Electricity map: Mapping the climate impact of electricity
app.electricitymap.org
app.electricitymap.org
But thanks to amazing green environmental organization like Greenpeace and all the fear-mongering for decades the world has missed multiple opportunities to turn into a nuclear society.
Had governments been willing to pay extra for clean energy (and air), nuclear would have taken of in the 70s everywhere. But coal and later gas was just to cheap for anything to compete.
Germany is specially interesting. They have on the forefront of green revolution. I can't even remember the amount of think pieces hailing Germany as this amazing government lead push to green energy. Germany was held up as the global model over and over. The amount of times I have heard talk about German investment in solar is almost mind-blowing.
But when I look at this map, its always brown. And Germany as an engineering society could have easily spent the last 2 decades putting up nuclear reactors. If France could do it in the 70-90, Germany could have done it 2000-2020.
Likely by now they could finish multiple reactors a year. And once you have the workforce and production capability for that pace could have built them all over the East.
What this map really shows is that if you combine nuclear with hydro you are like gone do amazing.
My own country, Switzerland, sadly had a vote (direct democracy ftw) and now nuclear research and new nuclear is basically illegal. Its a damn shame.
The world has just totally fucked up the response to climate change.
They were/are, but IMO, Germany seem to be in a terrible position re managing their energy needs.
They have had huge price increases - partly because they have had such dependence on Russia, and because they have removed their own power plants.
Furthermore, they have entrenched this mode of functioning in Western societies, who have become process not outcome oriented.
People interested in hacking and startups are probably among the most outcome oriented, so have trouble understanding how this process oriented mindset without course correction can exist.
Would be weird to hold France up as a model. "Let the Nuclear plants you built a generation ago slowly age out and be replaced by renewables that Germany helped establish" isn't something most countries could emulate, they'll jump straight to the renewables, because they're cheaper and better.
40+. The protests against superphenix started immediately and the rocket attack on the site was in 1982.
The attacker was Chaïm Nissim, who’d go on to get elected in geneva as a member of the swiss green party.
100% solar and wind also isn’t economical or practical. Their output is more cyclical and less reliable, and they tend to fail together.
The best way to run a power grid is actually to balance nuclear, wind/solar, and hydro (which has its own set of advantages and drawbacks).
So, the “100% this or 100% that” question is a red herring. We must use all the tools available (because the situation is actually quite dire), where they make sense.
While using only nuclear power plants for all the domestic electricity generation of a country doesn't make much sense, some reactor design, notably French ones (in particular composition of the control rods and their placement in the core, among other things) allows for very flexible control over power output. [0] EDF makes the surprising claim that their plants are as flexible as gas plants, which are generally considered as the go-to method of load following.
Also curious to why 100% nuclear wouldn't be economical, wouldn't this hypothetical situation benefits from the economy of scale and grid management simplification?
[0] https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document (PDF)
The amount of uranium and thorium on this planet is almost unimaginable. In fact Thorium gets carried to the surface in volcanic activity. So a nuclear society would not have to worry about sustainability for literally 1000s of years.
And that is before we even consider fusion.
As for it not being green. Nuclear reactors have very controlled inputs and outputs. Nothing is lost and civilian nuclear waste has never hurt anybody and certainty not nature.
By first principle, a nuclear society uses the least amount of resources in terms of mining and land to power human society for 1000s of years.
please behave.
> The amount of uranium and thorium on this planet is almost unimaginable.
So is gold. Both don't fall from the sky however.
> fusion
Not currently option, but wee need one now.
> Nuclear reactors have very controlled inputs and outputs.
Waste with loooong times to take good care of. Calculate the provision for 10000 years of toilet paper for a single security guard.
> By first principle, a nuclear society uses the least amount of resources in terms of mining and land to power human society for 1000s of years.
So the hunter-gatherers were definitively nuclear.
Thorium is literally a waste product resulting from rare earth mining. With basically no effort we could have 100s of years of reserves. Thorium is also available in waste quantities in basically every country in the world.
So its not at all like Gold.
> Not currently option, but wee need one now.
