54% of Portugal’s electricity is now generated by renewable energy | Hacker News Reader

54% of Portugal’s electricity is now generated by renewable energy

theportugalnews.com

176 pointsbelter255 comments

I'd like to offer a more critical perspective as a Portuguese living in Portugal.

We're a country with very severe economical, financial, social and health problems which have been unsolved for years. Living in Portugal is a hard and it's expected it will get harder and harder. We have tons of young people leaving the country every year.

Our CO2 emissions are like 0.15% of the total and our per-capita emissions are already lower than for ex. Germany. We basically have no industry. If we could wave a magic wand and completely stop our CO2 emissions it wouldn't move the needle on global warming at all.

Notwithstanding these facts, the government went all in on renewables and cutting down on emissions -- despite it not making any sense -- because it's a popular measure across all age groups.

Energy companies had to invest in still unproven renewable tech which was very costly. As a result, energy companies then had to amortize this investment and now we have one the highest energy prices in all of Europe. Had we chosen to start investing in renewables more recently, like Brazil, we would be buying better and cheaper tech.

So, we -- the Portuguese -- are worse, overall, because of these short sighted measures. But, hey, at least we get good press.

> If we could wave a magic wand and completely stop our CO2 emissions it wouldn't move the needle on global warming at all.

That stance could be held by virtually every country, condemning us to collective inaction.

GP's point is that Portugal wasn't the best placed country to go all-in on renewable energy because it was already economically in trouble and that the last thing Portuguese people needed was higher energy prices.

There are other countries that have stronger economies which are better placed to "go green".

That's just wrong. If China (29%) and the US (14%) waved the said wand we'd cut down emissions by almost 50% and would be looking at a completely different scenario.

It's so typically Portuguese to look at good news and somehow see it as bad news. I'm Portuguese, and I too suffer from this syndrome at times.

Not this time. Glad to see Portugal is on the right track.

You missed the point.

Us not polluting is, obviously, great news.

What we had to do to get to get here is the bad news. We chose to invest cash we don't have in fixing a problem we don't (really) cause and to which we don't (really) have a solution for. This, while 1/4 of the population earns minimum wage. My conclusion still stands.

Not to invalidate what you're saying, but surely every country has it's problems? While the problems you sight are significant, if this has been the case for a while, would they have been resolved if all the money had not been invested into renewables?

It sounds like culturally, those problems would still exist today i.e. due to corruption, but at least you have the renewables in place, as opposed to not have them.

I feel like you're looking for an ideal version that doesn't exist in reality.

I am not Portuguese but live here for some years now. It surprises me often how happy Portuguese can be with minor details that work while there are so many much more serious problems.

For example: some years ago several people mentioned the roads of Portugal were the best of Europe. I had a hard time believing because many local roads were worse than I remember from most countries. After the 3rd person or so I started wondering and looked it up. Turned out this was only for highways, which Portugal has only a few and build with EU money. Plus Portugal was actually only second, the Dutch highways were the best. Something I suspect at that time was not really frontpage news in the Netherlands. Until today many local roads are very bad.

I live in Ohio, but spent a couple of weeks in Portugal last year, including in some remote areas... Your roads on the whole are better than ours, by a long shot.

It is good that something has been improved, and now you have concrete proof that change in the right direction is possible.

Now that renewables are on the rise, the same effort can be put into other things that need improvement. It's a great start!

A few things

> If we could wave a magic wand and completely stop our CO2 emissions it wouldn't move the needle on global warming at all.

Some people completely ignore the fact that it does help, it may not help the ozone above China, but having a country that is not pumping out ash and other byproducts into the air does make it citizens healthier. They live longer, they have less health issues, they pay more taxes (potentially longer job life span), and they are happier. So regardless of the short sighted "we are too small to do anything" statement. It does help.

> Notwithstanding these facts, the government went all in on renewables and cutting down on emissions -- despite it not making any sense -- because it's a popular measure across all age groups.

Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

> Energy companies had to invest in still unproven renewable tech which was very costly.

Solar is fairly new, but wind is certainly not new in any fashion, along with water it is one of the oldest forms of energy generation that exist. If anything coal/nuclear are newer than wind. And tidal assuming a stable tidal pattern is also an easy engineering issue to solve. I am not sure beyond solar you can argue "unproven renewable tech".

> Had we chosen to start investing in renewables more recently, like Brazil, we would be buying better and cheaper tech.

You can't really say that, if that's an argument then nobody would ever buy anything, because it could always be better and cheaper later.

I get the reasoning for your statement, because investing in natural gas or other oil methods like that can provide more faster for the general populace. But there is no reason that renewable cannot ALSO do that, it's just nobody has an example of such case. And there are plenty of examples with gas.

> Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

Nope, not always, and this is why direct democracy is pretty inefficient. People aren't experts, are often shortsighted and thinking at the micro level: many government policies and choices need long term thinking and expertise at the macro level. Take a look at Switzerland - "green" measures such as a carbon tax, which is considered by many experts as one of the best policies to reduce CO2 emissions, was refused by voters, because they're thinking about the impact it will have on them personally, now, and not about all the negative things which will be reduced with such a tax.

It would cost them a lot of money and have no impact on CO2 levels. Chinese and Indians will not magnanimously sacrifice their money to lower their CO2, and if they don't then it doesn't matter.

With that attitude, nobody is going to do anything.

The rest of the world can encourage China and India with economic sanctions if they won’t come along for the renewables and EV ride. With that said, China at least is an example of moving to EVs and renewables rapidly.

China is the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It's very difficult to get the economic leverage to sanction China, and convincing developing nations to go along would be virtually impossible.

> China is the world's manufacturing powerhouse. It's very difficult to get the economic leverage to sanction China, and convincing developing nations to go along would be virtually impossible.

You don't buy from them. This is already happening [1] [2] [3]. Developing nations have no purchasing power compared to the developed world. They'll kowtow to developed world hegemony if push comes to shove (at least within the scope of US foreign aid [~$40B/year] and dollar dominance).

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=manufacturing+moving+away+fr...

[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/manufacturers-move-away-fr...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/20/china-factory-of-the-world-i...

Could we explore a bit in how it would cost them money. Taxes in general get back into the economy unless the government stockpile the revenue or invest them over sea. It would increase costs for companies doing exports, raising costs on mining (29.9% of total exports), and maybe organic chemicals exports. Switzerland second largest export is Pharmaceuticals, but I am unsure how much a carbon tax would impact that industry.

If they also applied it to imports then countries with high CO2 would have a harder time to export to Switzerland. Having less access to cheap products with high carbon footprint would add a costs to citizens, as alternative products will likely cost more, but then it would also encourage industries in China/India to produce products with lower footprint in order to compete on markets with carbon taxes/tariffs based on carbon footprint. It might even encourage local productions which can be a boon for the economy.

Poor countries have no incentive to pay carbon fees. Then have rich countries pay their carbon fees? So then tax payers of developed nations take the hit and have their own economic output lowered while countries ignoring carbon fees move ahead. It's a death spiral.

Have a look at Steven Koonin's "Unsettled". He was an Obama DOE appointee and Provost of Caltech (he's a physicist). He makes convincing arguments that the climate change models are highly unreliable. It's not Fox News garbage, he's legit.

The US and EU are making very large policy moves based on models that are not necessarily accurate.

But if the models are inaccurate, what if they are inaccurate in the optimistic direction?

That’s how error bars work and why they are indicated as +/-

Because the evidence doesn't point that way, and it's very expensive to make such an assumption, especially when much of the rest of the world doesn't follow.

I dunno... it's expensive in the short term but you end up with an energy infrastructure that makes you energy independent and where costs will only go down over time since solar/wind/batteries are all on a Moore's law like cost trajectory.

Fossil fuels meanwhile will on average only get more expensive over time because they are being depleted, and this isn't considering other externalities besides CO2 emissions.

There are reasons besides climate change to get off fossil fuel.

>Nope, not always, and this is why direct democracy is pretty inefficient. People aren't experts

This was also the Monarchist argument for not even allowing representative democracy (rule by "rabble").

Swiss laws are actually fairly decent while your American representative democracy proves that representative democracy really is rule-by-experts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

> This was also the Monarchist argument for not even allowing representative democracy (rule by "rabble").

And their premise was stupid because rule by inheritance has zero guarantees. A representative democracy can more easily have a meritocratic aspect to it.

> your American representative democracy

I'm not american, and they literally have one of the worst possible "democratic" systems, so shouldn't be used for anything else other than an example on what not to do.

>> Notwithstanding these facts, the government went all in on renewables and cutting down on emissions -- despite it not making any sense -- because it's a popular measure across all age groups.

> Another interesting statement, should it not make sense for a government to do what it's citizens want?

"and now we have one the highest energy prices in all of Europe."

