It's worth thinking about past unprecedented humanity-wide energy transitions to get a taste of what might be in store.
Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)
This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use. Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible. Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they wouldn't.
The way you describe the transition events elides the incredible instability that people living through them experienced (wars, revolutions, famines, etc.), which I think is what Stross is getting at here, and ultimately is probably right about.
Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
I think what you are saying is that it would be great to live after the French revolution happened and settled, good enough to live before the revolution happens; and the worst is during the revolution?
> Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
I find myself in this odd internal conflict. I genuinely care about the planet, but I'm approaching 60 and childfree, and have definite misanthropic tendencies. While there's big part of me that's a tree-hugging greenie and who wants to attend every protest about human rights abuses and war, here's always a loud voice in my head telling me "it only all needs to last another couple of decade without completely collapsing".
all of those things were also very common outside of energy transitions until about the last century.
for all of its faults, one thing the globalized system has allowed is that it makes relieving famine possible by shipping food from other parts of the globe.
Strictly speaking there's never been an energy transition in the sense of replacing one source of energy with another. Instead, the different sources of energy have been piling on top of each other. [1]
So while PV is growing at an unprecedented pace, it still represents only 2-3% of total energy production. About 75% still comes from fossil fuel. Today we burn more fossil fuels (and incidentally more wood) than ever before in human history. So the term "energy transition" is inaccurate at best.
> there's never been an energy transition in the sense of replacing one source of energy with another
We have. This is thinking too narrowly about energy as "driving a turbine" rather than doing work in general. Horses, oxen, and other beasts of burden have been almost completely marginalized in our modern economy. The same could certainly happen to steam-powered turbines (coal, gas, nuclear, etc) if the economics end up working out that way.
Yeah, even old water mills - while the weirs and water supply channels might still stand, the water wheels are long gone, with a few exception not worth replacing by a modern small water turbine generating electricity.
It is simply not economical to exploit this (originally critical) source of power as its is so small in absolute numbers compared to all the necessary maintenance.
A few years back I visited an old water mill called Itaipú. It has forty water wheels still in operation, providing a total of 14 gigawatts peak. At the time I visited, one of the water wheels was providing 95% of Paraguay's electricity, and the other 39 were providing 25% of Brazil's electricity. It turns 50 years old next year. In 02020 its average production was 8.7 gigawatts. They did have to replace one of the water wheels a few years after I visited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thcIrM31tZ4
Brazil uses more electricity now, some 80 gigawatts, so this one water mill only produces about 10% of it now.
It is true that many older water mills are no longer in use, though. Maybe 50 years to you is not old!
That's a hydroelectric dam, not a water wheel. A water wheel captures mechanical energy directly for eg grain milling, not conversion to electricity via turbine.
> the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism
Almost none of this really tracks. ICE => democracy? I don't see the link. Most of the things you speak of came with the industrial revolution, not with oil.
You seem to have misinterpreted what I was saying, possibly due to being unfamiliar with the terminology. It was Watt's external combustion engine that brought the industrial revolution and made democracy widespread, not the internal combustion engine.
We (mostly) ended human slavery, but I don't think its accurate to say we ended slavery in general.
Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.
We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.
Ironically for the parent's thesis (cheap energy replacing human slave labor), one of the major objects of modern slavery is... the manufacturing of solar panels,
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-xi... ("Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human Rights Concerns / The global industry is cutting some ties to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and companies are less transparent, a new report found")
(Maybe there's some kind of evil Jevons Paradox for slavery, where the automation of human labor counterintuitively increases total slavery; i.e. the technologically-augmented effectiveness of slave labor increases the value of slaves).
It would be interesting if someone could do a deep dive into what solar would cost if forced labour was taken out and all workers were paid a fair wage. Would it still be super competitive?
If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.
Yes. The US Department of Commerce has been litigating this every year for over a decade, with a deep dive into what kinds of "subsidies" the top Chinese solar producers might be receiving, including deeply implausible kinds of subsidies, and as I recall one of the "subsidies" they were supposedly receiving was that their employees assembling solar panels were working for lower wages than electronics assembly employees in Indonesia. These investigations, carried out under a "guilty until proven innocent" standard (called "adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available") end up with a quantitative "countervailing duty" to apply to compensate for the "subsidies" as precisely as possible.
You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.
The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.
But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.
The source of 27 million slaves today is outdated. More importantly, the source paper referenced by the BBC here doesn't show any source for such a number, the closest it comes is to reference two specific examples of slavery, Sudanese slaves captured by paramilitary or government forces and sex slaves in Mumbai. Both examples are listed with estimates topping 90,000 enslaved.
In no way am I saying slavery is no longer a problem, one slave is too many. I chose not to go after the parent comment's claim that slavery has ended because that wasn't the important to the point I was raising.
You have: 6 gigajoules / 10 years (8 hours/day)
You want: W
* 57.039776
/ 0.017531626
That's at least in the ballpark.
I think that from a moral point of view it's accurate to say that we ended slavery in general, or at least mostly ended it. Energy slaves made of barrels of oil or solar panels don't involve the same suffering and cruelty that human slavery does.
Energy slaves made of barrels of oil come with a lot of external costs that do impact living things though. I lived on the gulf coast when during and after the BP oil spill, countless animals suffered due to that oil spill.
Well that would depend heavily on how you define slavery.
Most people probably consider slavery something that can only be imposed on another human. I'd be in the minority considering animals raised in industrial farms and meat operations to be enslaved. I'd be in an even smaller minority to consider that plants raised in commercial fields may be enslaved, there is at least the possibility that plants may experience the world around them and their existence in it more than we give them credit for.
I don't know that I'd say we enslaved oil, I'd say we enslaved nature more broadly.
Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy, cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)
This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy available from the sun is much larger than what people use today, perhaps 7000× even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use. Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible. Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they wouldn't.
Quibble: China's solar panels are not thin-film.