- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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Some positive figures, heading in the right direction, but this still makes me sad:
Coal remained the dominant power source globally, generating 34.4% of electricity, followed by gas at 22% and other fossil fuels at 2.8%.
but this still makes me sad:
One piece of good news is that solar seems that it may be being adopted as a technology, on the familiar s-curve of technological adoption. So it may go from 6.9% to 50% much quicker than we expect.
Let’s hope so!!
Coals been around for around 200 years, gas for 100+. Solar just got inexpensive 10yrs ago. We have to give it time, even if we don’t have it.
This is overall great news. It’s surprisingly even better when you consider that renewables don’t need to be a 1 to 1 replacement of fossil fuel due to their massive energy efficiency and not having to transport fossil fuels around. Just moving coal and gas around, not even burning it, is a huge factor in climate change.
This video goes into it deeper in a fascinating way way.
To TL;DR the video, fossil fuels are amazingly inefficient, meaning you need a lot of them to produce the same amount of power as renewables. If you move heating to electric, cars and trains to electric, and home appliances to electric, due to the power efficiency of renewables and not needing to move fossil fuels across the earth, you need way, way less total generation of power, to the tune of just 40-50% as much.
I like your optimism & reasoning! Will check out the video, I’ve not heard that take before & it sounds like it makes a lot of sense, maybe we are closer to the ‘right’ side of all this than the media often makes out.
