(from my current understanding of the situation) the drawback of solar and wind power is less that it’s more expensive than coal, and more that it’s *cheaper.* Cheap energy is an unfortunate prospect for energy companies because it’s one big game of chicken: as soon as one company starts switching to solar power and energy costs pennies on the dollar, suddenly every energy company is making pennies when they used to make dollars.
I think this is part of the issue, but @xhxhxhx did a good effortpost about alternative energy a while back that I felt left me a better understanding of some of the other issues involved. I won’t just reiterate the same thing worse, but from the sounds of it, a lot of the problem is the way supply tends to fluctuate independently of demand. It seems like there’s a lot of potential for a big breakthrough in power storage at this point, though I am also kind of terrified of the failure states of something capable of storing that kind of energy.
The difficulty of the transition factors into that theory, if it were extremely easy, there would be no stopping it. Instead, there can be this situation where someone is going to have to spend a lot of money discovering how to solve the storage problem, then have that process immediately taken and used by others and therefore make none of that money back.
I dunno, I think whoever invented better storage tech would make bank. Power companies would pay, electric car companies would pay, those goofy people trying to sell consumer solar stuff (presumably made possible by govt subsidy or something) would pay. Storage technology is pretty bad today, and it would be huge if we made major advances in it.
@collapsedsquid said:
They would pay whoever produces the machines. That doesn’t have to be the one who developed it.
I mean, there are patents and shit. And if there isn’t any such protection, it’s pretty much orthogonal to the energy sector and more a general condition of the country/legal system you’re operating under. I don’t actually think that it’s likely to be a power company that would develop or produce better storage tech, but I do think they’d pay whoever did.
There are patents, but like you said, they can be tricky to enforce. There’s the the problem that someone can come up with a competing technology right after you come up with yours, or that you can spend a lot of money and develop nothing.
You want to think of this as an allocation issue. The rewards from this technology can go to consumers, capital, or labor. Consumers can make out like bandits here. I think the people who work on it can cash out in their next job. But the person who paid for the development? They might get a small piece, could cover their actual development costs before risk-adjustment, but not enough to make it worth the risk.
Depends on what tech it is. Super Ultimate Pumped Storage would have trouble, some battery tech probably not so much.