machines.
There was a lot of research going on about how to safely dispose of the waste and avoid such accidents in the future. If the research continued intensively to this day, we would probably have already found solutions for these problems.
But because if the whole world relied on this energy, the big oil and coal companies would not make nearly as much money as they did before and they would lose their political power.
So the big companies used the argument of the dangerous waste and the bad accident that happened to make the people dislike this energy.
It worked on the people. For many years now no one really wants to use this energy, because the people are very afraid of it.
Because most people dislike this energy now, the research into solving the problems has nearly ceased. No one is really interested in it anymore. Some researchers still work hard on it, but they get very little support compared to when the technology was invented.
Now people are looking for new ways of making energy that doesn’t destroy the environment. And while they do, we have to mostly rely on oil and coal.
Yes. Both the problems (or most of them) and at least some solutions have been known for decades for our biggest challenges. A few even date back to the earliest dates of oil & gas if not earlier but for various reasons they were sidelined at the large scale.
For instance, there were electric cars in the 1920s but pretty quickly the manufacturers dropped them. You could only get one if you were a hobbyist and built your own, or if you built one in a university class or something like that, the major producers adamently refused to even do much research (never mind manufacture) until just recently, a delay of only about 90 years.
Available yes, cheap no. Which has been a large issue for renewables in the past.
Design choices in infrastructure would have made a large difference long ago instead of spreading everything out.
We’ve had windmills and water mills for thousands of years – the only thing that modern versions do is improve efficiency, which means you don’t have to build as many of them to get the same result. We have also had energy storage approaches (not batteries) that can store this energy long-term – that’s basically what a water tower does, and there are several other far more useful/scalable approaches like thermal storage or pumped reservoirs. So yes, we’ve had lots of green technology available to us for centuries.
The reason we haven’t switched has nothing to do with technology: the technology is robust, well known, and cheap. The reason is that digging extremely abundant explosive fuel out of the ground is far easier and cheaper to do than building stuff, and the people who have money don’t want to spend it unless they’re forced to (such as by the government).
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