'want' is an evolving metric. I'm sure they want low energy prices now.

"Had we chosen to start investing in renewables more recently, like Brazil, we would be buying better and cheaper tech."

Yeah, everyone could just wait, until the magic revolutionary renewable tech comes around the corner and everyone implements it at once. Except progress usually does not work like that.

People do not learn to install solar panels or wind turbines over night. You want a solid growing workforce that can do that. And if not enough people are buying it, no one will produce those panels, can install or maintain them, or develope better ones.

And if this doesn't happen, then we will soon really learn, what a migration crisis looks like.

Depending on your priorities and your constraints, there's a sort of "optimal" time to enter the market. If you look at the technology adoption curve, early adopters are those with excess cash. If you don't have excess cash, your money is better spent entering the cycle later, when the technology evolution is close to plateauing (when all the major issues have been sorted out, and now the improvements are only marginal).

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

For infrastructure, some countries (rich ones) can be early adopters, because early adoption means more cash outlay for technology that is still rapidly evolving and will likely be outdated soon, which requires replacement. But poorer countries might find it more prudent to be Early Majority or Late Majority adopters. Consider subway systems -- early adopters like NYC made it possible for technology to improve. But if you look at subways in Asia, many systems are far more technologically advanced than NY's MTA because they came online later, when train technology had matured and they could afford more with less $.

We need early adopters, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be an early adopter.

"We need early adopters, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be an early adopter."

That's right, but the time for early adopters with renewables was 20+ years ago.

And so it was. But even back then, not every country ought to have been one. The US should have been. It has the cash and the ability to continuously invest and upgrade. Papua New Guinea, maybe not. They have other things to invest in that are more pressing than bootstrapping nascent technology. That’s my point.

By being early, I hope that you have acquired expertise that you can now export.

Something like 80% of Portugal's solar has been installed since 2018[1], when solar was on-par with if not cheaper than any other form of electricity generation. And that's from aggregate perspective, the economics are definitely better for Portugal. There were PPA being signed in similar geographies for 3c/kwh that year. I wouldn't be surprised if the defrayed cost from lower fossil fuel usage just since the start of war in Ukraine has fully offset the cost of the installation. I'm not sure why you think this has been so costly for average citizens.

[1] https://www.pv-tech.org/portugal-installs-more-solar-pv-in-2...

> Had we chosen to start investing in renewables more recently, like Brazil, we would be buying better and cheaper tech.

Brazil has been investing in renewables for nearly a century. For instance, the Henry Borden hydroelectric power plant is from 1926.

We built 12 hydro power plants in the 1950s. That's not really what the OP is talking about, but a trend in the early 2000s of overbuilding wind at prices that didn't make sense for the next 20 years, and hardly make sense now, 20 years later. Building solar now (which is as much responsible for current results as anything else) also makes financial sense.

You made the politicians who signed off on this very wealthy. Government programs mean big contracts, and the people who decide on those contracts always get their slice.

If they were serious about decarbonization they'd be pushing next gen nuclear to the point that electricity was so cheap that fossil tech couldn't compete.

What we're doing now is subsidizing cheap oil for China, while soaking American and European consumers, but the politicians are getting their slice, so why not?

Nuclear power stations are built solely for the purposes of supporting a nuclear military (like in Russia, the USA or France) or building nuclear weapons in a hurry (like in Sweden, Iran or South Korea).

No country does it for any other reason. Certainly not for the environment. The cost is absolutely prohibitive (5x solar/wind) and it demands lavish subsidies even if you discount the nearly free government-granted catastrophe insurance.

The only way to make it cheap for the consumer is to have paid off the plants because they were built 50 years ago and to neglect their maintenance. Like France.

Pumped storage, solar and wind meanwhile, are very, very reasonably priced.

> If they were serious about decarbonization they'd be pushing next gen nuclear

Well, then you must be overjoyed to learn that in the US just that is being done. Between the Infrastructure Act and the IRA there's money for:

- new technology development

- a nuclear production tax credit

- domestic fuel so we don't have to buy uranium from Russia

I'm sure after learning this you will feel moved to write Joe Biden a thank you card for implementing the exact policy you are advocating.

Wrong take, and a prime example of the national sport of being overly negative and pessimistic.

Portugal did go early into the wind power game. It had its costs but also produced know-how and a relevant industry stake in that market.

The solar installation effort was much better timed. Solar being fed into the grid is a lot cheaper than other sources, except for hydro (built in the 60s/70s, mostly already paid for).

The current push will create 40GW of capacity, for a country that uses 9GW peak. It should be enough to run the country 100% on renewables. That's a game changer.

Remove oil/gas imports from the national trade balance, and Portugal is suddenly a very very rich country.

> Remove oil/gas imports from the national trade balance, and Portugal is suddenly a very very rich country.

Is energy that much of typical person's spend? And internal creation of energy doesn't drop the cost to consumers to zero.

It is a relevant portion of a personal budget, if you include transportation costs. On a national level, though, it's huge. Portugal imports all of its oil and gas, and has a trade balance that is permanently on the slightly negative side. Energy is a very easy way to fix that, with excellent economic second order effects.

> and now we have one the highest energy prices in all of Europe

I hear that over and over again but... looking at my last EDP bill I find that I pay €0.15/kWh so what am I missing?

> I'd like to offer a more critical perspective as a Portuguese living in Portugal.

I’d like to offer some context for comments such as these as a portuguese living in Portugal.

The portuguese have very low self-esteem as a people. They very often criticize their own country in very harsh terms with a strong bias towards “the grass is always greener on the other side” and tend to steer conversations away from any positive aspects (most often by trying to present them as negative).

Foreigners are expected to passively agree with negative comments about Portugal. But beware: contributing with additional negative aspects is frowned upon and will trigger a sudden patriotic episode.

Important to note that Portugal's geography allows it to have a large fraction of base load met with an unvarying renewable - Hydro.

Not all nations will be able to reach these numbers with traditionally intermitent renewables like Solar/Wind.

The hydro comes from artificial lakes filled by rain and rivers coming from Spain. Rain is becoming less and less. Spain is keeping more and more of the river waters, despite some agreements on this.

All countries individually - sure. But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins. You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) you get permanent solar without storage.

Clouds though?

When you look at pictures of the planet from space. How much land can you see? Are there places you always see land? Put the panels there.

Night time.

Most locations can experience many hours or days of cloud cover, which can slash solar panel output by e.g 90%.

That's what intermittent means in the context of solar.

No it doesn’t. Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved.

(And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x)

What about a multi-month event with overcast weather with low winds over a whole continent (it was the case across most of Europe in 2020)? Just over provision by 100x? Is it still cheaper if you include all the land used?

Pretty sure it stays quite sunny in the desert. Also, there are quite a lot of deserts around the world.

The land given it serves no other purpose is probably not expensive.

How do you transport the electricity from the desert to where it's actually needed? Transmission losses and infrastructure costs make that cost prohibitive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

I think as other have pointed out HVDC lines make it a possibility. I don't quite understand the point made in the video about "expensive infrastructure to convert AC to DC"... wouldn't solar farms be generating in DC? Is the infrastructure in order to get the voltage up? Couldn't I string enough solar panels to increase the voltage?

We are already doing projects like this [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

> Just provision 10x more solar then. Intermittency solved.

For my country (France) IIRC it would require something like 30x more solar to cope with clouds + low light during winter. Take UK or northern Europe and you'd need 50x.

> And yes, it’s still cheaper than say, nuclear even if you provision 10x

What are you smoking? Also it would generate about 100 times more wastes (not talking about high activity waste of course, in which case it would be like a million time more waste)

What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process? So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive

Of course nuclear generates less waste than intermittent sources like solar or wind. Nuclear occupies orders of magnitude less land, requires less concrete, steel, copper, aluminium. And it's still comparing apples to oranges since nuclear is not intermittent and doesn't require building extra storage and grid infrastructure to account for variability.

Oh, you are saying something that is used productively is waste.

So nuclear plants waste heaps of water. By your measure.

> What waste does a solar panel generate? Or are you talking about the manufacturing process?

I'm talking about the panels themselves after they reached their end of life.

> So you’re saying building nuclear plants generates less waste than building solar farms? That’s unintuitive

Nuclear power density is incredibly high: you build 1 concrete bunker and 3 supporting buildings and you have more than a gigawatt of power. For solar you need a square kilometer of solar panels to get 0.1GW.

Compare those two places next to where I live:

- the nuclear plant: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7311/2.5188

- the solar farm: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/47.7229/2.6665

Roughly the same area. The solar farm has 55MW of power. The nuclear plant has 3.6GW, 65 times higher. And the nuclear plant's life will be 60 years at least, which means that over its lifetime the panels would need to be changed 3 times. And that's if there's no hail to damage them…

And this calculation only counts Power, if you did the same calculation for actual energy produced the difference would be around ten time worse.

