Hopium

It all looked pretty hopeless – 20 years ago!

The horrible thing back in 2004 is that there were no clear alternatives. I spent years dredging the internet looking for solution that could scale quickly enough. Back then EV’s were a distant dream and impossibly expensive. Biofuels like corn ethanol competed with farmland, so that when you hit some low percent of fuelling cars there was no food. Hydrogen would consume 3 times the energy of EV’s just to strip hydrogen out of water – let alone the fact that the fuel cell were also expensive. And where was all the energy going to come from to make this hydrogen when the renewables themselves were just too intermittent and crazy expensive? Everything I turned to had flaws. It was all bad – all just “hopium.”

Then for about 12 years I became an avid fan of nuclear power (still am for those colder countries that might need it.) There are many anti-nuclear myths that just need to die. (See Nuclear) But it remains unpopular and illegal in Australia. That wasn’t going to help in time.

Real hope emerged

Finally – after decades of various subsidies from German and Chinese policies – wind and solar have hit economies of scale to be viable. Not just viable – revolutionary! As they gradually scaled up, the price came down.

Renewables are now about 15 times cheaper than back when this nightmare started for me. And the technical improvements are amazing! EG: Solar cells are now made with a third the silicon of their grandparent technologies – and yet capture sunlight more efficiently over a longer lifespan! That makes them cheaper, but it also improves their net energy return. (EROEI). It’s a similar story with wind power. The charge of “hopium” held some weight decades ago – but no more. Real peer-reviewed exchanges between renewables experts and doomers have laid that debate to rest. The doomers lost – bad. (Hear the history of that classic debate at “Doomers vs Transitionistas” at The Energy Transition Podcast.) The hope is real, the engineering checks out, the ingredients are abundant, and it’s accelerating.

Now ‘hopium’ is a lazy taunt that reveals a lot about the person who uses it.

The marketplace has got the news. Wind and solar are now on an exponential doubling curve of every 4 years. That’s over twice the growth rate of the Doomer’s precious oil in the 20th Century. As we know with exponential curves, nothing seems to be happening for the longest time – and unless you’re studying it most people are not really aware anything is happening. And then suddenly the thing is EVERYWHERE! Peak energy Doomers are going to be shocked at how much happens in the next 5 years – let alone the next 20.