Energy will be far cheaper when we switch to a fossil fuel free grid, because the newer technologies are cheaper, and unlike fossil fuels they are on a decreasing cost tech curve. So the sooner we build out the tech, the sooner prices fall.
During the winter, and in storms like this, solar and wind is almost nil. Upstate NY gets very cold. And they are mandating people transition away from oil or gas into using heat pumps. Heat pumps are next to worthless in subzero weather. Oh, and they are also trying to phase out nuclear.
In the sense that trees are a resource which regrows after harvesting, unlike mined fossil fuels,[1] wood pellets are renewable.
There's reasonable concern that at quantities meaningful for replacing existing fuels, fuel-wood, including wood pellets, would not be renewable, though at what quantity that concern manifests I'm not sure.
Reasonably small-scale local burning of wood on an occasional basis can be sustainable. There are significant issues with air quality especially in traditional open-hearth fireplaces. The best heating stoves are enclosed as with cast-iron stoves, masonry heaters / masonry stoves, and the like. The actual firebox is often not directly visible, air intake is directly from the outside (so that warm air isn't sucked out of the structure), and heat is radiated through thermal mass and channeling. These stoves also burn more efficiently (high temperatures and optimised airflow) greatly reducing pollution concerns with particulates.
1. Note that the "fossil" in "fossil fuels" doesn't refer to petrified bone, but to things which have been dug up. "Fossil fuel" is fuel dug from the ground, as "fossil bones" are bones dug from the ground. The meanings of "turned to stone" (e.g., fossilised), or "old" (he's a fossil) are much more recently acquired meanings. <https://www.etymonline.com/word/fossil>
Of course you re-use the ashes. Great source of potassium for the garden. The modern day fertilizer potassium-source isn’t called “potash” for nothing.
Improves traction on ice, and could melt snow if it’s close enough to freezing.
Could also make soap with it if you wanted to get really creative. Or bricks or mortar (or a concrete supplement).
Why would anybody die during the transition? Especially if we do the transition as quickly as possible, we will be adding new resources to the grid while existing fossil fuel resources are still there.
In the US the grid problems are generally from having inadequate grid resources, and adding more will only help.
But any single paper in the literature shouldn't be trusted on its own. So I would encourage anybody who is interested to look for themselves at cost curves over time for solar wind and storage, and notice how they all follow Wright's law very well. And then look at the ever-increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction, as we need ever more sophisticated techniques to continue matching supply to demand as the easier sources are extracted.
Wind solar and storage behave like proper technologies. Fracking did to some extent, but it is technology for making something that was impossible into the possible; and there's finite amounts of frackable resources. Oil and natural gas have price floors set by these fracking costs, which have not dropped precipitously in the past 10 years.
We have not yet reached the inflection points on wind water and solar where the logistic curve switches to the linear phase. So we likely have decades of similar cost reductions for these technologies, almost certainly. If you look at where that leaves us for an energy future, it's unbelievably rosy. That is, as long as we invest in the tech.
I can't imagine what people in upstate NY are going to do in temperatures like this with only a heat pump, since they are trying to transition everyone off gas or oil. A heat pump is next to worthless in sub zero temps. Many will use wood.
Where I live in rural England, when the new gas prices were announced in July that chap that sells one tone bags of logs for wood burners had his busiest day ever. Log burners are lot less clean than gas.
