Which poor person drives a car built in the last decade? The median car in Germany is approximately ten years old. Almost all the poor people I know ride the bus, but that's probably my city bubble. The remaining ones can't even afford that and ride a bike exclusively.
Also, renewable energy is cheap. That renewable energy is expensive is a meme that was born when the prices were ten times higher than today.
Don't forget, the US is a car-oriented country with inadequate public transit and rail infrastructure. Many poor people are forced to own a car because they can't afford to live near where they work.
No able-bodied person in an urban area should need to own a car, but that's not reality.
Change how? EVs? EVs are expensive cars and our production capacity for them is limited, despite the growth. For the average poor person an EV is 5-10 years into the future.
Good public transportation is even farther away, you need a ton of committment, which many places don't even have, and then a good network takes 30-50 years to build.
Your argument is incoherent, we are talking about electricity generation and you started ranting about cars built in the last decade.
Anyway I love how the pro fossil fuel people claim to be thinking about the poor. In general the policies that reduce carbon emissions will make life a lot easier for the poor (better public transport, support for cycling, cleaner air, etc).
> You run into the same issues when talking about EV adoption. Yes, it's good that they make up say 10% of cars sold this year, but you're still selling 90% gasoline fleet, and it lasts 15 years and it takes a long time to displace.
The problem in home energy is no different than in EVs. If you make no gas cars... poor people are still stuck using whatever gas cars they can still afford (since they will be instantly high demand = you get expensive or really old) and there wont be a widespread solution to powering all of those EV vehicles the middle class gets for at least a decade.
The reason it's not happening is because it's very very expensive not only for the cars (lithium/cobalt/etc costs would ramp up really fast) but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings, where in my city most poor people live.
Telling them all to sit for hours waiting for a charging station that is hopefully near your apartment building is crazy, even if current numbers only hit 2-3x, not 10x. And multi-level underground parking lots aren't going to have plugs available for every car. Mine had 2 plugs available and it was used 100% of the time.
But most relevant that adding supercharger/any car chargers to homes everywhere is also going to apply tons of pressure on... you guess it home energy demands.
> but there's no good solutions to charge your car in most places like apartment buildings
Sure there is: add chargers to more parking spaces. They don't even necessarily need to be fast chargers; cars parked at apartments will typically be parked for multiple hours at a time (heck, possibly even days). There are benefits for non-EV owners, too (namely: that power could just as well be used to run a battery tender or block heater).
Yeah, it ain't cheap (yet), but when you compare to the cost of gas (even without wars in Eastern Europe), it pays for itself.
Not sure if you have encountered this yourself, but achieving this is a huge problem and has many, many issues.
Apartment buildings not built with EVs in mind are notoriously hard to retrofit to enable charging. And I don't simply mean the wiring from some central electrical room to parking spaces -- that difficult part is actually the easy part.
There are endless issues in getting such places wired up:
-- Which spots get wired? When every parking spot is owned by someone, whose will it be? How is the ownership of the charging spots determined?
-- Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?
-- How will the electricity be billed and paid for? This influences how the wiring and hardware upgrades need to be designed and built.
-- How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?
These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered. Inability to answer these questions to the owners of a building's satisfaction actually stops progress on this topic.
> Who will pay for the spots to be wired? Who pays for upgrades to the building infrastructure (and structure) that needs to be upgraded or fitted with central equipment (i.e. non-specific person owned)?
The landlord.
> How will the electricity be billed and paid for?
Included in rent.
> How is liability and insurance for the equipment's operation handled?
Same way it's handled for every other amenity.
> These are truly non-trivial questions that have to be answered.
And yet they're demonstrably answerable in all of 2 minutes. They're "non-trivial" only because landlords are cheapskates.
Renewables at present cost more than dirty energy. At least in capital costs. You're not going to get poor people affordable energy that way.
Your best bet is to develop the technology in the countries that can afford it. Then introduce the renewables when it's affordable. That's not far off.
Because world gas prices are so high, renewable energy is by far the cheapest option for new electricity generation in the UK already.
Let's take this morning's peak, electricity wholesale spot prices were £600 per MWh. A "subsidised" wind farm in the North Sea might be paid £150 per MWh, which ordinarily is indeed very expensive, but right now that means £450 per MWh comes to the government as the other side of the "subsidy".
There's maybe 13GW of wind power this morning (of maybe 35GW used in Britain). If that was all gas power instead, it would have cost us almost £1M every ten minutes extra on top of what will be on bills anyway.
Even at "normal" prices recently, those wind farms are basically free. Only in the middle of the night when there's no power need and the reservoirs and batteries are full do they drive prices briefly negative and thus their subsidy actually pays them, all day the prices are above subsidy levels and they pay us.
It's been the cheapest for a decade, even when gas prices were low.
You need to include health costs etc. in that, but if we're worrying about poor people, then simply ignoring the pollution that will make them sick seems weird.
The silver lining here is that it make energy storage economical without any subsidies. Looking at local Finnish spot prices - one could charge for 30e/MWh and discharge at 500e/MWh. Companies like GridScale tout 60% round-trip efficiency at a price of 60e/kWh. With such uneven prices, the installation pays for itself within a single year, which is crazy high ROI
This is too defeatist. We shouldn't be building any fossil fuel based plants now and all those existing plants will need replacing in time.