Oceania too: Australia installed 442 MW of residential solar and 2.5 GWh of residential batteries in the month of April alone. Both numbers are partly juiced by changes to a rebate program from May, but the overall trend remains explosive growth.
Which is pretty much what Australian average price is. Average Australian domestic tariff is around AUD 0.30/kwh which is USD 0.21/kwh.
None of this touches on standing charges, I don't know how that works in the USA, in Australia for an average household it runs at AUD 1.00/day to AUD 1.50/day (USD 0.70/day to USD 1.00/day). For an average household the standing charge is going to add 15 to 20% to the tariff.
Hormuz being closed hurts Iran way more than it does the US. It's shocking that they're persisting on this strategy. That's the problem with authoritarians though: they'd rather rule over rubble than be an average citizen in a prosperous society.
It's Iran turning the strait into a wedge between US and the rest of their previous partners. The US has enough oil for themselves, but the hurt is felt everywhere else. And the cause of that hurt points in one direction (the US)
Its probably all reflex at this point. The USA killed almost all the top leadership early on in the war, leading to a sub-optimal leadership transition with the feeling that the country didn't have much left to lose. I'm not sure what the US leadership was thinking, maybe they really bought the "the people will overthrow the government and not hate the US if we just do a few strategic assassinations" spiel?
I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
So is it bad that governments don't allow the processes and manufacturing to take place in their own countries, allowing independence and market dynamics and economies of scale to result in yet another order of magnitude cost reduction in solar? Or is it good that China doesn't do ecological protections, worker protections, or the things that western countries do, so we get to profit from the exploitation and pollution of their people and land?
It'd sure be awesome if regulations and regulators in Western countries weren't stupid. This whole game is just insane.
Let's just pawn it of on China, arbitrage the regulatory and human rights differential, and pretend the value is the same as if it's locally manufactured. Then we pocket the difference! Number go up!
Economists have this thing called "comparative advantage".
E.g. the US specialises in software; China in PV and batteries; EU in industrial equipment; the Middle East, oil; Australia IIRC is minerals; each trades what they're optimised for in exchange for what the others are optimised for, and are better off for it.
This works only so long as nobody is dominating a strategic sector, something that everyone needs but they are such a major player they get to set the prices. Monopolistic behaviour, but from a nation that cannot be sued for it rather than a corporation which can be ordered broken up.
Unfortunately, OPEC was already a thing even before Hormuz, the MAGA tariffs are confused and seem to be trying to make the US into an autarky but also keeping trade open so it can be taxed, and China seems to want to be dependent on nobody else while also keeping everyone else dependent on them, which currently leaves the EU and similar currently holding this particular hot potato and goodness only knows in which direction and on what schedule we'll yeet it elsewhere.
Trump cancelled a ton of green energy initiatives, why are we blaming the same regulators you imply are a good thing by pointing out that China "doesn't do ecological protections"?
I’m confused a bit, the premise they produce essentially all solar panels got an “indeed” with article-based assertions that exports doubled in one month, and it’s 14 GW more than the total amount installed in Spain ever, both very impressive. :)
Is there anything there about Chinese share?
I had the understanding they produce the vast vast majority as well, but that seems belied by exports doubling near instantaneously with demand? That made me wonder if there’s a lower cost floor producer(s) with, say, 10-20% of production that quickly got booked
> I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
My comment points out that, yes, China is wildly benefiting from this. They have 80%+ of the global solar PV market. They also have a deflationary macro environment encouraging persistent exports, along with 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity.
TLDR China has enough manufacturing capacity slack to support scaling exports at this scale immediately.
> The IEA has stated that China’s solar photovoltaic exports account for 80% of the global market. While there is a wide variety of products that make up the solar supply chain, panels, cells and wafers make up the majority of exports by trade value, and can be expressed in GW terms. Ember tracks these products to give a clearer picture of the global solar supply chain.
