It doesn’t work like that. At lower prices more people can afford energy. There is huge and growing pent up demand for energy in the developing world that can absorb big supply increases, acting as a break on price drops. Furthermore, price drops make some energy unprofitable to develop, which works to slow the expansion of supply. The market is more stable than many realize.
Big drops in energy prices are bad for the bank accounts of the people run the USA too. That’s the most pertinent fact if you are trying to make predictions about what will happen.
It doesn’t work like that. At lower prices more people can afford energy. There is huge and growing pent up demand for energy in the developing world that can absorb big supply increases, acting as a break on price drops. Furthermore, price drops make some energy unprofitable to develop, which works to slow the expansion of supply. The market is more stable than many realize.
Big drops in energy prices are bad for the bank accounts of the people run the USA too. That’s the most pertinent fact if you are trying to make predictions about what will happen.
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Agree but the demand for energy in the 21st century will be several orders of magnitude higher than the demand for energy in 20th century. just as the demand for energy in the 20th century was several orders of magnitude higher than the demand for energy in the 19th century.
Even current oil/gas/coal deposits will not be able to meet the demand in a couple decades without even higher prices.
This leaves the current structure of energy supplies vulnerable to lower cost much higher volume energies.
That’s why there is a huge —about go very public —race for the first country/company to develop the first lftr thorium reactor. (actually a couple prototypes were done in the late 60’s.) why? because the thorium reactors promise the sort of higher order of magnitude and lower cost and safer cleaner energy that will be needed to meet energy supplies demands.
its that high order magnitude energy demand that has countries like china so freaked out about energy supplies for the future. they figure out how much energy taiwan needs per person and then multiply that by the number of people on the mainland china and come up with a gargantuan energy demand,
that’s why when they read articles about thorium reactors three years ago they immediately sent a delegation over to pick up the latest plans. That’s why recently they moved up the date of their first prototype to 10 years hence. that’s also why one of their chief archetects for their thorium venture was quoted in the newspaper as saying that
Professor Li, director of the project’s molten salt chemistry and engineering technology division, said the smog crisis had provided huge impetus for their research.
“The problem of coal has become clear. If the average energy consumption per person doubles, this country will be choked to death by polluted air,” he said. “Nuclear power provides the only solution for massive coal replacement and thorium carries much hope.”
Researchers working on the project said they were under unprecedented “war-like” pressure to succeed and some of the technical challenges they faced were difficult, if not impossible to solve in such a short period.”
“This is definitely a race,” said Li. China “faces fierce competition from overseas and to get there first will not be an easy task”, he said.