Panels need to be changed every 20 years? 20 years is their minimum. What over time causes a panel to fail?

I think counting a nuclear plant specifically without also counting the uranium mine required to support it is not completely honest. And also the storage facility for the waste should be counted as well. Uranium is typically huge open pit mines.

> What over time causes a panel to fail?

During a thunderstorm this spring, the solar farm I'm talking about above suffered significant damage from hailstones, losing around 10% of the panels (the farm had only opened in summer 22). That's one anecdotal example.

> I think counting a nuclear plant specifically without also counting the uranium mine required to support it is not completely honest.

You're vastly underestimating the energy density of Uranium: France, which produces close to 80% of its energy with nuclear imports less than 10 000T of Uranium each year. That's one kilo for 44 MWh of nuclear energy. (And most of it, the U238 part, isn't actually being used, but instead stored until the advent of breeder reactors). A solar panel weights a few dozens of kilograms per MWh/year (let say 20kg/Mwh/year, conservatively, even though from a quick search it's likely more) so you'd need to have your solar panel for 44x20 = 880 years for the mass of the solar panel to be of the same order of magnitude as the same mass of Uranium.

> And also the storage facility for the waste should be counted as well.

As mentioned earlier, there will be hundreds of time more waste from Solar panels than from nuclear. Solar panel's waste are actually toxic wastes[1], full of heavy metals, BTW. (And unlike nuclear radioactive wastes, heavy metals have an infinite half-life: they don't live from hundred of years, they remain toxic forever)

> Uranium is typically huge open pit mines.

Only 12% of Uranium mining actually happen in open pits mines[2]. Also, do you think Silicon grows in trees?

France alone extracts 12 times more silicon that what we import of Uranium.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Mining_techniqu...

Do you really want to quote some nuclear anecdotes? XD So there’s this place in Ukraine…

Silicon is in sand… which is also a good place to put solar panels.

Are you really weighing uranium vs solar panels? What kind of measure is that?

How much does a nuclear plant weigh? What about the water pumped into a plant? What does that weigh? Do you need to weigh the people required to run a plant to get your kg/Mwh measure? XD

> So there’s this place in Ukraine

Oh yeah let's talk about the soviet union again and do if it was a nuclear problem … By that metrics hydro power is absolutely terrible as well, given that we've had two major dam incidents (including one in… Ukraine) this years causing much more death than Tchornobyl ever did… Also should you count all nuclear incidents that resulted in reactor being damaged, you'd still be far lower than 10% of installed power being destroyed.

> Silicon is in sand…

Because open pit sand mining causes no issue somehow? Uranium is also in sand (at least in Kazakhstan, #1 producer) so what?

> Are you really weighing uranium vs solar panels? What kind of measure is that?

Measuring environmental impact of both energy production mean. Which is the opposite of the “solar good for the planet/ nuclear bad” irrational argument that you're having.

> How much does a nuclear plant weigh?

Much less than the equivalent solar farm, that's been my point from the beginning.

> What about the water pumped into a plant?

That water goes in and out, is that all you have as an argument left? Do you count the air going through wind turbines as a waste when evaluating wind power as well or the double standard only applies to nuclear for some reason?

> Do you need to weigh the people required to run a plant to get your kg/Mwh measure?

Ohoh, very clever >_<

You raised all the points you now deride. I agree they are dumb. Glad we got there.

You got stuck to the point of not being able to make actual points so you eventually fell back to mocking my arguments, bringing this fruitless discussion to its conclusion. Glad we got there too.

No, I didn't [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37762107

Really? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37776572

Transmission loss will kill you. It's like 1% per 100 miles depending on the voltage.

That’s for AC thought right? Ultra high voltage direct current is pretty efficient for transmission I thought

Per 1000km (670 miles) AC's efficiency tops out at 6.7% losses, and DC 3.5%.

The earth's circumference is 40,000 km, or 24,000 miles. Even if hurricanes and monsoon seasons weren't a problem, you're still looking at obscene transmission losses to get energy to NYC in the middle of the night- say 55% or worse... and that's not even counting the fact that the lines can't hug the earth's surface, they need to run along the bottom of the ocean floors to avoid damage by storms, boats and currents.

Do we even have enough copper to pull that off?

We’ve used 700m metric tons thus far. There is a further known deposits of 2.1b metric tons still in the ground. So yes, we do.

The emissions we would create to produce that much aluminum, steel and concrete would almost certainly make things far worse far faster than if we were to gradually adopt more renewables and build nuclear, and skip the global grid altogether.

I recall the register running the numbers on the idea several years back, and it wasn't pretty.

Shifted goalposts again.

What if you produced the aluminium and steel with solar energy? Could an arc furnace get hot enough?

Concrete… I don’t know how much we are talking, you mean for foundations? There isn’t a way to make carbon neutral concrete?

HVDC transmission losses are 3.5% per 1000km compared to 6.7% per 1000km for HVAC [1 ] so you are order of magnitude off.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

6.7% per 1000km is .65% per 100km which is almost exactly 1% per 100miles, as GP said.

So it's just off by a factor two if you compare with DC.

> You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together) you get permanent solar without storage.

In theory? Yes. In practice? You have one whole hemisphere powering the other hemisphere, which makes transmission a brutal challenge.

Agree. That’s the tricky bit. But it’s also just straight up solvable engineering challenge. Which we’ve proved as a species we are pretty good at those.

High voltage intercontinental direct current could really make this possible.

> But the Sun is not intermittent. The planet just spins.

FYI clouds exist as well.

> You put enough solar panels on enough geographical locations (and connect them together)

It would cost orders of magnitude more in infra for the connection part that the power generation would (well, except for the solar panels you'd need to put on the Pacific Ocean, which is almost an hemisphere in itself, of course)

If 18% is nearly a hemisphere.

Agree the connection part would be tricky. But there vast majority of things need to be connected up anyway. We seem to have been fine with building gas pipelines that span huge chunks of the world.

> If 18% is nearly a hemisphere.

That's a stupid metric, especially when you consider that the limit between the Pacific and Antarctic Ocean is completely arbitrary.

Just spin it and you'll see what I mean: https://earth3dmap.com/3d-globe/

It doesn't really matter if you have some daylight remaining in the Americas while the sun is rising in Asia, all the solar energy is going to over the Pacific and will be for hours before it fully reaches Asia.

> Agree the connection part would be tricky

It would be “tricky” in the same way space colonization would be “tricky”… Like not entirely theoretically impossible, but still very far from what's practical today.

No, not like that at all. Laying cable is not difficult. Manufacturing 10,000km+ of cable is difficult, but we literally already have factories doing it. No where near space colonisation difficult.

We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources?

I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.

> No, not like that at all. Laying cable is not difficult. Manufacturing 10,000km+ of cable is difficult, but we literally already have factories doing it.

You have no idea of the amount of such cables that would be needed, nor than you have any idea of the difficulty of laying them. It is difficult in the same way sending rockets is difficult: we know how to do it and have been doing it routinely for decades, but that doesn't mean we could scale it to the point your project would need, very much like space colonization.

> We have 7000km gas pipelines. You think electrical cables would be more difficult or more resources?

Yes, because it's “lengths times number of cables” that poses problems. The amount of power you'd need to be able to transfer is beyond imagination! I leave next to a nuclear plant that produces a mere 3.6GW of power, and there are multiple high tension power lines going from there, and only up to a few hundred kilometers away: in your fantasy you'd need A THOUSAND TIME more (over thousands of time more kilometers). If you managed to send a spacecraft that's a thousand time bigger than ISS, that's already space colonization for you already. Turns out scaling this up a thousand time is far from straightforward.

> I think you over estimate how much land you need to power the whole world. There is plenty of space. Even on islands in the Pacific Ocean.

You are underestimating it vastly. The world consumes 30 PWh of electricity a year. At 30% of capacity factor (which is the best you can hope for, realistically only achievable in low-latitude deserts without clouds), and 300MW/km², you'd need 40 000 km²: that's the size of Switzerland worth of solar farm, good luck putting that on pacific Islands…

Orders of magnitude matter, and you definitely lack the sense of scale for these things. What you're talking about is science-fiction material.

So you are comparing the global use of energy for a year against the nighttime load for a single day (ie when the sun is on the pacific )?

It’s a cool idea, and I’m pretty certain something like it is going to happen over time. Given we are seeing 10-100x (in gwh) of renewables be provisioned compared to any other type. So I guess welcome to science fiction!

> So you are comparing the global use of energy for a year against the nighttime load for a single day (ie when the sun is on the pacific )?

Well, this comments explains a lot. Why are you even having this discussion if your engineering literacy is at this level?

> It’s a cool idea, and I’m pretty certain something like it is going to happen over time.