> China has invested over USD 50 billion in new PV supply capacity – ten times more than Europe − and created more than 300 000 manufacturing jobs across the solar PV value chain since 2011. Today, China’s share in all the manufacturing stages of solar panels (such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules) exceeds 80%. This is more than double China’s share of global PV demand. In addition, the country is home to the world’s 10 top suppliers of solar PV manufacturing equipment. China has been instrumental in bringing down costs worldwide for solar PV, with multiple benefits for clean energy transitions. At the same time, the level of geographical concentration in global supply chains also creates potential challenges that governments need to address.
The Chinese Politbureau is toasting themselves so hard, they're going to be drunk for the next decade.
It's a perfect storm for China, they're leading in EVs, battery production, renewables. While the US is busy undermining itself from all directions: as a military superpower, cultural, political, economical.
Europe is waking up slowly, but it is shackled by high internal energy prices, not enough labor, and low desire for innovation.
Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?
Europe seems to be backtracking on some of their far-right flirtations after seeing the idiocracy in the US. Orban was voted out in Hungary after decades in power. Meloni in Italy is often described as far right but her party also strongly supports the EU, NATO and Ukraine.
Mass deportation of who? The far right governments of most EU countries just play on basic fear tactics, none of them will ever do anything remotely close to your mass deportation fantasies. The most hardcore things they'll do is apply the laws which already exists regarding foreign people committing crimes and people illegally entering, and even that isn't given
Just look at the post brexit UK or Meloni's Italy...
> They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation
No amounts of deportations meaningfully affect the demographics. They can at most slow down the new immigration. For all his bluster, Trump deported barely more people than the long-term average in 2025.
But more importantly, the "far right" in Europe is far less crazy than in the US, and they support re-establishing local industry.
> police speech
Europe has never had absolutely free speech like the US. It's by design.
To me it seems it is a dictatorship with cult leadership again. Xi reminds me more of a modern version of Mao Zedong (without the focus on starving millions to death though). The main reason I see China having a dictator again is so that he can push ahead with his plans of invading Taiwan.
> Europe is waking up slowly
Where do you see that? I don't see it anywhere. They are sleeping.
Well, they act clever. The more important question is why other countries are not as clever. I am getting tired of the "democracies are the better model", which I would agree with, but then China just pushes through with bulldozer sinomarxism turned mega-capitalism. And that's working. So what the heck are those democracies doing other than failing really hard right now?
Democracy works when the population is educated and rational. Its easier to get votes via populism that give short term benefit to certain groups but long term hurts education and makes people irrational.
Many Democracies have learnt that politics cannot be trusted in certain fields due to this reason many governments ensure interest rates are not controlled by politicians such as the Federal Reserve. Perhaps we should treat education as something that cannot be trusted by politicians and controlled by an impartial independent organization.
* 15% of British power generation is already de-linked from the gas power price. This is from 10 GW of operational renewable capacity currently covered by the price-setting Contracts for Difference scheme.
* A third (36%) of power generation in Britain will be priced independently of gas by 2030, according to forecasts of generation from the Contracts for Difference scheme. Up to 36 GW of competitively-priced new wind and solar is under development by 2032 through the scheme.
* Hours where gas was below 20% of Britain’s electricity mix averaged £60/MWh in 2025, compared to £130/MWh in hours where gas made up more than 50% of the mix.
* The gas share of power generation fell to a second record monthly low in a row in Britain in April 2026. The gas share in both March (27%) and April (19%) was the lowest per month in over a decade. In March, wind supplied a monthly record 42% of all power generation.
