Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

samwillis

Not today though, sadly it's down at 1.77% right now:

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

It's nearly 50% gas (cctg, combined-cycle gas turbine) at the moment.

Nice to see solar at up at nearly 18%!

View on HN

Linked are our French neighbours, with 71% nuclear vs UK's 10%. Also 14% hydroelectric. Impressive!

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/

France is almost green here:

> https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR

Yet, many people think that nuclear is not the way to go.

France got a 40 year head start. They werent even aiming to decarbonize their electricity, it was a side effect of chasing energy independence during the oil crisis.

It was the way to go in 1970.

People think nuclear isnt the way to go now because it's eye wateringly expensive. EDF's bankruptcy and the rapidly exploding costs and risks of dealing with France's aging plants confirms this. In spite of still spending hand over fist, the % of nuclear power is in decline in France (theyre officially hoping solar and wind can fill in the gaps).

It should also be noted that the French government went out of its way to gut the nuclear ecosystem for electoral reasons (F. Hollande hoping to get the Green vote some 15 years ago). Only recently did they realize that we don't have nearly enough renewables and that, yes, if you don't maintain your plants, they do tend to degrade rather quickly. And presenting the sector as a dead-end, of course they're now missing qualified people to do the maintenace and the design of new plants.

This is in additation to the weird scheme forcing EDF to sell cheap energy to their competitors.

I always hear it's so expensive, but compared to what? Just continuing to burn fossil fuels?

Costs I see to solar and wind that I rarely see anyone mention are:

What happens when you cover large deaths of land with solar and windmills? What does that do to the micro climates of those areas and what affects will that have on the global climate? What does that do to the wildlife (both plant and animal) long term?

What are the true costs of the mines and manufacturing and transportation needed to build and maintain all of that?

I grew up near hydroelectric dams and when I was young they were hailed as free renewable energy. By the time I hit highschool they were demonized for forever changing the river's ecosystem and nearly driving certain fish species to extinction. How does wind and solar not end up the same?

In fact, I've seen the "solar and wind cover lots of land" in every single post about energy that comes on HN or Reddit.

The answer the "compared to what?" is everything. It is clean, continuous, it's compact and other benefits. But it's expensive. You need over 30 years (being optimist) to break even. You need government financial support because no bank would finance that. That's the reason only countries like France or China build them: the costs are partially hidden in the country budgets or public owned corporations balances.

About hydro, that was a "unknown unknown" paraprhasing Rumsfeld. You can't avoid what currently seems our best bet to our current knowledge (wind and solar) because maybe there's an unknown unknown that could bit us hard in 40 years.

The science of understanding environmental impact has improved hugely. We can actually know pretty well the answer to those kind of questions. And often the impact will be less damaging to the environment than what it is replacing (such as farmland).

'Force de Frappe'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_de_dissuasion

But how many heat their homes with electricity? Many households in France (and the UK and elsewhere) are heating their homes with gas and the same goes for cooking. The share of electricity of the total energy consumption is also important to consider.

True - but solar is doing well today considering how grey is it: https://grid.iamkate.com/

17.7% right now, and 7.7% for the full 24 hours of yesterday.

Good to see coal at zero, but sad to see the amount of gas we still require.

Great progress though!

It's sunny here.

Maybe for you... https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/forecast/uk Day of rain and flood alerts for much of the UK, with lower temperature than the previous 5 days.

That is the challenge; we often have a few weeks with low wind so need those fossil fuel generation to fill the hole. And adding more turbines doesn't help the bad cases much.

(I tend to like https://grid.iamkate.com/ now )

"...we often have a few weeks with low wind..."

Plenty of wind up North + Scotland - just no means to transport it over where the most demand is (the South).

Not always. Often, but not always, and that's the problem. This afternoon for example, even off the East Coast of Scotland the wind was about as brisk as a stroll with your elderly grandmother. If you've got 10GW of wind turbines, but they're running at 5% output, that's 500MW, which isn't nothing but it's not even enough for Scotland.

But it was windy in Ireland, Portugal and the Baltic sea.

https://www.windy.com/?100m,50.958,4.345,5

Yes grid.iamkate.com is brilliant, and it has good insights into costs. However, I just like the 90s skeuomorphic design of gridwatch.templar.co.uk, makes me think of simpler times.

Wow that website loads surprisingly fast

It's almost entirely static (or at least server rendered) even all the SVG graphs. I'm going to take punt and say it's a static pre-rendered flat file based on the response time.

Could it be possible that they are talking about energy production instead of energy use and conveniently writing "UK's electricity" to add ambiguity?

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63976805

Reply on news.ycombinator.com