Green Energy

Ok, lots to unpack in this video, but the primary issue is that it is highly US centric and doesn't apply very well to other large electricity markets like the EU.

Here in the EU there is already a very high percentage of renewable electricity generation, often exceeding 70% of the total.

But we have hit a wall not because of too much competition or low profitability, but the exact opposite.

In the EU the power generation is primarily owned by a few large companies, basically an oligopol. These own both large renewable and fossile fuel plants.

The video is correct in how it describes how electricity spot markets function, but has a blind spot in how it can be gamed if a few large companies conspire in keeping the electricity a mix.

By ensuring the demand is rarely fully covered with cheap renewables, but rather keeping a few expensive to run gas-fired plants in the mix, they can collect the price for the gas powered electricity even for the cheap renewables and thus make record profits as long as they keep the market captured like that.

As a result electricity prices for private and industrial consumers are high, despite a large percentage of cheap renewables, and this is a huge barrier for the much larger non-electricity energy consumption sector to electrify.

This is proof that capitalism sucks. You're getting readily available electricity, and yet oil is more profitable.

The problem is that renewables can be done by a lot smaller companies then fossil fuels. Solar can be done by a family on the roof rather easily. Wind turbines cost 3million per piece, so very possible investment for a farmer, small company and the like.

Fossil fuel power plants are a lot more expensive hence competition is smaller. We are easily talking 100million and more per plant. Large pipelines, refineries and oil or gas field developments easily cost over a billion. That keeps out competition. Not to mention oil having the largest cartel in the world backing it.

They are currently. Google and Microsoft are working on getting private nuclear power plants up and running so they can sell more AI slop

Compounding the problem is that the incentives for the company don't always align with the incentives for the person making the decisions.

If you work in an oil company, anything you do to invest in renewable energy will make you look like a traitor to your peers, and on a personal level, you'll be at risk of trading the existing huge well-polished mature empire underneath you for a scrappy little tiny empire that might or might not succeed. That distorts decision-making away from sensible decisions even in areas like the tech sector where the scrappy little empire might have orders of magnitude more profit in it. In energy, where as pointed out, the profit might actually be lower, there's not an energy company on the planet that will do much more than tell their marketing team to talk a lot about it so they look like they're doing something that people like.

I get it but even with all these drawbacks we're doing pretty good, I'd like to see China and India have their lines start going back the other way

Also he didn't mention much about batteries, which are fantastic for arbing cheap solar during the day and expensive power at night