(As more wind, solar, batteries, and transmission are deployed in the UK, fossil gas power share will continue to decline until pushed out of the generation mix)
Ok, I have to comment about the chart on oil prices that shows a massive rise from 2020 to 2022, which the article blames on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even though that didn't happen until early 2022 and the spike began 2 years earlier. That's just jouranlistic misconduct. Let me tell you what actually happened because, for some reason, nobody actually talks about it. First, some context:
1. OPEC/OPEC+ meet every 3 months to adjust output based on expected demand to keep oil prices relatively stable. That is, they want to maintain a floor and a ceiling. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it causes political instability and threatens oil-for-security guarantees that have existed since FDR agreed to such with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1945;
2. Oil has different flavors based largley on how light or heavy the hydrocarbon blend is (called API Gravity) and the sulfur content. this is what Brent and West Texas Light Crude means. Generally, lighter crude is more valuable because it makes more valuable products like avgas and gasoline;
3. Oil is traded on both spot (physical) markets and future (paper) markets. A futures contract is a standardized contract for 1000 barrels of oil of a particular blend delivered or received (depending on which side you're on) on a given date. Generally, when we see oil prices in the news we are looking at futures prices. Historically short-dated futures prices and spot prices have been pretty similar. Spot prices are proprietary but this didn't matter. Now it does as that link has been broken [1]
3. When the world shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic oil demand fell off a cliff and supplies backed up in production facilities. People weren't taking delivery and oil prices briefly went negative (technically, this was an "extreme contango" market);
4. Because of this, the Trump administration cajoled MBS to get OPEC to cut oil production [2][3][4]. This was a 2 year agreement that initially cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels per day ("Mbpd") going to to 6.3Mbpd ultimately. IMHO the administration panicked that US oil producers would go belly up. This represented ~10% of the world's crude oil supply;
5. In 2021 oil demand came roaring back. Prices went through the roof; and
6. Republicans blamed Biden. The Biden administration tried to get OPEC to increase production [5] and Biden never blamed OPEC or even Trump. Democrats took the "oil companies bad" approach.
This 2 year deal was completely unnecessary. OPEC would've cut production as necessary anyway. And it entirely matches the increase in oil and gas prices and inflation for this 2 year period and nobody ever mentions it.
Russia invading Ukraine in early 2022 was just the cherry on the cake.
Look at that chart. Where it's marked as "COVID-19" is March-April 2020. The deal begins in June 2020. It ended in June 2022, which is at the exact point of the big red bar to the right of the Russian invasion, after which oil prices dropped despite the fact that the war was still going on (and still is).
I am still pissed at Trump and the oligarch bros. They really
need to pay for the costs they caused here. I also blame
them from rising RAM prices. Why do we have to pay for any of
that? We also need to get off of oil. I know this is not realistic
for many reasons, but it is a weakness of many economies that
they are so insanely dependent on a few countries with a lot
of oil and gas. It basically gives other countries ways to
blackmail.
What if? Trump is playing 5.7-D chess. He knows his base is full of idiots. He bombs Iran to create a crisis that wakes up his base to "wut, oil, need oil".
This was only way to get them to use renewables and re-think that maybe electric vehicles are not just 'woke' but also can help 'national security'.
Create Crises, to swing economy to electric and renewables faster than EV subsidies ever could.
It is a bittersweet victory. Petroleum demand is going to be forever destroyed -if you were on the fence about scaling renewables, all doubt has been eliminated. Energy dependence is a strategic nightmare, with a proven solution available for the taking. Solar, batteries, EVs, whatever you can install, as quickly as possible. There are already regional stories where solar-friendly Spain is seeing lower price changes than Italy because the renewables are lessening the impact of the closure.
However, if you were financially struggling before this happened, you are in for a world of hurt. Food, fuel, fertilizers, and dozens of downstream refined products are going to see large price increases for months to years.
I wonder how much has been offset by all the bombings and oil dependent countries having to fall back to coal until they can switch to solar or another oil supplier (if they can afford to do either at all).
If a temporary disruption, we’d go back to business as usual as soon as the supply constraint abated. The scale and time duration oil flows will be disrupted has led to a “burn the ships” transition, because it is simply the more economically rationale path now. More rapid global energy transition means the forward carbon emissions curve gets bent down.
Yeah, that would be wonderful too, but I didn't want to engage the downvoters (like you apparently did). This is a forum for discussing "hacking", not for political tribalism (not addressed to you but to them). SMDH.