No we don't. Fusion actually make very economics sense outside of a few very specific issues. We certainty don't need it in the next 50 years. And practically speaking for power generation on earth fission will likely remain the cheaper option.
> Waste with loooong times to take good care of. Calculate the provision for 10000 years of toilet paper for a single security guard.
In any real nuclear society you would only produce waste that only needs a few 100 years of storage.
And anyway toilet paper and pope are simply resources that are recyclable. So not sure why that would even be an issue.
Also, you literally don't need a guard at all.
> So the hunter-gatherers were definitively nuclear.
Hunter-gathers required waste amount of land to produce their daily energy inputs.
Unfortunately the last two cabinets (8 years) did a poor job in continuing a most promising change to more renewable energies. The business lobbying that took place at that time is unbearable.
This graphic[1] (in german, but you get the idea) shows the expansion figures for renewable energies and it is clearly visible how photovoltaics in particular have been severely limited since 2013. Absurd rules were created, for example a levy for privately generated photovoltaic electricity. Or artificially created requirements to keep plant sizes small.
After laws were changed in favour of large investors, fossil energy companies now adorn themselves with large projects, although a large part of the expansion is still done by private individuals.
After an entire industry has been destroyed, there are now complaints that there is a lack of skilled workers and that the number of new installations cannot be increased quickly enough. It all makes me want to puke. We could be somewhere completely different today, but greed and lust for power prevent us from doing anything good for the general public.
[1]: https://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/EE/Redaktion/DE/Bilder/G...
This makes sense since you stress the grid requiring the grid operators to invest.
It applies of you build the solar farm and the power line yourself. And did normal grid, in addition to grid fees.
If I was going to ding Germany for anything (because they've been pretty much world leaders on the whole climate thing) it would be their initial reluctance to embrace EVs but they seem to be over that now. And they stepped back slightly on their climate leadership under a right-wing government but greens seem to have more influence currently so getting back on track.
But generally their carbon intensity of the whole economy is trending in the right direction, despite doing more heavy manufacturing than most other EU countries.
*because they are absurdly subsidized, as opposed to other methods of production which have been repeatedly fucked over the years.
So that is in part why they are cheap, but they are also simply cheaper now due to their scale of production.
Nothing 'absurd' about that though so not quite sure what you're claiming is happening. Presumably something along the lines of there being a big conspiracy to hide the true costs of renewables which hurts the real cheap energy sources, which are fossil fuels. Which feels backwards to me.
But recently market prices for electricity were by far exceeding the minimum guaranteed prices, so you can't call those renewables as "heavily subsidized".
Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing (which so annoyed the French government that they simply murdered an activist) and nuclear dumping, both of which put considerable quantities of radioactive material into the air and water.
Chernobyl has been in the news again since the site was occupied by Russian troops. That and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla... have apparently taken shelling damage but as yet no leaks have been reported. The potential for an accidental or deliberate disaster that covers Western Europe with radioactive material and takes out a season's agriculture remains.
Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?
More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.
Frankly, I don't trust the Human to manage the risk of a nuclear installation. Look what Humans are doing elsewhere in every other domain. We don't need the sun to be brought to Earth.
People make way to big a deal of how amazingly complex nuclear plants are. Its not some magical spell that prevents demons from entering the world.
And the potential of accidents even in case of terrorist attack (or whatever fantasy scenario) is far smaller then people want to claim.
Any time extension is a tradeoff, there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.
> there's nothing wrong with extending the lifespan if the regulators are okay with it.
Perhaps! Unless regulators make a mistake, or are pressured politically or by industry to extend licenses when they ought not be. I'm not sure I'd want to go into a hypothetical 2030s where the US had scores of nuclear power plants to decommission two decades after the end of their original lifespan.
So, no, nuclear energy is about the safest means of producing energy we have today. Offsetting environmental damage to third world countries to mine your rare earth minerals for solar does not get to make you feel better about it. Nuclear installations are not handled like a shitty startup that goes "wE'Re AgIlE wE'lL dEaL WiTh iT iN tImE". The IAEA is absurdly stringent on their requirements. The ASN in France puts such harsh conditions and requires every crucial safety equipment to be not just doubled, but tripled. There is no domain in which we are more demanding.