As unlikely as space colonization, but who know what can happen in the next centuries.

> Given we are seeing 10-100x (in gwh) of renewables be provisioned compared to any other type. So I guess welcome to science fiction!

Fortunately nobody is actually interested in trying to make your whole-earth storage-free solar electric grid. So actual engineers may actually get something done ;)

> Well, this comments explains a lot. Why are you even having this discussion if your engineering literacy is at this level?

No it doesn't. I think you're missing what I mean. You need enough panels to generate ~82TWh/day. That roughly equates to 45 million panels of around 2m^2 so you'd roughly need around 136km^2. So they'd fit on Hawaii.

That's for the worlds entire consumption though, so even though you could fit the 45 million panels in one spot, in the middle of the pacific (so your previous point is moot) - you'd spread them around the world.

So despite no one apparently being interested in this crazy "whole-earth storage-free solar" We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally to date. So the numbers are not a crazy engineering challenge. It's actually just a distribution problem.

But sure, stick to attacking me rather than prosecuting the idea. I'm sure that's how all innovation happens right?

> No it doesn't. I think you're missing what I mean. You need enough panels to generate ~82TWh/day. That roughly equates to 45 million panels of around 2m^2 so you'd roughly need around 136km^2. So they'd fit on Hawaii.

Thanks for confirming my previous point about engineering literacy, now at least I'm sure I haven't misjudged you before…

> So despite no one apparently being interested in this crazy "whole-earth storage-free solar" We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally to date. So the numbers are not a crazy engineering challenge. It's actually just a distribution problem.

Well, glad you've abdicated your initial idea[1] altogether. And since that was the idea that I've been criticizing in the whole thread, maybe this wasn't too much of a waste of time on my side then. Yes we're installing solar panels, but yes we're investing in storage as well and no we don't plan on having a world-wide grid to leverage the spinning property of earth to compensate for their intermittent nature.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37719370

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link

This project look like they are installing a 4000km cable between Australia and Singapore. With storage as well. But I thought you said long distance cables don’t work? That’s what you said.

Maybe you should let them know about the cloudy days? You said solar doesn’t work.

They mine uranium in that same part of Australia… why didn’t they choose nuclear? You said nuclear was better choice… because of weight!

Not leveraging spinning, we are installing solar globally because the sun shines everywhere. Can you point to country not installing solar?

You didn’t refute my math on panels, is it wrong? I’m happy to learn. Or you just trolling? (Your error earlier was thinking you needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second or hour? Hard to tell, but it’s off by multiple magnitudes… you don’t need to do that, you have a whole year to produce it)

From your Wikipedia link:

> by a 4,500 km (2,800 mi) 3 GW HVDC transmission line.

3 GW

Also it's still a project, a very ambitious one that is, which is projected for shipping in ten years, and whose budget has already doubled compared to what's initially projected and has already bankrupted once before getting saved, so it's a bit early to use that as a example of how straightforward such thing is… At this point, it is as “real” as fast neutron reactors…

> Maybe you should let them know about the cloudy days? You said solar doesn’t work.

Who said that? Not me. You know discussing energy technology isn't like supporting a sport team… If anything, I'd argue that the environmental impact of solar makes it the worst of the non-fossil energy source. But it works, it just doesn't work the way you think it works, you are off by orders of magnitude at every levels, that's the problem and that's why you end up with science-fiction “ideas” to save the world.

> Not leveraging spinning, we are installing solar globally because the sun shines everywhere.

Then you've abandoned your idiotic idea you started with and we're good, there's no much need to continue this discussion since you retracted the take I've been criticizing from the beginning.

> You didn’t refute my math on panels, is it wrong? I’m happy to learn. Or you just trolling? (Your error earlier was thinking you needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second… but you don’t need to do that, you have a whole year to produce it)

The fact that you think that I “needed to produce the whole years worth of electricity every second…” in my previous calculation is an example where your math is wrong. There's also the fact you don't realize that your “136km²” is off by multiples orders of magnitude (Hawaii is 16 THOUSAND of square kilometers, and even your project in Australia is going to be 150km² wide[1]), or that you don't even realize that your calculation ended up with “45 million panels” and one sentence after that you say with a straight face that “We've already installed 1.75 billion panels globally”, without realizing that somehow it would mean that we'd have 30 times too many solar panels already… In addition to the math, there's also a lack of basic practical sense, like you can't multiply the size of the panel by their number to get the surface of a solar farm, and you cannot fit a solar farm on a mountainous island of the same surface unless you also plan to level the mountain altogether, and so on and so on.

[1]: https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3091182/w...

I’m convinced you don’t understand my words. Is English your second language?

136km is less than 16000km soo all the panels would fit there. That was my point????

The Australian one is spaced out because they have so much land they don’t care. So I still don’t get your point.

I think you are the one off by orders of magnitude, because you are confusing panel capacity with generation. Just to double check that, do you agree a single 400w panel generates conservatively 1800w/day ?

Yes we have installed enough panels to power the whole world many times over. But they aren’t connected… again that is my point.

There are HVDC cables in use all over the place. That tech is very much process out. Do you get what a 3GW line can do? It can deliver 72GWh in a day.

EDIT I’ve realised rather belatedly you are just a troll. Apologise for the overfeed.

> I’m convinced you don’t understand my words. Is English your second language?

It is, but it's not a language problem here… The problem is that all you write is nonsense!

For instance:

> The Australian one is spaced out because they have so much land they don’t care.

Like the I know the real estate in the Australian desert must be cheap, but why spend a HUNDRED TIME too much money on real estate just because it's cheap? You think the project financiers are completely dumb? Why can't you even imagine that your calculation is broken?

> Just to double check that, do you agree a single 400w panel generates conservatively 1800w/day ?

Come on. I don't know if I should laugh or sigh at this point.

> Yes we have installed enough panels to power the whole world many times over. But they aren’t connected… again that is my point.

Is there a sentience life behind this account or is it a markov chain language model? If there is, please take a big breath and think about what you just wrote. Seriously.

> Do you get what a 3GW line can do? It can deliver 72GWh in a day.

7.2⋅10¹⁰Wh/day, compared to the 8⋅10¹³Wh/day that the humanity consumes. That's 3 orders of magnitude off, that's how much you'd need to scale it up. Scale ISS by 3 orders of magnitude and you have a spaceship that's 5 times bigger than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, to keep the space colonization analogy. Scale the (provisional) budget required by this project by 3 orders of magnitude, and you get one year worth of US GDP. That's how non-trivial this is.

You should try and learn to manipulate orders of magnitudes, because that's a skill you're lacking and it really shows. The scales involved in such a discussion are so big you cannot rely on your intuitive sense of scale.

"renewable energy sources accounting for 54% of its energy consumption in 2019. This is higher than the EU average of 18%"

"higher": quite an understatement.

Go, Portugal!

Ironically, still very far from Brazil's 84%. Meanwhile the UE thinks it can lecture South America countries about how to preserve nature.

Wow, I had zero idea Brazil is doing so good in that front. I agree with you completely. EU's biggest economy shuts down nuclear plants in favor of coal, I think that tells us all enough about how much those in charge really care about the environment. Votes from irrational, brainwashed German population seems to be more important.

If that front is preserving nature, then they’re not doing a very good job, no

Refresh my memory, who is doing a better job preserving nature?

If the country doing most of global work to preserve rainforest (and paying for it alone) isn't doing a good job, who is doing?

Brazil is constantly destroying huge swaths of rainforest. Sure, destroying it gets you a lot of money, but NOT destroying it is completely free.

If that’s an example to follow, then we’re collectively fucked.

> If that’s an example to follow, then we’re collectively fucked.

We got collectively fucked when all western countries destroyed their natural landscape to get industrialized. If you expect another country to keep 70% of their land intact to save the world you gotta pay for this. And taking by the importance everybody seems to be giving to it, the price is expensive.

Western countries never had the Amazon rainforest. And when they destroyed their forests they didn’t do so knowing they’re vital for the survival of humankind.

What you’re saying is literally blackmail. But Brazil is also blackmailing themselves, as they happen to be part of the same world as everyone else. “Pay us or else we burn this building with all of us inside” does not sound like a reasonable position, nor one that should be taken as an example.

I mean having great renewables while clearfelling the rainforest is probably still net negative.

Renewable energy generation and aggressive deforestation and ecological destruction are orthogonal

The fact that we still preserve the biggest rain-forest in the world says that we take care of it much better than any other country in the world did with their natural landscape tho.

Isn’t the point that it is not being preserved?

That is the hypocritical take of the ones that didn't preserve any land, destroyed everything to get industrialized (including looting South America, Africa and Asia) and now discovered that doing so comes with a cost. And they now want other countries to pay their debt, again.

Ah so because other countries did it in the past it is therefore just for Brazil to do it?

