Hacker News Reader

Cross-border electricity is what the future will look like though, it's not like it matters if the energy was generated in Germany or Finland when I turn on the lights at home.

It definitely does if your neighbor decides they need extra money and jacks up the rates and/or doesn’t like you anymore and shuts it off. Then it is whoever has the most self contained power wins.

While true, that feels about as likely as Bavarian independence.

Russia has done it with natural gas in the last 10 years. The UK seemed like a great EU partner - until they weren’t.

Things change and over the span of 10-20 years, things can change dramatically. The life span of many of these decisions is 30 years or more.

Which is why I gave the example of a regional independence movement rather than saying it’s impossible.

I don't think the scenario you describe is a realistic scenario within the European energy market. Prices are decided by supply and demand and the market is getting more interconnected so single points of failure become less likely.

I do wonder what happens in case there is no wind and no sun all over Europe and the demand is higher than the supply. It's probably very unlikely to happen but then countries will prioritize their own citizens (as we saw now during the covid crisis) and then we could have blackouts. I assume scenario's like these have been researched but I don't follow this subject, maybe someone else here knows?

The data shows natural gas usage has been pretty much static for a decade: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

Germany is also a net exporter of electricity and exported 13.7Twh more than it imported from France.

Yes, on the open european electricity market, electricity coming from renewable have the priority "on injection" on the grid above all the other sources of electricity.

So when you have spikes of renewable productions (a lot of wind and a lot of sun) Germany sells it to "everyone around" at a really cheap price. Which means that on a yearly average Germany indeed exported a lot of cheap renewable electricity to everyone.

Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?

Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital expenditure. If you have spare you might as well export it and you can probably underbid any other form of power.

France is also leaning rather heavily on the capital expenditures it made on nuclear power in the 80s. Unfortunately its gonna be in for a whopping bill when its plants start aging out in 2025: https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...

Germany, OTOH, will be able to coast on what it's already built in the next 10 years while the rest of Europe plays catch up.

The current Germany infrastructure total cost is around 500B€ in 20 years. That's for sure a few brand new nuclear power plants, or a few big investment plans in power efficiency (heat pumps, isolation…).

Wind turbines lifespan is around 25 years (some 30 years), mostly limited by structural and physical issues. You can't reinstall a new wind turbine on top of an old one (the concrete base is also fragilized and new turbines are often way bigger than old ones).

Solar panels indeed have a way better lifespan and recent ones stay efficient even after decades of use.

So one question now: why is Germany building and importing so much natural gaz (~400g of CO²/kwh, it's around 10 for renewable/nuclear) if their renewable plan is working so well ?

They're using about the same amount of natgas they did 10 years ago.

I presume they will start scaling down natural gas plants at some point, but they're clearly aiming to shut down nuclear and lignite plants first.

Coping with increased electricity demand and switching off two forms of power generation entirely wasn't going to be quick but it is inevitable.

>Well, they're cheaper than all other forms of electricity. The cost of renewables is mostly capital expenditure

There is a cost to renewables that most advocates don't factor in - balancing. Most studies use the prevailing market rates for energy to prove that renewables are cheaper than coal or gas however, when renewables aren't providing power, something is and that something has a cost.

This is a cost paid for by consumers though it isn't attributed to the source of the problem - the variable renewable generators.

Similar argument for energy storage. You need storage precisely because renewables are variable and that cost should be factored in to the cost of renewable energy. At the moment, it isn't.

>however, when renewables aren't providing power, something is and that something has a cost.

Hence all that electricity imported from, e.g. France in winter. Some people might be under the illusion that this was free but I can assure you I am not.

There's a reason Europe is super keen on country interconnectors. It really helps smooth out production.

Intermittency of renewables really has become the next Y2k. I suppose we can thank a decade of carbon and nuclear lobby fearmongering for that :/

Like Y2K as a problem it receives relatively too much attention relative to the problems it causes. The rolling blackouts germany was promised ~10 years ago never materialized, for instance:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/23/germany-...

This has no connection to the point i was making. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?

No, I was responding to you.

Total CO2 emissions drop even further, and we get incrementally closer to a world where anthropogenic climate change is a global catastrophe as opposed to a global extinction event?

>Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?

I am not a huge fan of Germany's energy policy myself, I see it as misguided giving up nuclear first and coal second.