Interesting perspective of relative risks in life. Makes me think of Boeing's 737MAX that should have gone through a new type certification process and was instead allowed (by regulators in multiple countries) to apply software to make it seem like it flies like other 737s. This saved on pilot retraining costs, and resulted in a couple mass deaths. We don't seem to be coherent with risks.
In practical terms: solar panels might cost less per peak W, same for inverters, same for batteries but costs to reach self-sufficiency for real [1] are still simply absurdly expensive in both absolute capex terms and expected operational life.
Actually I have a small p.v. with lithium storage as a guarantee for blackouts, not counting the battery in monetary terms I'll pay it back thanks to self consumption, I can shift most big loads in the sunny days etc, but not all. A battery big enough to ensure full operation in comfort conditions (witch means being able to heat the house in winter, cook something in early morning or in the evening etc) + some backups (grid or generator) when there is not enough Sun during the day would cost 30-40k euros. And would still be a fragile system with around 10 years of fully operational life, after some parts of the system might still be operational with enough performances to be kept, but batteries, the most expensive and unrecyclable part of the system will be not. Changing them probably means change battery inverters since voltages and other characteristics might have changed in new batteries, witch is again another important costs of the system. And that's just at private home's level, at scale for industries etc it's simply technologically impossible so far. For those usages we have only fossils, when possible nuclear (need abundant water ready available, significant hydrogeological stability etc, can't be done as easy as place a big diesel or gas generator on ground) or again when possible classic hydro power.
P.v. costs are going down in part because of evolving scale in part artificially because of economical moves (like having skyrocketed prices of oil&gas with various excuses but in reality just for a deliberate speculation) and nuclear costs soar just because instead of being done by a single State are done by various private companies that work between them for profit. We can't really run a country on renewables so far and we will not in the near future.
[1] too many use a classic dumb tricks "hey, with a p.v. system you'll produces more than you consume", witch is true in kWh/month terms, witch is false in time distribution of such production concentrated between morning and early afternoon and zero in the rest of the time
Comparing Nuclear and Solar cost is like comparing the cost of rain to the cost tap water. It is fundamentally stupid.
- Nuclear provides a stable continuous source of power and matches existing power grid.
- Solar need more than three time the capacity for the same level of power, need profound infrastructure changes and required to be associated with Lithium Storage or/and Power2Gas or/and water pump storage.
> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.
France has been able in 20 years to create out of nowhere more than 30 nuclear power plants covering more than 50% of the country energy needs for a fraction of the cost of an EPR today. Privatisation, loss of Engineering knowledge and mainly lack of politics support are the element to blame here. Not nuclear energy itself.
> Reminder that Greenpeace started out fighting against nuclear weapons and their testing
Good. Then they should stick to their fundamental and go protest a bit against Nuclear weapon testing in North Korea. That will make them much more relevant that when they do support the construction of (Russian provided) coal and gaz power plants in Germany.
Sticking to their fundamental might have helped to prevent the shit show we are now in: now Germany cannot even afford to stop few Gaz pipelines from Russia without putting the country in the dark.
Electricity cost to the final user is the only metrics that matter.
Anything in the energy market is heavily subsidies: petrol, gas, RNG, everything, not only nuclear.
France was having one of the lowest electricity price in Europe for more than 2 decades mainly due to Nuclear[^1]. This is not anymore due to the European common energy market.
[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/59f1e791-...
By that logic the difference between solar and nuclear doesn't matter since the cost is the same.
The fact of the matter is that we don't know the cost of nuclear in France since it gets lumped together with other profits/losses. This is unfortunate because it makes comparing very difficult. The claims you made are therefore unsubstantiated.
Why does the answer to those questions make your claims about renewables needing storage nonsensical?
Energy is was more than 70% nuclear in France. The rest is mainly hydro, solar when available and a bit of Gas [1]. Some reactors were built before and after this 20 years nuclear rush, this is why 50% in my previous message.[^2]
[1]: https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/regional-data#producti...
[2]: https://twitter.com/superbello123/status/1505287449995579396
France peaked around 75% of electricity from nuclear. Energy is bigger than just electricity and generally includes transport and fuel for home and industrial heating, which puts Framce back around a half of energy from clean sources.