Remember, we didn't know how to pronounce hormuz until bombs started falling on people's head. The bombs and those who dropped them caused the problem. This isn't an energy issue.
I cannot stress enough how historically ignorant of a perspective this is. I don't know how you meant this, but Hormuz has been one of the most critical geopolitical choke points since 1979, and Iran has spent 45 years preparing to use it for leverage in exactly this situation. None of these facts should be a surprise to leaders of nations.
Well apparently over 95% of that 45 years of preparing has been obliterated, their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications.
> their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications
U.S. PPI is in the double digits as is MoM CPI. And while Republicans are seeing losses in polling, the IRGC is consolidating power. Both Iran and America are bleeding. But it seems clear that it’s in the IRGC’s interest to draw this one out for goodies. That’s why Tehran escalating while Trump desperately tries and fails to run home.
I mean, their planning has been very effective. It's a decentralized strategy that plays to their strengths; it doesn't take a lot to hold the strait closed, and they can pressure everyone in the region very easily by attacking infrastructure (oil, but also desalinization plants).
Their planning is so good it's turned this into the largest strategic embarrassment in the last... 80 years?
Renewables don't have the same level of external dependence on a constant flow of instantaneously used fuel. So while I do agree with you, it is an energy issue regardless of your politics.
> we didn't know how to pronounce hormuz until bombs started falling
I mean that might be true for you, but its been on the radar over here for a number of years. (it was also a key risk with Iran identified by a number of key intelligence think tanks. especially around the time of the anti-nuclear treaty negotiations)
But to your point, youre right its not an energy issue, its an energy and materials issue. There are lots of pre-cursor chemicals and products that come out of that region that the modern world needs to function.
Well, the Trump-Netanyahu axis turned it from "We're going to have an inhospitable planet within the next century" problem to a "We need an affordable alternative source of energy right now" problem...
Oceania too: Australia installed 442 MW of residential solar and 2.5 GWh of residential batteries in the month of April alone. Both numbers are partly juiced by changes to a rebate program from May, but the overall trend remains explosive growth.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/households-still-going-big-on-so...
very jealous of how cheap AUS solar prices are. < $1 AUD per watt after rebate
Don't be jealous of our peak power price though: $0.56/kWh
(I have a battery though, so I rarely pay full tote - which is one of the reasons I got a battery)
We pay like 30 cents in USD per kw.
Average price is $0.19 in the US.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
Which is pretty much what Australian average price is. Average Australian domestic tariff is around AUD 0.30/kwh which is USD 0.21/kwh.
None of this touches on standing charges, I don't know how that works in the USA, in Australia for an average household it runs at AUD 1.00/day to AUD 1.50/day (USD 0.70/day to USD 1.00/day). For an average household the standing charge is going to add 15 to 20% to the tariff.
Hormuz being closed hurts Iran way more than it does the US. It's shocking that they're persisting on this strategy. That's the problem with authoritarians though: they'd rather rule over rubble than be an average citizen in a prosperous society.
It's not about the US vs Iran.
It's Iran turning the strait into a wedge between US and the rest of their previous partners. The US has enough oil for themselves, but the hurt is felt everywhere else. And the cause of that hurt points in one direction (the US)
Its probably all reflex at this point. The USA killed almost all the top leadership early on in the war, leading to a sub-optimal leadership transition with the feeling that the country didn't have much left to lose. I'm not sure what the US leadership was thinking, maybe they really bought the "the people will overthrow the government and not hate the US if we just do a few strategic assassinations" spiel?
I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
That's a bit of an understatement. Essentially all residential scale solar panels and batteries are now built in China.
So is it bad that governments don't allow the processes and manufacturing to take place in their own countries, allowing independence and market dynamics and economies of scale to result in yet another order of magnitude cost reduction in solar? Or is it good that China doesn't do ecological protections, worker protections, or the things that western countries do, so we get to profit from the exploitation and pollution of their people and land?
