The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
uyzstvqs 14 minutes ago [-]
> thanks to China
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Weryj 9 minutes ago [-]
Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
fragmede 5 minutes ago [-]
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
grunder_advice 53 minutes ago [-]
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
WJW 30 minutes ago [-]
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
adjejmxbdjdn 36 minutes ago [-]
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
giantg2 52 minutes ago [-]
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
mcswell 41 minutes ago [-]
Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
adrianN 17 minutes ago [-]
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
xeonmc 12 minutes ago [-]
I like to think optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and that all this is actually his meticulously planned Golden Path to help humanity grow wiser for the better upon his demise.
iknowSFR 27 minutes ago [-]
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
gcanyon 27 minutes ago [-]
This is exactly what I came to post. It's like Trump was designed in a lab to destroy the US :-(
kakaz 55 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 12:29:32 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.