This 75% of electricity is (perhaps not coincidentally) very close to the 80% that many people feel modern renewables can provide without any major storage issues. Because that 20/25% leeway means you can just use fossil backup to fill any gaps where your clean supply doesn't match your demand.
But, the anti-renewable types who point to nuclear to justify their outdated opinions on renewables never seem to care that nuclear was only ever part of a larger system. They meticulously count every penny spent on grid upgrades and storage for one, but not the other. Pumped hydro and nuclear is a classic combination for decades.
They'll attack time-of-use pricing as some kind of attack on liberty even though its a standard thing to do with excess nuclear capacity overnight, in places like France, for example.
That may be, but the simple reality is that they and many like them have been fearmongering against nuclear for decades while being far more accepting of coal and case.
> Is everyone happy with Iran having a buildout of a dozen or more reactors to replace their oil usage?
I am. Iran would have had peaceful French built nuclear power with French handling nuclear bringing nuclear fuel and taking nuclear 'waste' home.
This was agree on by Iran and France. However the US in its infinite wisdom prevented that.
And then when Iran said, if France was not gone do it, they would do it themselves. The US and Israel basically fell over themselves claiming this was prove that Iran was building nuclear weapons.
> More prosaically, the cost of solar only goes down, while the cost of nuclear seems to only go up.
That's not a law of nature. Its an act of deliberate policy and history.
Modern p.v. and eolic means tons of small "products" to be sold and sold regularly because as long as tech improve after 10 years even if a plant is still fully functional it's about time to refresh it. As a result means a very profitable business for private companies (just try to track those behind Greta Thumberg, you'll end up quickly to giants like ABB, Ökoworld AG, Dii GmbH, Enel, EDF, Endesa, Abengoa, Siemens, Cevital and various investments banks). Oil giants are sitting on big money but they know their business sooner or later will end at least because of more and more scarce resources, so they like to diversify their investments. That's is. France have more nuclear because France have more public (have had, at least, with recent government and projects things goes very badly here)...
"New" nuclear projects are stuck for similar reasons: investors want profit, the service is just a mean to elicit profits, not a purpose and the profit a reward.
Swiss is luck to a certain extent because of it's small size and a certain policy toward autonomy, they aren't really autonomous especially recently but at least hydro thanks to the orography can play an important role and probably can still grow a bit toward many smaller-size plants so just pushing nuclear a bit they can be almost autonomous again. France to be autonomous must re-nationalize EDF erasing Hercules project and other disastrous neoliberal moves. Others are almost doomed: Germany have not good enough infra in the whole country, it's private-based development under USA control have had so negative effects that I do not know how they can be back in power, Italy is also doomed, Spain might have a bit more chances but I'm not much sure and other countries are completely out of the game.
Having a small p.v. with lithium storage I've reasoned a bit just in terms of personal energy autonomy in Green New Deal terms: having built s new house (Minergie-alike (BBC) if you are Swiss) I already have all electrical and winter heating demand far less energy than an old house, winter cooling is needed thanks to the climate only during the sunny days where there is plenty of electricity however try to be almost autonomous (witch means near-zero consumption from the grid, but with the grid as a cheap backup, cheaper than running on a generator) would mean are 30-40k euros more in both battery, a geothermic heat-pump since the actual heating (hot water stored in the garage + VMC + low inertia heat transfer to the house) stress batteries too much in many winter nights. Enlarging that to all houses: we can build something similar for individual homes in perhaps 50+ years. We still have to power industries. Even if in a soon future we can use e.v. as part of the house power plant (both to recharge them when not used, thanks to more than one car and WFH, and when they supply energy to the home microgrid) we are still not autonomous in a safe manner, the investment is a significant fraction of the entire home value and the worst part: it does not last longer. Batteries really used can last from 5 to 8 years while formally they'll last 10. That's means around 10-12k euros per year, doable for middle-class that will be impoverished by such hi prices but not doable for most others, a vast majority of the citizens. And still nothing to produce enough of such gears for even just only the middle class. Nothing for the industry, hospitals, shipping, airplanes etc. Long story short the actual new deal is a way to elict money from all to enrich few, making all much more surveilled (IoT is mandatory in such systems, and done in connected and proprietary ways) and poor. Witch is actually the 2030 Davos agenda. It's almost NOTHING for climate change (the sole part is that the need of new home might means homes able to offer better climate comfort, hopefully built in hydrogeologically safe places). Oil&gas will remain probably as long as we have them in sufficient quantities and nuclear will be kept going hoping for fusion, but all in a world ruled by private bodies so a world that can't really innovate.
