General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJust Curious What Happens To The Price Of Oil And That Industry When It's Replaced With Solar,Wind..
and other forms of alternate energies? Though we wean ourselves off the dependency for powering our cars, trucks, etc - oil I believe is still necessary for use in plastics, etc. Wouldn't the price of most everything go up? What about the jobs lost in the industry? Gas stations, oil company people, etc.
How would switching to alternate energies effect the economy as a whole?
I guess one would think that there would be more oil available - so the supply would be up and the demand down - thus the prices would be expected to go down.
But we're talking about the oil companies here - and I'm sure that the prices would go up versus down in order for them to make the same dollars they were making before alternate energies.
I'm just throwing this out for discussion. I'm wondering what would happen? What is expected? How would this impact us?
Kolesar
(31,182 posts)Or so I read. It would decrease the price versus what it would have been without the standards.
I think batteries could replace petro fuels for private transportation. We really need to quit buying products that have to be transported a thousand or more miles, though.
Laelth
(32,017 posts)It will be a long time before the alternative (and/or renewable) forms of energy technology we have can replace fossil fuels.
The price of oil should continue to rise, regardless, purely do to its increasing scarcity.
-Laelth
4dsc
(5,787 posts)There is no so called alternative energy source that will ever replace oil. You obviously have a huge misunderstanding of the role the oil plays in an oil based society.
Not to mention that solar and wind are a different form of energy.
Auggie
(31,173 posts)except, as oil goes, when the supply runs out. But that'll be a while from now and nothing will really matter by then.
To answer your question, the price of oil will skyrocket as supply and production wane. Oil companies will diversify into other fields -- merge with / buy into other industries, including alternate fuels and their distribution.
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)So your argument is backwards. People will find the disadvantages of wind and solar tolerable as a consequence of the rising price of oil.
I'd like to convert my old Subaru to battery power. It gets currently gets 30mpg @ $4.00 per gallon, so call it $0.18 per mile once you factor in incidentals. My commute is 13,000 miles per year,
The cost of conversion is about $12,000 of which $9,000 is batteries. My price for electricity is about $0.08/kwh, and living in Washington, solar and wind aren't economically justifiable, but hydroelectricty is and that is where most of my power comes from.
Once converted, the car will use roughly .28 kwh per mile or about $0.02 per mile. That means I recover my capital investment at a rate of $0.16 per mile ($0.18 - $0.02 = $0.16).
If fuel prices remain steady, I will recover my capital costs in saved fuel after 75,000 miles or roughly six years... about $160/month.
The main benefit as I see it is disaster mitigation; in the event of some major geopolitical shock to the oil supply, we'll still be able to drive.
JackN415
(924 posts)Benton D Struckcheon
(2,347 posts)I posted some figures a month or two back which showed it starting to happen in electricity generation in the US. Basically, as wind power has increased, oil use has decreased to insignificance in the production of electricity. Combine this with the effects of conservation - energy use per household has actually fallen a bit as houses have become better insulated, heating and cooling systems have become more efficient, and of course incandescent bulbs have been replaced by CFLs - and it wound up also decreasing the overall usage of fossil fuels, which hit coal. The coal producers have been in a long bear market as usage of coal in electricity generation has also fallen. While oil has continued to rise, because its role in electricity generation was never that large, its main uses being elsewhere, both coal and natural gas prices have fallen, natural gas to such an extent that electricity producers switched out of coal to natural gas. So, the winner among fossil fuels has been natural gas.
I'll see if I can retrieve the figures and show what I'm talking about.
Anyway, the upshot is that oil prices can be expected to stay elevated for quite a while, precisely because of its wide range of uses. Coal and natural gas aren't nearly as useful.