It'd sure be awesome if regulations and regulators in Western countries weren't stupid. This whole game is just insane.
Let's just pawn it of on China, arbitrage the regulatory and human rights differential, and pretend the value is the same as if it's locally manufactured. Then we pocket the difference! Number go up!
Economists have this thing called "comparative advantage".
E.g. the US specialises in software; China in PV and batteries; EU in industrial equipment; the Middle East, oil; Australia IIRC is minerals; each trades what they're optimised for in exchange for what the others are optimised for, and are better off for it.
This works only so long as nobody is dominating a strategic sector, something that everyone needs but they are such a major player they get to set the prices. Monopolistic behaviour, but from a nation that cannot be sued for it rather than a corporation which can be ordered broken up.
Unfortunately, OPEC was already a thing even before Hormuz, the MAGA tariffs are confused and seem to be trying to make the US into an autarky but also keeping trade open so it can be taxed, and China seems to want to be dependent on nobody else while also keeping everyone else dependent on them, which currently leaves the EU and similar currently holding this particular hot potato and goodness only knows in which direction and on what schedule we'll yeet it elsewhere.
Trump cancelled a ton of green energy initiatives, why are we blaming the same regulators you imply are a good thing by pointing out that China "doesn't do ecological protections"?
Indeed, China exported 68GW of solar PV in March 2026, double the prior month and 14GW more than total solar PV capacity installed in Spain.
Chinese solar exports double in a month to hit record high amid energy crisis - https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/chinese-solar-export... - April 23rd, 2026
I’m confused a bit, the premise they produce essentially all solar panels got an “indeed” with article-based assertions that exports doubled in one month, and it’s 14 GW more than the total amount installed in Spain ever, both very impressive. :)
Is there anything there about Chinese share?
I had the understanding they produce the vast vast majority as well, but that seems belied by exports doubling near instantaneously with demand? That made me wonder if there’s a lower cost floor producer(s) with, say, 10-20% of production that quickly got booked
> I'm assuming that China, with its industrial power and leadership position to produce a bunch of green energy components (like solar panels), is well-positioned to benefit from this.
My comment points out that, yes, China is wildly benefiting from this. They have 80%+ of the global solar PV market. They also have a deflationary macro environment encouraging persistent exports, along with 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity.
TLDR China has enough manufacturing capacity slack to support scaling exports at this scale immediately.
(tangentially, they have the capacity to build 20M EVs per year, roughly 1/4th of annual global demand for light vehicles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48379805)
China’s Solar PV Export Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore... (“The latest solar PV export data from the world’s largest exporter, China, by country or region of destination. Data updated on a monthly basis.”)
> The IEA has stated that China’s solar photovoltaic exports account for 80% of the global market. While there is a wide variety of products that make up the solar supply chain, panels, cells and wafers make up the majority of exports by trade value, and can be expressed in GW terms. Ember tracks these products to give a clearer picture of the global solar supply chain.
https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
> China has invested over USD 50 billion in new PV supply capacity – ten times more than Europe − and created more than 300 000 manufacturing jobs across the solar PV value chain since 2011. Today, China’s share in all the manufacturing stages of solar panels (such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules) exceeds 80%. This is more than double China’s share of global PV demand. In addition, the country is home to the world’s 10 top suppliers of solar PV manufacturing equipment. China has been instrumental in bringing down costs worldwide for solar PV, with multiple benefits for clean energy transitions. At the same time, the level of geographical concentration in global supply chains also creates potential challenges that governments need to address.
The Chinese Politbureau is toasting themselves so hard, they're going to be drunk for the next decade.
It's a perfect storm for China, they're leading in EVs, battery production, renewables. While the US is busy undermining itself from all directions: as a military superpower, cultural, political, economical.
Europe is waking up slowly, but it is shackled by high internal energy prices, not enough labor, and low desire for innovation.
The MAGAchurian candidate.