Comparing the data from https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/, there seems to be some real discrepancies, e.g.
- Solar: 4.23% vs 13.81%
- Wind: 18.8% vs 8.5%
- Gas: 37.1% vs 41.24%
I am not sure who I would trust more - I guess if the data from electricity map is an estimate that is close to 2.5 hours out of date, that might explain some of it.
Cool UI though
Here are the technical requirements for each data source: https://github.com/electricityMap/electricitymap-contrib/wik...
(to answer your question, the list mentions that a data source is required to be: "Updated in real-time with less than 2 hours of delay." ... "Can have a longer delay, but then the country won’t be colored on the map")
[1] - https://github.com/electricitymap/electricitymap-contrib/tre...
Live electricity production/consumption CO2 map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28223366 - Aug 2021 (36 comments)
ElectricityMap – Live CO₂ emissions of electricity production and consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747927 - Oct 2020 (101 comments)
Electricity Map – Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17772529 - Aug 2018 (71 comments)
Live CO2 emissions of electricity consumption - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15998650 - Dec 2017 (135 comments)
Things I take issue with: 1. How do you lump all of California under one value given there are 4 large utilities that have their own value but include LADWP and the balancing authority? 2. Since the visualization is by state but not the size of impact it also makes smaller inefficient areas look like they have as large an impact.
I do appreciate the flow of electricity across states though.
In the end I'm not sure the value prop - is this for policy planners? It's not high quality enough to be for energy trading or asset deployment. I had thought of doing something like this mapping out a couple years ago but couldn't figure out what the exercise was going to do in the end outside of some interesting visualization and then fairly complicated analysis of different energy systems.
Either way good work for the people who've got the project to this point.
The issue is data acquisition. In regions where they have more granular input, you have a better resolution.
> In the end I'm not sure the value prop - is this for policy planners?
It’s for outreach and communication with the general public. It’s trivial to put a map on Facebook to show how well/poorly a given place is doing. It’s also interesting to have a quick look depending on the conditions, like the wind turbines output during a storm, or during a heat wave, or to see just how efficient PV production is under various conditions.
On top of that, that in states with high renewables, like Texas, you occasionally have grid congestion that causes wind turbines to curtail, or shut down, in order to balance the generation with the consumer's loads.
A rough picture, seemingly updated every 5-15 minutes, of the broader 'nodes' in the U.S. grids can be seen at https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Drill down deep enough into the data, and you will unearth the recent tracking of renewables in each of those nodes.
The large wind providers (notice Texas, central Australia, etc ) are really burning natural gas/etc because the wind is rarely meeting even 50% of its nameplate capacity.
That’s hardly news though. In the US, the capacity factor of wind averages around 35%. The world over, it can range from 15% (though obviously you’d hope for some analysis before building to avoid locations where it’s that low) to 60% or so (according to the wiki, for Eolo in Nicaragua).
Solar is both better and worse: more regular, but less evenly distributed, for PV solar the CF ranges from 20% in the south (e.g. AZ) to 10 when you reach the canadian border.
> The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) is a source of statistical bias that can significantly impact the results of statistical hypothesis tests. MAUP affects results when point-based measures of spatial phenomena are aggregated into districts, for example, population density or illness rates. The resulting summary values (e.g., totals, rates, proportions, densities) are influenced by both the shape and scale of the aggregation unit.
> For example, census data may be aggregated into county districts, census tracts, postcode areas, police precincts, or any other arbitrary spatial partition. Thus the results of data aggregation are dependent on the mapmaker's choice of which "modifiable areal unit" to use in their analysis. A census choropleth map calculating population density using state boundaries will yield radically different results than a map that calculates density based on county boundaries.