BUT, if everyone built out renewables like crazy, it would create a huge market for storage or electrolysis systems.

Pretty easy to solve. We know that electricity can go around the Earth 7 times in a second. Now, if Germany has excess electricity during the day, they can simply pospone that electricity by wrapping a long cable 302 400 times around the globe (12h * 3600s/h * 7/s = 302 400). During the day they feed the excess electricity into one end of the cable, and then 12 hours later at night, electricity comes out the other end at just the right time, when they need it!

IIRC, antopodal HVDC would have resistive losses of either 70% or 30% — I’d have to recalculate from scratch to find out which, but it doesn’t matter much either way: the real issues are “How much does the line cost?” and “what are the political implications of that size power line in all the places it has to pass through?”

Batteries and HVDC to your nearest major desert are what I expect to be the solutions.

70%, seriously? That's actually really low. What kind of voltage would that require?

The following claims HVDC transmission losses of 3.5% per 1,000 km @ 800kV, therefore 20,000 km is 100% - ((100% - 3.5%)^20) ~= 51% loss; I guess my previous calculations were a different voltage, but as I’m asserting that even the difference between 30% and 70% doesn’t matter, neither does this :)

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...

> Now try to guess what is happening when everyone starts to do what Germany is doing for close to 20 years now ?

What will happen is that people will learn to build an energy system that works well with this situation.

Which will likely mean things like industrial plants that shut down when electricity is scarce and get payed for that by the grid operator, because that's cheaper than having a lot of storage. It will mean new industries will be built by using excess renewables (likely hydrogen will be such an industry). I'm excited to see that happen.

> France is sending around 2 to 4 GW of electricity (so mostly nuclear) to Germany all the time

False. In reality Germany often has a trade surplus with France. See, every country has multiple interconnects, and various areas send and receive power. On the whole, Germany sends more power to France than France sends to Germany. Which makes sense -- France's total power production is far below its peak power demand, and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline. But sure, one area of Germany imports from France while another area exports to France...that isn't notable.

You're regurgitating ridiculous pro-nuclear propaganda. Telling that your argument has completely shifted between posts.

"Germany didn't "removed fossil fuel""

Who are you quoting? Further, Germany started their nuclear decommissioning in 2011. Natural gas + coal + lignite is *WAY* below that level now.

>And in the end the result is https://www.electricitymap.org/map 5 to 10x more CO² impact than France per kwh, even with 2x the nuclear plants setup in France (60GW of nuclear in France against 60GW of wind turbines and 60GW of solar panels in Germany).

Germany had a much dirtier power profile before they started decommissioning nuclear reactors. They have a much, much cleaner profile now, even if it still isn't as clean as France's. The "went back to coal" nonsense is ridiculous noise.

EDIT: I would love to know what's going on in the minds of people who downvote comments like this. Just upset with fact and reality?

> as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline

Source ?

Nuclear is around 90% of Capacity factor in the USA, 75% in Canada, around 70% in France and UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...

So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels. And roughly the same numbers are other kind of plants (gaz, coal…).

>So close to 2 to 3x more than wind turbines and solar panels

This is a pretty facetious comparison. You install solar knowing that the sun won't shine all the time, and turbines that the wind won't blow. No one installs it expecting 100%. The cost to install is low.

Nuclear, on the other hand, is a massive capital expenditure. When nuclear is down, that is a major problem because you don't overbuild. An unplanned outage can be a disaster.

This whole conversation is a bit rich given that many of France's reactors are nearing EoL and France has no plans on replacing them.

Regardless, I soundly and overwhelmingly debunked the nonsense that Germany "went back to coal" so now it's on with strawmen and shifting goal posts. Such is always the nature of any discussion involving the magical panacea of nuclear.

France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision". And indeed now we are reaching the point where we don't have the knowledge and industrial level to "jump back" into the flow.

Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;) Germany is indeed planning to phase out coal "by 2035" (lets see how this goes, there is an election going on). Germany is currently building natural gas plants on the other hand. Gaz that is mostly (around 45%) imported from Russia, a nice diplomatic thing they're getting into.

"France has no plan on replacing them is mostly caused by political "no-decision"."

Bullshit. Nuclear died outside of China because it was oversold and an economic calamity. You can't even install nuclear without massive government subsidies (not least a huge liability waiver where the state basically takes on all liability, not done for any other energy source). The cost to build, operate, retrofit and decommission is always massively over the expected, and it has only gotten worse.