Really? Europe looks primed to follow the US, just a few steps behind. They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation, and are even ahead of us on cultural decline with respect to mass surveillance being used to actively police speech. What moves have they been making that you think indicate an upward trend? How are they going to recover from stagnation and demographic collapse?
Europe seems to be backtracking on some of their far-right flirtations after seeing the idiocracy in the US. Orban was voted out in Hungary after decades in power. Meloni in Italy is often described as far right but her party also strongly supports the EU, NATO and Ukraine.
Mass deportation of who? The far right governments of most EU countries just play on basic fear tactics, none of them will ever do anything remotely close to your mass deportation fantasies. The most hardcore things they'll do is apply the laws which already exists regarding foreign people committing crimes and people illegally entering, and even that isn't given
Just look at the post brexit UK or Meloni's Italy...
This is what people said about Trump and the Republicans. Of course they wouldn’t do mass deportation. It’s all just rhetoric.
When someone tells you who they are believe them.
Trump, at the end of the day, deported about as many people as Obama. He just made a huge song and dance about it.
> They're electing their far right leaders and primed to start mass deportation
No amounts of deportations meaningfully affect the demographics. They can at most slow down the new immigration. For all his bluster, Trump deported barely more people than the long-term average in 2025.
But more importantly, the "far right" in Europe is far less crazy than in the US, and they support re-establishing local industry.
> police speech
Europe has never had absolutely free speech like the US. It's by design.
> Europe has never had absolutely free speech like the US. It's by design.
They don't have it in the US either, they just love to flex it while not understanding how it's implemented in practice
Far left will continue to rule in Europe.
I can't think of any European government that is far left? I am not familiar with all of them of course, so happy to be proven wrong.
Is there still a Politbureau?
To me it seems it is a dictatorship with cult leadership again. Xi reminds me more of a modern version of Mao Zedong (without the focus on starving millions to death though). The main reason I see China having a dictator again is so that he can push ahead with his plans of invading Taiwan.
> Europe is waking up slowly
Where do you see that? I don't see it anywhere. They are sleeping.
Well, they act clever. The more important question is why other countries are not as clever. I am getting tired of the "democracies are the better model", which I would agree with, but then China just pushes through with bulldozer sinomarxism turned mega-capitalism. And that's working. So what the heck are those democracies doing other than failing really hard right now?
Democracy works when the population is educated and rational. Its easier to get votes via populism that give short term benefit to certain groups but long term hurts education and makes people irrational.
Many Democracies have learnt that politics cannot be trusted in certain fields due to this reason many governments ensure interest rates are not controlled by politicians such as the Federal Reserve. Perhaps we should treat education as something that cannot be trusted by politicians and controlled by an impartial independent organization.
https://archive.is/nA1UT (includes complimentary subscription in botnet)
Who knew that Trump was going to speedrun The Green New Deal?... just for every other country except the US.
Right now the UK makes up the volatility of its heavy reliance on wind with LNG. So this isn't exactly a hedge against gas shortage.
Ember Energy: British power prices are increasingly independent from gas - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/british-power-price... - May 13th, 2026
* 15% of British power generation is already de-linked from the gas power price. This is from 10 GW of operational renewable capacity currently covered by the price-setting Contracts for Difference scheme.
* A third (36%) of power generation in Britain will be priced independently of gas by 2030, according to forecasts of generation from the Contracts for Difference scheme. Up to 36 GW of competitively-priced new wind and solar is under development by 2032 through the scheme.
* Hours where gas was below 20% of Britain’s electricity mix averaged £60/MWh in 2025, compared to £130/MWh in hours where gas made up more than 50% of the mix.
* The gas share of power generation fell to a second record monthly low in a row in Britain in April 2026. The gas share in both March (27%) and April (19%) was the lowest per month in over a decade. In March, wind supplied a monthly record 42% of all power generation.
