If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) it wouldn’t need support from politicians.
Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.
Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.
Once you account for these, renewables are far cheaper.
All the green movement is really doing is calling for better accounting standards for energy.
It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.
Just look at France on how cheap and available nuclear energy is for instance.
Germany is paying the price because politicians blocked green energy they effectively hindered the expansion of solar and wind energy.
Take Bavaria as example they don't want wind turbines and prefer nuclear energy but the don't want power lines for wind energy from north Germany or a nuclear repository. Instead their Minister President suggests fracking, not in Bavaria of course.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-dow...
That's on top of several major aging and maintenance issues which arose some months ago:
https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-re...
Add in the current European wide-risk of the military destruction of the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and the balance sheet for nuclear relative to solar/wind/storage looks more and more negative.
When I play with my favorite modeling site https://model.energy/ the place with the lowest cost to get to 100% renewable baseload is... Greenland!
(These assume the cost to install a wind turbine is the same everywhere, which obviously isn't right, but it does give an idea how good the wind resource is in these places.)
Renewables require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. Even just building one hour of storage is 2,500 GWh globally. We'll need around 3 weeks of storage to make a completely renewable grid: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora...
We have no feasible way of delivering that much storage. Wind and solar are cheaper to make small reductions in a grid that is mostly fossil fuels. Their intermittency isn't an issue there because it's just opportunistically shutting down the fossil fuel plants when wind and solar are producing. But actually delivering a 0% carbon grid with intermittent sources is not just hard, it's not possible.
Our problem isn't energy production, it's energy production with the least damage to our environment.
Trying to shut down nuclear because a river gets too hot is the kind of faux-environmental that's hampering out efforts to combat climate change.
You should inform yourself before making wild claims. Fossil fuels are cheap mostly because of government subsidies.
Reminder that 6.8% of the world's entire GDP (5.9 trillion US dollars) was spent on subsidies for fossil fuels just in 2020. [0]
[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying.
Calculate how much it will cost to power a city 100% with renewables for a week. Oops, you can't, cuz we don't have the technology for uninterrupted power draw from non-nuclear renewables.
And yet this is exactly how fossil fuel companies and their proponents (even individuals outside the industry, if you can believe it) justify their "lower cost". The true cost of fossil fuels is hidden due to extreme externalities such as their impact on the climate, ecology, and human health.
There's also the possibility of using both nuclear and intermittent sources. But between the fact that peak demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production in the evening and the fact that nuclear is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it is to run at 50% of the time, renewables become redundant. If we're building enough nuclear power to fill in the gaps of intermittent sources' periods of non production then we're building enough nuclear power to fulfill 100% of grid demand anyway. So just skip the intermittent sources.
Oh, but it is. It is such a common trope, always trotted out as a reason to keep using coal or natural gas. Often it is paired with appeals to nuclear power which isn't being built, leaving us with fossil fuel energy while we wait for something to not happen.
> So just skip the intermittent sources.
Let's say we spend $100B on new power generation over the next 10 years: $50B for nuclear and $50B for wind+storage. Which do you think will produce more watt-hours during this 10 year period? Which will reduce dependence on fossil fuels more? We both know the answer to this so consider it rhetorical.
Arguments against renewables are arguments for the status quo, which includes some imagined ideal that won't happen.
Solar and wind are good for the short-term goal of small fossil fuel reductions. They are not very good at actually providing the bulk of a decarbonized grid. Storage remains a fantasy, so that leaves nuclear and hydroelectricity as the only non-intermittent carbon-free sources of energy. For places with the right geography for dams, great. For everywhere else, nuclear is the only option.
There's a few other sources of energy like geothermal and tidal power, but those are similarly geographically limited.
Recently, energy prices in Europe have (roughly) doubled [1].
And suddenly -by comparison- that same ROI starts to look very interesting to a lot more people.
[1] (YMMV, check your local energy spot prices for actual numbers)
Heat pumps and solar everywhere!
And as the summers get hotter, everyone wants solar + aircon. It's crazy!
The demand for new heat pumps is very high at the moment
Some people are also interested in not destroying the environment they live in, though. They are interested in acting as a global society to stop destroying the planet.
To that end, they want to pass laws that force corporations to clean up the messes they make and include the cost of that in their energy production. If they had to pay for the mess they make, it might very well make "green" energy more profitable and also help our environment. At the very least, they'd have to stop destroying the environment.