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A few more thoughts on this @ramez thread that lit Energy Twitter up over the weekend. 1/
@ramez It’s true that Germany’s Energiewende played a key role in the recent drop in solar/wind prices, and to that end, the enormous costs of that program have far broader global benefits than many of its critics acknowledge. 2/
@ramez I’m not sure I’d give Germany proportionally more weight than China and the United States, but it’s definitely a global leader in deployment. 3/
@ramez The question is, how many national policies/technologies lend themselves to solar-like success? 4/
@ramez Solar/wind are a pretty global market. The US fracking revolution, for a constellation of reasons, is much less exportable. 5/
@ramez Countries like Costa Rica, Iceland, and Norway are blessed with a bunch of falling water that make a low-carbon grid much more technically feasible than most countries. That achievement is also not broadly replicable. 6/
@ramez Even states that have achieved high nuclear penetration — Sweden, France, Ontario, South Korea — owe that achievement more to domestic policy and institutional arrangements than to any particular technological characteristics. 7/
@ramez So, for countries looking to decarbonize: do you rely on liberalized energy markets to deploy solar, wind, and hopefully next-generation, smaller nuclear reactors less dependent on consolidated state power? 7/
@ramez Or do you rely on nationalized energy industries and just achieve deep decarbonization through directed infrastructure plans, whether with nuclear, hydro, or whatever? 8/
@ramez I think we’re likely to see a lot of both. Key is importing the *right* lessons from each success story. For the Germany model, that means using cheap solar panels they helped turn into a global market. It doesn’t necessarily mean a similar heavy deployment subsidies. 9/
@ramez Crucially, it also doesn’t mean that the closure of Germany’s nuclear power plants was crucial to the success of solar/wind in Germany. 10/