(As more wind, solar, batteries, and transmission are deployed in the UK, fossil gas power share will continue to decline until pushed out of the generation mix)
Ok, I have to comment about the chart on oil prices that shows a massive rise from 2020 to 2022, which the article blames on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even though that didn't happen until early 2022 and the spike began 2 years earlier. That's just jouranlistic misconduct. Let me tell you what actually happened because, for some reason, nobody actually talks about it. First, some context:
1. OPEC/OPEC+ meet every 3 months to adjust output based on expected demand to keep oil prices relatively stable. That is, they want to maintain a floor and a ceiling. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it causes political instability and threatens oil-for-security guarantees that have existed since FDR agreed to such with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1945;
2. Oil has different flavors based largley on how light or heavy the hydrocarbon blend is (called API Gravity) and the sulfur content. this is what Brent and West Texas Light Crude means. Generally, lighter crude is more valuable because it makes more valuable products like avgas and gasoline;
3. Oil is traded on both spot (physical) markets and future (paper) markets. A futures contract is a standardized contract for 1000 barrels of oil of a particular blend delivered or received (depending on which side you're on) on a given date. Generally, when we see oil prices in the news we are looking at futures prices. Historically short-dated futures prices and spot prices have been pretty similar. Spot prices are proprietary but this didn't matter. Now it does as that link has been broken [1]
3. When the world shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic oil demand fell off a cliff and supplies backed up in production facilities. People weren't taking delivery and oil prices briefly went negative (technically, this was an "extreme contango" market);
4. Because of this, the Trump administration cajoled MBS to get OPEC to cut oil production [2][3][4]. This was a 2 year agreement that initially cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels per day ("Mbpd") going to to 6.3Mbpd ultimately. IMHO the administration panicked that US oil producers would go belly up. This represented ~10% of the world's crude oil supply;
5. In 2021 oil demand came roaring back. Prices went through the roof; and
6. Republicans blamed Biden. The Biden administration tried to get OPEC to increase production [5] and Biden never blamed OPEC or even Trump. Democrats took the "oil companies bad" approach.
This 2 year deal was completely unnecessary. OPEC would've cut production as necessary anyway. And it entirely matches the increase in oil and gas prices and inflation for this 2 year period and nobody ever mentions it.
Russia invading Ukraine in early 2022 was just the cherry on the cake.
Look at that chart. Where it's marked as "COVID-19" is March-April 2020. The deal begins in June 2020. It ended in June 2022, which is at the exact point of the big red bar to the right of the Russian invasion, after which oil prices dropped despite the fact that the war was still going on (and still is).
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/iran-war-has-sha...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/commentary/reuters-open-interest/tru...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/opec-agrees-largest...
[5]: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-call-opec-its-a...
Trump is going to end up being the best thing that ever happened to EVs too.
silver linings
I am still pissed at Trump and the oligarch bros. They really need to pay for the costs they caused here. I also blame them from rising RAM prices. Why do we have to pay for any of that? We also need to get off of oil. I know this is not realistic for many reasons, but it is a weakness of many economies that they are so insanely dependent on a few countries with a lot of oil and gas. It basically gives other countries ways to blackmail.
What if? Trump is playing 5.7-D chess. He knows his base is full of idiots. He bombs Iran to create a crisis that wakes up his base to "wut, oil, need oil".
This was only way to get them to use renewables and re-think that maybe electric vehicles are not just 'woke' but also can help 'national security'.
Create Crises, to swing economy to electric and renewables faster than EV subsidies ever could.
Have you heard him talk?
He can't even stay consistent in 1D.
What if he's is just an evil Chauncey Gardiner?
that's way too high brow of a reference for this crowd.
Why would you attribute to genius what is more likely explained by idiocy?
I mean, what if he's not?
... is this a common sentiment?
This is the only good thing to come out of this unnecessary war.
I haven't checked the numbers, but wouldn't reducing the global oil supply have a direct and positive impact on carbon emissions?