Most of that is Hydro which only is possible some places in the world and only delivers electricity which is only 20% of a countrys energy needs.

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

The page you link shows 18% of Brazil's energy is from sugar cane (making ethanol, mixed with petrol in cars). This is very high comparex to most of the world.

Doesn't change the facts.

Saying 54% of electricity is not written to inform but to misinform. Most people don't know it's only around 20% of most countries (and here we are talking modern countries) energy that comes from electricity.

The rest is fossil fuel. Globally it's still 76% that comes from fossil fuel and there is no realistic substitute for fossil fuel when it comes to the 4 elements of modern society.

Steel Concrete Fertilizer Plastic

Renewable energy is super easy when you’re a hot, sunny country with a lot of water. High energy demand for AC has a big overlap with the time of the day when the sun is shining.

It’s the opposite when you’re at a high latitude. Now you need the most energy for heating when there is barely any sun. Add some geography where you can’t use any hydro power and wind is all you have left. This is what a large chunk of Europe has to deal with.

There's always nuclear.

That is 54% of Portugal's electricity and 18% of the EU's energy, from different years.

34% (PT) and 22% (EU) are the total renewable energy figures from 2021.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Pulling my comment out of a thread because I think it's important: nearly all of this article is plagiarized from years-old sources. Search any sentence with a number in it and you'll find it somewhere else. A few examples:

> At the end of 2021, Portugal became coal-free after shutting down its 628MW Pego coal-fired power plant...

https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/what-europe-can-learn-fro..., March 2022

> In January 2022, 4,085 GWh of electricity were generated in mainland Portugal...

https://www.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/portugal-a-strong-be..., February 2022

> In the same year, Electricity was the 7th most imported product in Portugal.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/electricity/r...

> On February 4th, 2022, China Three Gorges (Europe), S.A. notified EDP that...

https://www.edp.com/sites/default/files/2022-02/20220204_CTG..., February 2022

> Unfortunately, Portugal has some of the highest prices for electricity in Europe thanks to taxes...

Not sure the original source, but I found this quote verbatim in several other older articles.

Is this a real newspaper? The author of this article is apparently the publisher: https://www.theportugalnews.com/contacts. Is this is a real person, or is this like an auto-generated ad vehicle? Why is it all in English?

Edit: It does seem to be real: https://web.archive.org/web/20100601000000*/theportugalnews...., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portugal_News (those references are real books). Just kind of a bizarre publication.

Maybe it’s a search-enabled LLM with a ‘use exact quotes’ prompt?

>Why is it all in English?

I can't speak to the plagiarism aspect but this part is trivially answered; because it's a site made by an English speaker targeted at English speakers. Of which there are large numbers in Portugal, especially in the Algarve where he is from.

Yes that makes sense, when I wrote that I was just looking at all the "related stories" under this one that have nothing to do with Portugal and wondering if this is some spam operation that had just picked the best the___news.com URL it could get. But no it is real, and looking at the print edition it does focus on Portugal, it just surrounds the news with 80% ads.

How did you discover the plagiarism? Or if you searched sentences manually, what prompted you to check?

Elsewhere in this thread somebody noted that the electricity price in the article didn't seem right, so I went to Eurostat to check myself. I couldn't figure out where they got that 0.2246 number from so I searched for it and found the first plagiarized source.

Even without he plagiarism, the whole thing read like an LLM or offsite content farm (the 2 are becoming indistinguishable)

Fossil-free is a more relevant metric in general. Since Portugal doesn't have any active commercial nuclear power the two metrics would show the same.

Congrats on the improvements!

Congrats on bringing in nuclear in this topic even though it's not relevant at all. A discussion about renewable energy wouldn't be the same without it!

It is striking to see real life examples of countries achieving high rates of renewable energy production with large amounts of pumped storage and without nuclear power.

Right now, when it's a calm night, Portugal imports 18% of electricity from Spain which at this moment produces most energy from oil and nuclear.

You cannot have a proper good faith discussion about renewables without nuclear and fossil fuels.

Yes you can. The good faith question to ask is: is the cost of nuclear higher than renewable +storage?

I don’t know the answer, but renewable +storage is trending down. Nuclear is up. So at some point (which may have already happened) nuclear is just going to be a bad faith argument.

> So at some point (which may have already happened) nuclear is just going to be a bad faith argument.

When nuclear (and other forms of fuel) stop providing base loads when main types of renewables don't work (aka a night with no wind), then this will have happened.

Storage can handle the base load.

If the sun doesn’t rise one day… we have bigger problems.

Still not having heard of clouds, eh?

you know solar still works even through clouds right?

Sure they “work” if you don't expect them to actually produce power…

No, they work anywhere from 80 to 20% efficiency depending on the density of the cloud. But the vast majority of cloud cover is obviously the less dense kind (dense kind falls out of the sky). So you could say 60% efficiency on a typical overcast day.

I mean, why to even bother with facts when you can pull numbers from your b*tt…

In most countries, during most seasons and on most hours of the day you don't even get 80% efficiency on a sunny day! Heck, even in the most sunny deserts, the average daytime efficiency of a solar panel is barely 60%…

But yeah sure in fantasy land solar panels give you a daily average 80% efficiency on a cloudy day…

I think you are only referring to Europe when you say most countries. 80% efficiency is very common. In most countries near equator and south of the equator, and United States.

And I said 60% average on a cloudy day.

> And I said 60% average on a cloudy day.

If you live in fantasyland where the “average on a cloudy day” is in fact the the value that exists in the Mojave desert, then sure…

No, this is the average across all land mass. You get where the majority of land mass is right? (Hint: not Northern Europe)

No it's not.

But maybe you're forgetting that days aren't 12 hours of noon.

Maybe the “average at noon, including sunny and cloudy days, across landmass is 60%”, but that's very much not the same thing as “the average on a cloudy day is 60%”…

Average across all days across all land mass. It’s never a cloudy day across all land mass… so it averages out. I’m confused you aren’t following here

> It’s never a cloudy day across all land mass…

But then again, how does that relate to your previous points:

> you know solar still works even through clouds right?

> So you could say 60% efficiency on a typical overcast day.

We were talking about the impact of clouds on a particular spot, and now you're telling me that you're counting the average across landmass because it's never cloudy everywhere in the world…

I suppose it means you retract your previous statements about solar panels working well even in the presence of clouds?

Trolololol

Well, here we are.

Sure you can. Personally, I view the fossil fuel plants differently than nuclear, I would much prefer that the majority of steady state power generation was nuclear, but that does present quite a target and threat to the rest of the world during a time of war. I don’t have all the answers here, just wanted to start with my thinking.

Getting away from fossil fuels is not a pie in the sky proposal these days. You could look at the success of the lithium storage battery in Australia, previously serviced by fossil fuel peaker plants. There is pumped hydro, and all manner of other non-chemical storage that is possible.

There are certainly a range of options that are 100% renewable with storage, but at this moment don’t compete on price with natural gas or even coal if you only factor the cost of the input to the system. Can we agree on that?

I would say the inexpensive nature of fossil fuels ignores the total cost of the fuel. We’re basically setting up future generations for a complicated terraforming process to recover the atmosphere to something that supports our farming needs and temperature needs to support life, not just our own but the natural world we rely on.

This cost might not factor in to the per/MW cost of coal or NG, but it should. This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous.

> I would say the inexpensive nature of fossil fuels ignores the total cost of the fuel.

So do most calculations of renewables. Most of them don't ask how much it costs to build enough storage for the energy, or how much terraforming needs to be dun for pumped hydro storage, or how much we need to overbuild (and most renewables take up a lot of land) etc.

> This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous.

That I definitely agree with.

Spain produces more from renewable energy (14%) than it does from nuclear energy (12%): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Spain

Except at night. According to [1] at 6:00 this morning Spain was producing its electricity from:

- 42% gas

- 26% nuclear

- 20% wind

- 4.4% hydro

- 0.5% solar

- "negative" from hydro storage (as it was depleted by this time, and was being filled back up)

And Spain only has 7GW of nuclear installed, so it's not difficult to surpass that

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/ES

My hope is that some day that the passion for the political side of nuclear translates into passion for the logistical and project management challenges of nuclear. There's this false belief that if people just wanted nuclear, politically, it would be built in large amounts.

In reality, in advanced economies with high labor costs, nuclear is nearly impossible to build. This is true even in countries like France, that complete large construction projects like public transit and trains without cost disease.

In the US, we are beset with an additional challenge beyond the inherent high costs of high-labor demands for precision construction; we also have difficulty with any sort of project management of large construction projects.

If nuclear has a future in the US, we need to start construction on 100GW of reactors in the next few years to replace reactors at their end of life. But we only have a few tiny projects for SMRs, with designs that are barely complete, if at all.