Russia produces about 5% of uranium, and uranium is reduced to yellowcake on site but it is generally enriched by the country using the fuel (eurodif being a pretty significant exception).
Furthermore uranium has a bunch of advantages — aside from most of the known reserves being in advanced economies (namely Australia and Canada):
- because it's dense and stable (unlike gasoline or natural gas), countries can have years of enriched fuel in storage, meaning in case of supply issue they can easily wait out
- ramp up of existing mines (or opening out of new mines) to compensate for one supplier shutting down or being blackballed, because
- uranium requires very little infrastructure between the mine (which ships yellowcake) and the enrichment plant, yellowcake is transported in 400kg drums packed into standard shipping containers
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1147442/imports-of-urani...
If the West became dependent on Kazakh uranium because they shifted their entire fossil fuel generation capacity to nuclear, it would be in Russia's strategic interest to exert control over Kazakhstan's uranium, one way or another.
There may be sensible ways to replace some base load on the grid with nuclear, but not by introducing a resource dependency on the vassal of a major adversary.
The thing we can do right now is focus on electrification of end uses that are still fossil fuel powered. That way the end uses are mostly agnostic of the method of generation.
- the weight of uranium compared to the weight of coal needed for the same amount of energy produced is absolutely ridiculous: 2.5 metric tons vs. 7 grams of uranium 235. That make it easy to stockpile it for years to come
- Some "waste" are already being recycled and used again
- uranium is uniformly distributed on earth, there's not the same geopolitical issues that we experience for fossil energy sources such as oil and gas
- I'm not sure whether those 20%/20% proportions are true since some EU countries does not disclose the part of uranium imported from each countries
- Australia, Niger and Canada are also some major players for EU uranium import, none of which want to back Russian war, quite the contrary according to the UN vote.
And I'll bet money that, couple of days ago, the carbon put out by the spinning reserve that is necessary to cover a day like today wasn't counted.
If you're going to advocate for wind, great. Can we examine your plans honestly, please? Because if you want to deliver an equivalent service to France, one where "SLA" and "disconnect the customers if convenient" are treated as different things, then our current plan is not wind. It is gas.
But, if you insist . . .
The gas required for standby is miniscule compared to what is burned under load, and frankly, I would bet money that wind was curtailed before "wasting" any gas. Even if we burn gas today, gas not burned two days ago, was not burned. So, it is nonsense to dismiss the benefits of wind.
I do not know what the future picture will look like, but given the relative cheapness of wind generation, I suspect there will be a significant over capacity installed. Grid storage is also coming along. New interconnects are being installed such as the North Sea link to Norway. We are currently importing 1.4GW from Norwegian hydroelectric. I suspect wind energy was exported to Norway when it was blowing. And yes, more nuclear is being built, in the form of Hinckley Point C.
A near future thing might be lots of EVs with vehicle to grid capability adding a lot of battery to the grid. Millions of EVs would provide some non trivial amount of capacity. Several manufacturers are starting to supply cars with this capability (e.g. Ford, Kia, and a few others). And of course Tesla is already experimenting with virtual power plants as well.
The future is going to be a messy process of different countries and companies rolling out bits and pieces of infrastructure and technology as it becomes available. It's a fiercely competitive space and it does not favor players that depend on costly solutions that require high energy prices to be economically sustainable. All that will happen in a market with an increasing amount of variety of supply and greater fluctuations in pricing.
This actually has a re-enforcing effect. The more wind, solar, and battery comes online, the less profitable gas plants become. They only generate revenue when they are in use but they still cost money when they aren't producing. Likewise, exporting nuclear energy is not a thing when there is a surplus of cheap renewable energy unless you basically sell the energy at a loss. And turning a nuclear plant off takes a lot of planning. And turning them back on is of course expensive as well.
That's one of the issues France is facing with its domestic nuclear production. It's often cheaper to import wind power from abroad and with a connected grid, power suppliers have the freedom to do so. And of course in areas where prices are higher, home owners are incentivized to find ways to reduce their energy prices by installing solar on their roofs and adding batteries to their house.