There are places where nuclear is by far the best option, and its extreme costs and safety needs are acceptable. There are many others where it just never yielded the promise.

"Germany is not going back to coal, I never said that ;)"

That is the root of this thread that you jumped into, making several seriously wrong claims that you either just shifted goal posts or edited out along the way.

"This is a pretty facetious comparison." Is it? A few weeks ago I noticed that the wind in my state was below 5mph over the entire state, for the entire day, with temperatures in upper 90's. You literally can't overbuild wind enough to account for this.

Add in that the latest nat-gas installation in my state from start to finish cost 1/4th the price of our last wind turbine installation, if you compare actual power produced over the year instead of simply comparing max rated production.

That's when I realized that you literally can't have enough wind to replace CO2 producing power and nuclear is the only reasonable answer.

The economics of wind, solar, gas, and nuclear are very well documented and known. Making a robust grid is well known.

"That's when I realized"

You understand how utterly ridiculous this sounds, right?

"That's when I realized that spacecraft should be made out of aluminum foil"

Who am I to believe? The published costs of installations coupled with power company records or studies which don't look anything like real world data, but always unerringly tell me wind is cheaper.

I based my opinion on real world data, and only real world data could change it. Maybe that sounds ridiculous where you're standing, but I'll never know.

And like my man Richard Feynman would say if he were alive today, p-hacking, cargo culting, and outright fraud are alive and well - endemic in the life or death sciences - and super-saturating the more politicized sciences. Takes 5 minutes to get a rough estimate of something to see if a study is even close to being accurate. Try it. Pick a small wind market in ideal conditions, pick an established utility with public records, and do the work yourself.

> with temperatures in upper 90's

The implication here being that air conditioning will be using lots of power? Surely using solar PV for air conditioning is the most obvious pairing out there. It's rarely hot and not sunny.

>and as is the nature of nuclear power, plants are very often offline

Did you perhaps confuse wind and solar with nuclear? The design of a nuclear plant is precisely the opposite of what you describe.

No, I didn't confuse them. How, exactly, does a nuclear power plant design prevent being offline?

You understand they have to take the plant offline to do major maintenance, even refuelling, right? In April, 75% of New England's nuclear power plants were offline, for instance, most unplanned.

When a single plant costs billions of dollars and becomes a significant or overwhelming contributor to an area's power mix, it can be a problem.

The tone of your replies is needlessly aggressive.

A typical nuclear plant isn't designed to be cycled regularly. What you are suggesting is that most nuclear plants are not generating power for more than 50% of the time.

A cursory search of capacity factors will show that this is the opposite of reality. A typical wind or solar installation on average, generates zero power for more than half the time.

And that's exactly why you have several nuclear reactors in a plant and several turbines, and several power lines…

Please be a bit serious about what you're saying, you don't have to actually turn of a plant when you need to refuel. If any kind of plant (including hydro) need to be completely turned off for maintenance its really because you had a major design flaw.

Most of the nuclear power plants that Germany built were single-reactor plants and would shut down for refueling. Multi-reactor plants will stagger shutdowns so that the plant continues to generate at reduced power. It is the same in the US. Only a few reactor designs like CANDU are capable of online refueling without interruption. Planned shutdowns for refueling are scheduled for low-demand times of the year.

Here's a nuclear industry blog post explaining the practice: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-happens-dur...

Interesting, thanks for the link :) !

I believe we only have two active nuclear plants in New England - Seabrook NH and Millstone CT. Seabrook has one reactor, Millstone has two I believe.

It's remarkable how much power these plants generate with a relatively small footprint.

> no wind at night

Wind speeds are actually greatest around sunrise and sunset, which corresponds more or less with peak energy demand.

>(no wind at night)

No, wind at night!

Worse, the gas comes from Russia, so they are now dependent on Russian gas imports.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2...

Of course the CO² impact per kwh is higher in Germany. The country started two world wars and the winning factions understandably weren't overly eager to see Germany building nuclear proliferation capabilities. For the first 10 years after WW2 any kind of nuclear research was forbidden. For the same reason Germany was also forbidden to have an army in the first years after 1945. That's why nuclear never played a big role in Germany and critical parts of nuclear infrastructure (like fuel rod recycling) are still done in other countries (mostly France).