The US is going to lose most of its nuclear power before it will build it back, if it ever does build back more nuclear. This is a stark contrast to renewables and storage, which are mature technologies that are on the TW scale, a magnitude that the nuclear industry can only dream of.

I doubt this day will come.

The technology has been replaced and energy generation on this planet has turned toward renewable energies.

Time to move on and care about the radioactive remains of this technology from the past.

> technology has been replaced and energy generation on this planet has turned toward renewable energies

This is totally untrue. Presently, in advanced economies, it’s cheaper to build solar and wind. If those economics change, what’s deployed will as well. (Or a country risks fuckup à la Deutschland.)

"Totally untrue"?

Just face the facts...https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr... it's over.

> If those economics change

How are those economics supposed to change? Prices for renewables keep on falling, while those for nuclear never stopped rising.

You should come up with some sources for those claims far away from reality...

And what "fuckup" is this supposed to be? Germany build 7.9 Megawatt only solar in 7 months this year, and it's just the beginning after 16 years of stagnation. Wake up.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/technologie/stromproduk...

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-deutschland-ga...

> How are those economics supposed to change?

With better technology. Again, we agree that right now we should be deploying solar and wind. But because it’s cheapest. The anti-nukes didn’t win, economics did. (Again, case in point Germany versus America.)

What is this "better technology"? It's nowhere to be seen, SMRs are even more expensive. So what are you talking about?

Sure, did anti-nukes win.

They forced the exit in Germany and the growth of renewables. Huge German subsidies pushed development of renewables for years and made it cheaper for the rest of the world AS A RESULT. You can lie to yourself about it, but it won't change the facts.

True environmentalists won.

Fake ones like Shellenberger lost.

I agree with your assessment, but there is still some chance that there's a big innovation in nuclear that we can't foresee.

Sure, it's been around nearly three quarters of a century, but there is a chance. People in the industry have not been focused on innovation, so there has not been much exploration of the space, and honestly even going back to the pre-TMI era it wasn't about driving down costs as much as massive projects.

Battery tech was stagnant for a long long time before the current decades-long innovation push in lithium ion. I think we could see something like this for nuclear, especially if they get away from thermal conversion to electricity and figure out direct conversion of some sort (this is pure sci-fi right now!)

I'm not hopeful, and it won't happen soon, but the space has not been fully explored, IMHO, so there's a non-zero chance oh something disruptive. Perhaps not with the current on the table proposals at the SMR startups, but outside of that there is room for a shakeup. Let's check again in the 2060s or 2080s we'll have something fantastic.

> People in the industry have not been focused on innovatio

What are you talking about? Countries all over the world threw BILLIONS at exactly this, and what came out in the end is...hilarious. If we'd have thrown the same kind of money on battery tech, we'd already have surpassed lithium-ion.

This is what it's about: you can spend every dollar only once, and there is no sane reason to throw a single dollar at nuclear when there is renewable energy, batteries, recycling, etc..

Innovation is not measured by dollars spent, it's measure by improvements. Of which there is pretty much zero for nuclear in decades.

Not sure what you are shocked about, or what point you are trying to make.

I try to clear up your false statements with sources and facts.

Meanwhile, you keep on stacking "opinions" without any facts even close to it.

Yes is it my opinion that spending billions on construction of unfinished designs is not not innovative, but it it merely your opinion that this represents innovation...

Unless there was some other "fact" in there?

These are extremely aggressive comments without much to back them up! I am open to hearing more if you do have some facts though.

In your first comment, you've stated that my statement that nuclear has been replaced by renewables is "false". I gave you sources which supported my statement and showed that you are wrong in accusing me of falsehood.

You also claimed Germany had produced some fuckup. I showed you with sources that there is no fuckup.

You've dropped those two things for your personal and unfunded claim that "with better technology", nuclear will come out of something you said in a sentence before doesn't happen. Adding to that, "anti-nuke" failed.

I've explained to you that they actually didn't fail but won and asked for sources on those technology developments you see on the horizon, and therefore you used as an argument.

You still did not come up with any substance or source, but still claiming that there was no focus on innovation. I told you that there have been billions put into that and what came out of it wasn't showing what you claimed it should show (innovation which is cheaper/better).

For which your answer was that this innovation wasn't actual innovation because it was crap.

Leaving us and especially you with nothing to show in this discussion because you've played yourself.

So now, your last straw is an attack on me and the fact that I've shown that your argument is not valid and labeling it as "extremely aggressive".

Seriously? Is this what you learn these days about the way discussions are supposed to work?

I don't know who you think you are replying to, but I said none of those things. Such sloppiness combined with such aggressiveness does not make for good discussion.

I really don’t think there’s much passion for nuclear power generally, I never see it discussed in any context other than as a contrast to renewables.

I’ll believe it has a future when I see people randomly bringing it up in oil price discussions or things like that.

I do see that occasionally, but it is not a large percentage of people.

One of the most influential people in energy, Jigar Shah, is far more rosy on the possibility of the nuclear industry getting its act together than I am. If he delivers loans to the right people that can actually execute, and he definitely gets a good view into the sort of people trying to build than I do, then he may very well be right.

If you're curious about this data for the United States, I built a site that lets you track renewable production, as well as many other interesting datasets about the US electrical grid.

https://www.gridstatus.io/map

I'm surprised how much is nuclear in the states I have lived in. The fact that California is almost 50% solar is pretty crazy too.

All I see is a “Tap the Region” button and nothing else on the iPhone 13 Pro

hmm, ill have to look into that. in that case, check out this listing of all the areas we support: https://www.gridstatus.io/eia.

also, if anyone else has this problem please comment / email me max@gridstatus.io

It's a nice looking map, I'm personally a big fan of https://app.electricitymaps.com/

I'm sure you could use the same datapoint to cover more zones (cf their Github repo https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...)

I am too!

We focus on the United States, so we can have the deepest coverage for each of the regions. In some cases that means were the same as Electricity Maps. In other case, you'll see our data is more real time without relying on estimations.

We have a lot more than generation mix data. For the wholesale energy markets, we also have all the pricing data[1]!

In case you're curious we also have an open source library: https://github.com/kmax12/gridstatus

We'd love to expand, but every new region is hard to support in the same depth as what we currently have in the US

[1] https://www.gridstatus.io/datasets?filter=lmp

That's awesome! Why is the PNW power-source display an x-y plot and the Midwest and Texas and New England (the others I looked at) are pies? I see in the PNW plot there's a ~constant output from nuclear and the other sources are more variable (x-t plot makes it easier to see this) but nuclear is a source of energy in the other locations with pie charts, as well.

It depends on the source of the data. For the regions with the pie charts, those are Independent System Operators (ISOs) or Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs). They publish much more data and is more real time than the other regions, so we have different pages to display them.

Nuclear is strictly a base load power source. It takes on the scale of "many hours" to days to change generation level at a nuke, and there's intense economic pressure to operate them at full capacity as much as possible because its opex is largely fixed and enormous (as is the capex from construction.)

This is why all the people shrieking about how evil the public was/is for 'irrationally' hating nuclear and how we need more nuclear (here, on twitter, and reddit) are idiots, especially when they talk about it providing "grid stability" because of those naughty, highly variable renewables.

Grid stability comes from fast-reacting power sources like natural gas, hydro, and energy storage systems like pumped hydro and batteries. The most famous example of this is in the UK, where pumped hydro is fast enough to react to "The Great British Kettle Surge" aka TV pickup:

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

Video covering Electric Mountain (9GWHr capacity) by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI

Any time someone opens their mouth and says nuclear is the solution to "days with no sun or wind", you can immediately discount everything else that comes out of their mouth as being from a person who doesn't understand the first thing about electrical grids/generation.

Even if it were feasible to change power levels fast enough to react to wind and solar generation changing from a physics standpoint, no power authority in the world would keep nuclear generation (the most expensive form of power generation already) capacity in reserve for a cloudy day.

What we need are more renewable sources, more energy storage, and a wide-scale HVDC distribution network to be able to cost-effectively move power from areas where there is strong generation by renewables to areas that need it, or at least into storage.

The variation in price is crazy, $80/MWH for Atlantic vs. $20-$30 for many other regions?

Indeed! One of the reason I made this site is to make it easier to track all the prices in one spot

Wow, the Arizona area is disappointing to say the least. All that sun and almost no solar power.

Most of Arizona and any other states energy need is not electricity. Only around 20% of it is.

Much respect for the amount of ETL you must have written to accomplish this. I have a local dashboard that duplicates some, not all, of your features for CAISO only and that was more than enough work.

ETA: Can I ask why you don't have records for CAISO storage charge level?

This is really neat! Thanks for sharing.

I notice that the map uses OpenStreetMap (via Mapbox, it looks like) for its base data, but doesn't display the required attribution[0]. For fixing this, their Attribution Guidelines[1] are pretty informative. Mapbox also has some helpful docs[2], and may have some additional requirements. Thanks!

