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Fifty Fifty: A Simple Observation on the Price of Oil and Solar
Fifty Fifty: A Simple Observation on the Price of Oil and Solar
Oct 09 2013
Published by Karl-Friedrich Lenz under Energy from the desert
About a week ago I blogged about a new report on the cost Germany has to pay for fossil fuel commissioned by the German Green party and written by Steffen Bukold. I noted that all renewable energy is domestic energy. Getting the transition to renewable energy done faster will save Germany trillions of dollars in costs for fossil fuel imports.
But here is another interesting fact I learned from that study. At page 17 the study tells us that in 1972 one barrel of oil cost $2 in average. In contrast, in 2012 that number had gone to over $100. Oil prices increased by a factor of 50 in only forty years.
And from the Wikipedia page on solar cells we can see that the cost of solar was $100 a watt in 1972. So if the cost of solar was $2 per watt now, solar would have gone down by a factor of fifty in the same time oil went up by a factor of fifty. That would be nice for the exact symmetry achieved. It also would make my headline correct.
However, in the real world things don’t play out quite that way. Actually solar is now at around $0.46 per watt, and it was around 0.50 in 2012. So that’s a decrease by a factor of 200 in forty years.
That of course means that the relation between prices of oil and solar has changed by a factor of 10,000 in those last forty years.
And there is no end in sight. Solar will get cheaper. And oil will get more expensive, as the low hanging fruit oil fields become depleted and new energy demand from China and India kicks in.
http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9826
Oct 09 2013
Published by Karl-Friedrich Lenz under Energy from the desert
About a week ago I blogged about a new report on the cost Germany has to pay for fossil fuel commissioned by the German Green party and written by Steffen Bukold. I noted that all renewable energy is domestic energy. Getting the transition to renewable energy done faster will save Germany trillions of dollars in costs for fossil fuel imports.
But here is another interesting fact I learned from that study. At page 17 the study tells us that in 1972 one barrel of oil cost $2 in average. In contrast, in 2012 that number had gone to over $100. Oil prices increased by a factor of 50 in only forty years.
And from the Wikipedia page on solar cells we can see that the cost of solar was $100 a watt in 1972. So if the cost of solar was $2 per watt now, solar would have gone down by a factor of fifty in the same time oil went up by a factor of fifty. That would be nice for the exact symmetry achieved. It also would make my headline correct.
However, in the real world things don’t play out quite that way. Actually solar is now at around $0.46 per watt, and it was around 0.50 in 2012. So that’s a decrease by a factor of 200 in forty years.
That of course means that the relation between prices of oil and solar has changed by a factor of 10,000 in those last forty years.
And there is no end in sight. Solar will get cheaper. And oil will get more expensive, as the low hanging fruit oil fields become depleted and new energy demand from China and India kicks in.
http://k.lenz.name/LB/?p=9826
I found the information about this blogger and the development of his beliefs to be interesting.
I started this blog in January 2003 and migrated it to WordPress in September 2006.
The first eight years I was mainly interested in intellectual property law, especially copyright.
However the Fukushima nuclear accident got me stronger involved in energy and global meltdown issues. I had some interest in the DESERTEC energy from the desert vision earlier, but plan now to put this at the center of my activity here and elsewhere for a couple of years. My interest is especially in bringing the concept to Asia, and there I am concentrated on the Gobi desert in Mongolia.
I had the illusion for a couple of months that advocacy for renewable energy could coexist with advocacy for nuclear as another low carbon option. However, I have given up pro-nuclear advocacy on this blog on December 8, 2011. The strongest reason pushing me to that decision is the intolerable opposition to renewable energy of most of the pro-nuclear bloggers. That is a basic blunder in messaging that assures my fierce opposition to what I call “Fossil Nukes“.
My position now is that I don’t need to decide on nuclear power. It doesn’t matter either way.
My name is Karl-Friedrich Lenz; I am a German national and a professor of German Law, European Law and International Trade Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo since 1995. All opinions on this blog are my own and are in no way to be understood as endorsed by Aoyama Gakuin University.
http://k.lenz.name/LB/?page_id=191
The first eight years I was mainly interested in intellectual property law, especially copyright.
However the Fukushima nuclear accident got me stronger involved in energy and global meltdown issues. I had some interest in the DESERTEC energy from the desert vision earlier, but plan now to put this at the center of my activity here and elsewhere for a couple of years. My interest is especially in bringing the concept to Asia, and there I am concentrated on the Gobi desert in Mongolia.
I had the illusion for a couple of months that advocacy for renewable energy could coexist with advocacy for nuclear as another low carbon option. However, I have given up pro-nuclear advocacy on this blog on December 8, 2011. The strongest reason pushing me to that decision is the intolerable opposition to renewable energy of most of the pro-nuclear bloggers. That is a basic blunder in messaging that assures my fierce opposition to what I call “Fossil Nukes“.
My position now is that I don’t need to decide on nuclear power. It doesn’t matter either way.
My name is Karl-Friedrich Lenz; I am a German national and a professor of German Law, European Law and International Trade Law at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo since 1995. All opinions on this blog are my own and are in no way to be understood as endorsed by Aoyama Gakuin University.
http://k.lenz.name/LB/?page_id=191
Mr Lenz makes his writing available under the Creative Commons license.