It is a bittersweet victory. Petroleum demand is going to be forever destroyed -if you were on the fence about scaling renewables, all doubt has been eliminated. Energy dependence is a strategic nightmare, with a proven solution available for the taking. Solar, batteries, EVs, whatever you can install, as quickly as possible. There are already regional stories where solar-friendly Spain is seeing lower price changes than Italy because the renewables are lessening the impact of the closure.
However, if you were financially struggling before this happened, you are in for a world of hurt. Food, fuel, fertilizers, and dozens of downstream refined products are going to see large price increases for months to years.
I wonder how much has been offset by all the bombings and oil dependent countries having to fall back to coal until they can switch to solar or another oil supplier (if they can afford to do either at all).
That really depends. Oil and gas could just as easily get replaced by coal in a not-very-different alternative world.
If a temporary disruption, we’d go back to business as usual as soon as the supply constraint abated. The scale and time duration oil flows will be disrupted has led to a “burn the ships” transition, because it is simply the more economically rationale path now. More rapid global energy transition means the forward carbon emissions curve gets bent down.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Irans-Oil...
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Persian-Gulf-Oil-...
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/28/oil-inventory-exxon-strait-h...
Sure, but I'd wrap that up into the renewables box.
Well there is the real possibility that this is going to cause a Blue Wave, which will at least slow down some of the more insane actions.
Yeah, that would be wonderful too, but I didn't want to engage the downvoters (like you apparently did). This is a forum for discussing "hacking", not for political tribalism (not addressed to you but to them). SMDH.
Here we only discuss how cool tech the Torment Nexus has inside it. Not who is building it and why.
Remember, we didn't know how to pronounce hormuz until bombs started falling on people's head. The bombs and those who dropped them caused the problem. This isn't an energy issue.
I cannot stress enough how historically ignorant of a perspective this is. I don't know how you meant this, but Hormuz has been one of the most critical geopolitical choke points since 1979, and Iran has spent 45 years preparing to use it for leverage in exactly this situation. None of these facts should be a surprise to leaders of nations.
Well apparently over 95% of that 45 years of preparing has been obliterated, their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications.
What a mess.
> their currency is in free fall, 2M people have become unemployed over there in the last few months, and a handful of idiots are playing a game of chicken with global implications
U.S. PPI is in the double digits as is MoM CPI. And while Republicans are seeing losses in polling, the IRGC is consolidating power. Both Iran and America are bleeding. But it seems clear that it’s in the IRGC’s interest to draw this one out for goodies. That’s why Tehran escalating while Trump desperately tries and fails to run home.
I mean, their planning has been very effective. It's a decentralized strategy that plays to their strengths; it doesn't take a lot to hold the strait closed, and they can pressure everyone in the region very easily by attacking infrastructure (oil, but also desalinization plants).
Their planning is so good it's turned this into the largest strategic embarrassment in the last... 80 years?
> This isn't an energy issue.
Renewables don't have the same level of external dependence on a constant flow of instantaneously used fuel. So while I do agree with you, it is an energy issue regardless of your politics.
It's dropping that one last straw on the camel's back which caused the problem. This isn't an overburdened camel issue.
> we didn't know how to pronounce hormuz until bombs started falling
I mean that might be true for you, but its been on the radar over here for a number of years. (it was also a key risk with Iran identified by a number of key intelligence think tanks. especially around the time of the anti-nuclear treaty negotiations)
But to your point, youre right its not an energy issue, its an energy and materials issue. There are lots of pre-cursor chemicals and products that come out of that region that the modern world needs to function.
The more pressing issue is the fertiliser price spike: https://ycharts.com/indicators/fertilizers_index_world_bank which has yet to fully mateirlaise.
You'll note that spike corolate with lots of civil unrest
Hormuz was in the news quite a bit in the past decade, if you followed the region at least a bit. Anyway electric cars will have some boom now.
Well, the Trump-Netanyahu axis turned it from "We're going to have an inhospitable planet within the next century" problem to a "We need an affordable alternative source of energy right now" problem...