Edit: After a bit of digging, I'm a bit unimpressed: it looks like the OSM and Mapbox attributions are deliberately hidden? From your compiled index.css:

    .mapboxgl-ctrl-logo,
    .mapboxgl-ctrl-attrib-inner {
      display: none !important;
    }

[0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

[1]: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...

[2]: https://docs.mapbox.com/help/getting-started/attribution/

fixed!

Looks great! Thanks for doing that so quickly :)

Fission stans are just going to stand on the sidelines seething while solar, wind, and storage accelerate. The world is deploying an amount of PV every year equal to the total cumulative output of all the fission stations built in history.

Maybe in a year or two renewables will reach the deployment rate of fission 40 years ago. I'm glad the green energy transition has finally lurched back into motion, but no, I do not think it was worth the 200 gigatons of CO2 we dumped into the atmosphere in the meantime. I'm speaking of the US alone; multiply it up for a global perspective.

Renewable deployment in 2023 is already 25x higher than the peak year of fission deployment.

The world has developed a lot in 40 years, that's a pretty silly comparison. But let's play this game -- the cost of delay is now more like 800 gigatons of CO2.

It wasn't worth it, but I'm glad the bleeding has finally begun to slow.

Until it's a calm night and your solar panels and wind turbines produce zero electricity.

I'm on of those. For those not familiar with this slang term, "stan" comes from a song of Eminem, an American rapper, and means fanatic.

I'm not seething at all. I'm cheering. Solar and wind are on an exponential trajectory in the US too. I'm am really happy for that.

It does not mean we should not pursue fission. But I'm a pro-technology guy. I can't easily understand how 80 years ago we got to the point of harnessing a source of energy ten million times more dense than fossil fuels, and then we collectively decide to just give it up. And I don't buy any of the arguments of the anti-technology crowd: it's too expensive, it's too dangerous, it's too easy to make bombs. Nuclear technology is indeed expensive, but all sorts of technologies can undergo a Moore's law period. Just look at the rocket technology in the era of Musk. Dangerous, yes, nuclear is not without dangers, but we've learned most of the problem cases and how to handle them. As for the danger of nuclear bombs, yes, that is there, but it's containable, and it has been contained for many decades.

"but we've learned most of the problem cases and how to handle them."

We also learned time and time again how corrupted human society and individuals can be. So while in theory we could do nuclear safe, we often don't. Neither mining, nor maintaining, nor disposing of the waste. We got lucky quite a few times, but having more of it, will likely just result in more incidents.

So while I agree that we should not give it up, I also think we should just harness more of suns fusion power of which we got plenty and invest more in storage technology (you can make batteries out of iron and saltwater for example, no rare elements needed for grid storage). Then there is also the huge energy source beneath our feet, which is fueled by fission btw. if you are more into that. Lots of opportunities ..

>It does not mean we should not pursue fission. But I'm a pro-technology guy. I can't easily understand how 80 years ago we got to the point of harnessing a source of energy ten million times more dense than fossil fuels, and then we collectively decide to just give it up. And I don't buy any of the arguments of the anti-technology crowd: it's too expensive, it's too dangerous,

I sympathise with your sentiment here, but consider this - we have invented technology that can create electricity when placed in sunlight. Once the device is created, the electricity is free.

We can generate hydrogen from this free electricity to make the power predictable, and when consumed hydrogen releases not only energy but also clean water. The devices are already so cheap that people are putting them on their personal homes, to the tune of several TWh of additional yearly capacity. More than several nuclear reactors annually in fact.

Is it really likely that anything can happen to Nuclear that makes it able to compete with that?

Also, consider that the main risk comes from humans, who are immune to the Moores Law period in any case.

> Is it really likely that anything can happen to Nuclear that makes it able to compete with that?

Yes. Nuclear technology can go down in cost by a factor of 100. If that happens, it can definitely compete with solar. In fact, it can compete even if it goes down in cost by a factor of 10.

You'll say that this is fantasy. And at this point it is, but there are no reasons to dismiss this as impossible. There are lots of new nuclear reactor designs. The current designs (pressurized water reactors) all need very thick pressure vessels, hundreds of tons each. There are very few forges in the world that can manufacture them (maybe 10, certainly less than 20), and they manufacture one now and then, so the prices are astronomical.

The new designs either have much smaller pressure vessels (the SMRs), that can be manufactured for a cost exponentially lower, or have no pressure vessels (like liquid metal reactors or molten salt reactors). I would estimate there are about 20 essentially different designs out there. Of course there are lots of unknowns, but I think a few of them have the chance to become 100 times cheaper than the current generation of nuclear technology.

The reason to dismiss this as impossible is that it hasn't happened in 70 years, and it's not like we haven't tried a lot of approaches. At one point we need to accept something doesn't work.

You could use the same argument for rockets before SpaceX came and cut their price by a factor of 100.

Sure, no problem. There's then also no argument against the price of renewables or storage going down by a factor of a quadrillion. It seems to me the question for some is less "how do we get some progress" and more "how do we get some progress using my favorite technology".

The question was also "is there really anything happening in nuclear?" The answer is no. SMRs are not a new thing, and the idea was given up on already [1]. That industry is simply running in circles waiting for people to collectively forget its past failures so it can try the same failed ideas all over again.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...

> It seems to me the question for some is less "how do we get some progress" and more "how do we get some progress using my favorite technology".

As I said, I am very happy about the exponential growth in solar and wind.

But nuclear is not just any technology. It is a miracle of nature and a crowning achievement of science and technology. The energy released when one nucleus splits is millions of times the energy released when electrons rearrange their orbitals during chemical reactions. The efficiency of fission is just 1000 times lower than the efficiency of the E=mc^2, which is to say of the ultimate reaction, the matter-antimatter reaction. Fusion is 6 times more energy dense than fission, but fission we have and fusion we don't.

But the main cost of nuclear isn't the construction of the reactors. It's the management of the fuel, waste and the operation of the plants, the salaries of the people involved in keeping everything safe at all times, the repairs and maintenance, the special transport vehicles, the refineries of the fuel and so on. These costs are partially hidden in general taxes since they are often handled by the government, but they still exist.

The Rancho seco nuclear plant is costing some 10 million per year, 30 years after it closed. The cost of "having made it" is likely to eclipse the cost of actually making it.

Even if your prediction should occur, it won't reduce the total cost of nuclear power by a lot, and it will have to compete with plants that (for example) provide free electricity from the sun, since their costs are basically all paid upfront.

Germany also clocked in at 52% for this year [1] until now.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-covers-52-perce...

"According to Eurostat, we pay €0.2246 per kWh here which is 22% higher than in the UK." Unmitigated drivel. Current UK prices are, i pay, euros €0.39 per kWh, charge before Government subsidy is euros €0.59 per kWh.

Those numbers look like they could be about right for 2020/2021, but using them in a 2023 article is meaningless given the effects of the war in Ukraine on gas and electricity prices. I don't know how much Portugal's grid depends on gas, but I could believe that it's less affected by gas prices than the UK grid is.

Right now it's a calm night, so ~25% comes from hydro storage[0], 22% from hydro, 18% imported from Spain [1], and 16% from gas.

I find these "x % is now renewable" useless without looking at actual numbers, and how they work not just in the best of cases.

[0] Didn't know Portugal had this much hydro storage

[1] Spain right now is 37% gas, 23% nuclear, 17% solar, 12% wind

Edit: data from https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

I doubt Spain is 17% solar... As they are essentially same sun availability.

You think it's too much or too little? Sun availability didn't matter much in Spain until recently, as the country finally got rid of the "sun tax" that limited the development of wide-spread solar panel usage. Essentially, even if you used solar panels, you'd be taxed on every kWh produced, even from your own solar panels. Luckily, they got rid of it, so probably the development will ramp up a bit from now on.

> You think it's too much or too little?

When it's night in Portugal, it's night in Spain :-)

Spain has quite a few solar plants that generate power even at night.

It seems surprisingly high for night time production. As I think original comment was about momentary production.

I was surprised, too. Data is from https://app.electricitymaps.com/map, so could be quite inaccurate

I somewhat suspect the data. Could be that there is some inaccuracies and it is also from earlier point of time

Better data for Spain in 2022:

    Solar: 11.5%
    Wind: 22.7%
    Hydro: 6.6%

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...

It's not better data because it shows data in aggregate.

The time of the data is written there (right under where it says Spain)

As of this moment it says 19:00 and 3% of electricity, which was before sunset, it was probably an hour or more earlier, and sun has been especially strong today.

Spain has some heat-the-molten-salt power plants which continue to produce electricity after sunset.

Probably the difference in solar installations.

Right now the latest data is from 20:00 and it says 3.3% so when the comment above was made, the sun was shining a bit more.

