- #26
What about environmental and sustainability merits? Markets don't take into account either. I say we should spend money on renewable energy even if it's uneconomical, since there is no guarantee the markets will handle situation in a few decades when the oil starts running out.
Markets will react to depletion of resources only when it begins to happen, but imho it is too dangerous to wait for that. Why not leave some oil in the ground, just in case it's needed later?
Tanks and machine guns have no economic value at all, they are tools for political ends.Planned production is not always a bad thing. Take, for example soviet economy. Even though in general it was quite poor nation, during WWII they managed to produce huge quantition of war machines, more than germans who had more advanced economy. It was because organizing production of only tanks and guns is technicaly doable, in contrast to producing millions of kinds of goods in peacetime economcy. I don't have online source, our teacher of economics history told us this.
Because energy is a market, war is not.So why shouldn't electricity be produced in beraucratic manner? The organization of production seems to be purely technical problem, such as predicting power consumption(probably doable, as it is almost constant), calculating costs of production and choosing what kind of power plant to build and how big share of renewable energy should be(decided by weighting in costs and non-economical benefits).
And this is why environmentalists are often accused of being socialists, because many of them are. Here's another example of central planning gone awry.A technical department could simply say to politicians: if you want this share of renewable energy it will cost this much, and if you want this price electricity for consumers you will need to pay this much subsidies.
Yes, reports are given in peak installed power. Same for solar.... When you report figures for wind power, do you only report installed power capacity?
Divide by ~3 for wind, by ~6 for solar on an annual basis. The figures obviously fluctuate quite a bit by season and location.From that installed capacity, how much energy is produced per year?
The electric load has an average (like everything) but it is not constant, not even close. The load is also sensitive to cost, thus efficiency of the producer matters, thus competition matters, and we're back to no you can't centrally plan the entire electrical system.(probably doable, as it is almost constant), ...
The price of oil of course did not stay at the crash bottom of 2008....y.
Besides, have you considered what the results would be if you're wrong and energy prices don't spiral beyond what they are today? Really, based on what the fundementals are and what the global economic situation is likely to be in the next few years there is no reason to believe energy prices will increase significantly for the forseeable future....short of nuclear war in the mid east of course.
And even when it does recover, barring a major political event that disrupts supply it won't instantaneously go through the roof, it's a gradual increase.
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The bull goes up the stairs, the bear jumps out the window.
True, although it is still way down from what it was in 2007. Part of it is that the "next big economic slowdown" just hasn't occured yet. When it does we'll see prices go down again.The price of oil of course did not stay at the crash bottom of 2008.
Yep, pushing prices up somewhat, but again not nearly up to $140 a barrel....a critical point, because much of the N. American boom in oil production via fracking and tar sands oil would be marginally uneconomic if the price had remained at the 2008 bottom.