All that needs to happen is something like this.
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I’m a bit believer in Joulle as well. In combination with the coal companies and a company like Sundrop Farms—they could keep the coal business model alive.
As it is solar is taking ever more people off the grid. fewer people on the grid means higher costs per person for the infrastructure. So coal electricity costs go up. Meanwhile, all the technological innovation is going into solar plus economies of scale are driving solar costs down.
The electrical generation companies currently have two test algae operations going but neither of them are joulle. they’re slow.
But there are other disruptors. The whole LFTR thorium group plus other nuclear designs that are currently being bandied about. Sometime in the future one of these is going to click. It will simply drop the price of electricity to 1/4-1/10th current cheapest coal/gas prices.
And then the world will change. We’ll be in a new brave new world. Beats me when that will happen. I tell people there’s likely to be very public international competition to break out sometime in the next couple years to have the first LFTR portable reactor out.
Thorium, natural gas, nuclear and solar are not competitive to oil’s high energy density for transportation uses, given the glacial pace of battery technology development. Trucking is an exception. GMO bacteria that absorbs sunlight and excretes gasoline would directly compete with oil.