Renewable Revolution

Quote from: RE on February 11, 2016, 07:18:59 am

Newz Flash.  This isn't the early 90s, its a quarter century later.

Correct. The 90's in the oil business was after a worse crash, dating back to 1986.


In a few years, when the boomers are shaken out, debt recycled through the bankruptcy courts, when the dead weight workers have moved on to window and car sales, and the existing production taken over by those who know how to do the business when it is work, hard, day in and day out, work, THEN it will be like the 90's.

We haven't even hit the big shake out/bankruptcy/mergers phase yet.

Hey MKing, in the 1980's, low oil prices crashed renewables. YOU have been predicting REPEATEDLY here that the SAME "supply and demand" mechanism will work for your oil pig pals again today. You are wrong. Amory Lovins is right.

Those who claimed low oil prices would crash renewables (other than biofuels) were wrong.

Oil companies since 1860 and electric utilities since 1892 have sold energy commodities—molecules or electrons—rather than the services customers want, such as illumination, mobility, hot showers, and cold beer. This business model means that when customers use the energy commodity more efficiently to produce the service they want, the provider loses revenue, not cost. That’s bad for both electric utilities and hydrocarbon companies, because most (and for oil, ultimately all) of the commodity they sell can be displaced by far cheaper energy productivity.

Over the past 40 years, Americans have saved 31 times as much energy as renewables added. Those cumulative savings are equivalent to 21 years’ current energy use. They’re simply invisible: you can’t see the energy you don’t use. But globally, it’s a bigger “supply” than oil, and inexorably, it’s going to get much, much bigger.

Oil companies worry about climate regulation, but they’re even more at risk from market competition. The oil that’ll be unburnable for climate reasons is probably less than the oil that’ll be unsellable because efficiency and renewables can do the same job cheaper. An oil business that sputters when oil’s at $90 a barrel, swoons at $50, and dies at $30 will not do well against the $25 cost of getting U.S. mobility—or anyone else’s, since the technologies are fungible—completely off oil by 2050. That cost, like the $18 per saved barrel to make U.S. automobiles uncompromised, attractive, cost-effective, and oil-free, is a 2010–11 analytic result; today’s costs are even lower and continue to fall.

In short, like whale oil in the 1850s, oil is becoming uncompetitive even at low prices before it became unavailable even at high prices.   


http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2016_02_01_as_oil_prices_gyrate_underlying_trends_are_shifting_to_oils_disadvantage