(But I think the sun goes down a bit earlier, but there are also the canarian islands as part of spain, way further south and west of the mainland)

Portugal is on the Atlantic coast so has more wind and rain. A lot of inland Spain is pretty arid, making it ideal for solar.

There are a couple of points in here to discuss:

- Geographical advantage for renewable enegry - Regulation on the energy consumption.

There are a lot of countries which are importing energy already from external sources. Even some of the countries does the same thing, they cannot reach into this potential.

However, we have to accept the truth that this is a big achievement for Portugal no matter what. At least, some of the folks think about climate change.

>Whichever way you look at it, renewables are saving our planet, not our pockets.

In the UK, last year renewables were actually lowering the bills.

Further the article blames the expense on taxes

So this isn't backed by facts or the article itself.

Also the 18% European average sounds low, is that total energy, rather than total electricity?

As for the UK, it's looking like renewables could outproduce fossil fuels for electricity this year.

> Unfortunately, Portugal has some of the highest prices for electricity in Europe thanks to taxes. According to Eurostat, we pay €0.2246 per kWh here which is 22% higher than in the UK.

It's more like £0.30=€0.35, which is going down to £0.27=€0.31, which is a lot higher than €0.22. Probably using data from before Feb 2022.

That sentence appears to be copied from this 2019 article: https://www.portugalhomes.com/news/article/172/what-taxes-co....

Eurostat's latest data, for second half of 2022, actually says €0.46 for household consumers, and taxes are only about 20% of that.

Edit: Significant portions of this article are plagiarized. I picked another random sentence, "Portugal became coal-free after shutting down its 628MW Pego coal-fired power plant", and it's stolen from here: https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/what-europe-can-learn-fro.... This is literally the first one I tried.

Is there some kind of practical limit to renewable electricity production due to how difficult it is to store and its intermittent nature. My intuition tells me it can never quite be 100%. How wrong am I?

Well, in principle one could store solar energy in the form of a flammable fuel which can be used to rapidly spin up a turbine, by constructing ethanol/methane from carbon dioxide and water. We can't do it at scale yet, but this is the realm of e.g. Prometheus Fuels.

Batteries exist (and are getting better). Most of the intermittent nature of renewables is just solving for the timing issue (e.g. evening when demand is high and the sun goes down), so short term storage is what's most in demand.

Longer term storage is harder (e.g. it's cloudy for days on end), but even then there are renewable storage options like pumped hydro and generation of natural gas from electricity.

It is true the amount of storage needed goes up the higher the percentage of intermittent generation on the grid. There are various models that say it can be done but it requires overbuilding generation and substantial investment in transmission in addition to storage.

It's for sure a hard problem.

Hydro never stops. Wind and solar are cyclical, but even aside from electrical batteries, there are multiple companies designing energy storage systems (cf EnergyVault which has been making rounds in the news https://www.energyvault.com/).

> Hydro never stops

It does. In droughts

Indeed.

I wonder what happens in summer in case of drought.

This links partially answers my question.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT

Apparently 33% was pumped storage (wow). And it’s a windless night so no other renewables. 17% gas that produces the CO2.

That is quite impressive. Won’t compete with the crazy hydro of Norway/Sweden or the nuclear of France. But it’s quite a decent chunk of carbon free power.

If you are willing to build a whole lot of infrastructure for storage and accept the efficiency loss due to the conversion then you can probably get pretty close to 100%. See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

Not wrong.

Some renewables are consistent particularly geothermal, hydro, and biomass

Geothermal is not available everywhere with current tech

Hydro ditto, (must have mountains) it is hugely destructive, and is intermittent on an actual scale (dry years)

Biomass is expensive and hungry for land.

So it is not simple.

It is doable, and essential if we are to continue lifestyles anything vaguely like what we have, but it requires careful planning and cooperation

The current "Big Capital" model is not well suited. More local, small scale, and distributed generation and storage are where we need to head, IMO

Norway is at 98% renewable, at least.

Hydro. The whole world could run off hydro if there were enough dammable rivers and lakes, because you can scale output up or down.

When people ask about the viability of renewables they typically refer to intermittent sources.

In the last 30 years there has never been a time where there wasn't wind or sun somewhere in Europe.

So in theory it's possible to hit 100% even without storage. But obviously not in practice since it might mean you need enough generation and distribution to supply the entire continent from a tiny corner of it. (And the next night it might be a different corner).

Once you add storage 100% becomes more practical, but "practical" is more a question of "how much are you willing to spend". Using the existing hydro much more heavily for storage means that 100% is practical IMO.

There have been long periods of time with low winds / overcast weather though, severely limiting the effectiveness of solar and wind power generation over weeks.

https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

Renewable electricity production can be anything. Just because you produce something does not mean the same country has to consume it, nor that it is connected to the general grid. Renewable production can be 100% if that is what a given country is set to produce and sell on the international market.

Renewable electricity consumption is a bit more tricky. People generally consume energy independently from when energy is optimally produced, so intermittent nature of renewable is a problem. There are countries which are very close to 100% renewable production but which import more than 50% of the energy that they actually consume, while at the same time being energy export positive because of massive exports during periods of optimal weather conditions.

There is research done on this, example [1]. My feeling from listening what is said in the industry is that 80-90% will be not that hard, and that 100% will be.

[1] https://twitter.com/ChristianOnRE/status/1705676813366612109

Good on Portugal for the effort but nothing out of the ordinary, in terms of CO2 this is average performance:

(select Portugal, emissions over the last 12 months)

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Gas still accounts for a lot of the production

Actually, portugal is doing very well, but it ~35% of total energy consumption

https://www.eea.europa.eu/ims/share-of-energy-consumption-fr...

I think they're both true, not all energy is electricity (e.g., cars, industrial processes, heating, etc.,)

Anyone knows what's the cheapest energy storage technology? Basically, if a typical European country wants to add energy storage sufficient to supply the country for 4 hours, what's the cheapest technology?

Pumped storage by a country mile - if your countries geography supports it.

Pumped storage is definitely the most efficient method of energy storage, but is it the cheapest when taking infrastructure costs and land use into account?

I remember reading about plans to use renewables to pump Colorado River water back up into Lake Mead to increase the amount of power the dam can generate during low generation periods for solar and wind.

That seems like an efficient approach, because the dam and reservoir are already there.

Up front infra costs are high but the hoover dam is nearly a hundred years old and will last another several hundred. The amortization period is very long, whereas chemical batteries will need frequent replacing.

> January 2022, 4085 GWh of electricity were generated, where 63.64% came from renewable:

- 31.27% wind

- 17.78% hydro

- 6.99% bioenergy

- 3.80% solar

- 3.80% pumping

Average, overall, and other measures are unimportant when talking about electrical power. You need to look at worst case scenarios to understand how much capacity is actually required. So, over the course of a year, on what day did renewables supply the least amount? That would provide an initial indication, but would hardly suffice for long term planning.

For example, if utility A supplies only 20% of required power from renewable sources on a given day over the last year, you can really only say renewables can be expected to supply 20% on any given day. But you'd need to do modelling or track over a larger number of years to get to the (likely lower) actual number.

In the south there are many people living on land which is off grid because legally they aren't allowed to really live on that land.

So, counting them maybe the rate goes up a little.

Which basically means that 10% of their energy comes from renewable energy and that includes burning wood bricks, trash and a bunch of other CO2 emitting sources.

Electricity is only around 20% of a countrys energy need. In developing countries even less.

So it sounds great but it's completely misleadning of course.

Globally wind and solar combined might be around 2%

This is the mouse and the elephant all over.

You can easily find real numbers rather than invent some.

In Portugal electricity was 25% of total energy in 2021, renewable energy covered 30.6% of gross final energy demand in 2019.

https://www.iea.org/reports/portugal-2021

Sorry but those numbers aren't really contradicting mine.

Renewable energy in Portugal is mostly bioenergy and waste (Page 20)

So yes lets look at the actual numbers.

https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/a58d6151-f75f-4cd7-...

A monumental achievement, especially when the EU average is only 18%.

Portugal Caralho

That's impressive !

Does anybody can point me toward good sources about costs of maintaining those solar / wind / hydro installations ? I'm thinking about the solar panels, which I always thought have a limited lifetime (apparently it's getting much better). Is this viable in the long term ?

For solar panels in particular, the answer is more or less shrug; for current common types estimates range from 25 to 50 years before efficiency drops off significantly, but obviously the technology was rather different 25 years ago so there’s no example of a modern-type solar panel that has worked for 25 years. Domestic panels often have a 25 year warranty.

Of course, _useful_ lifetime may be a different thing. If you have limited space for panels, and in ten years efficiencies have doubled (current panels that you can actually buy are in the 20% range; current lab record is 47% for exotic types, so this at least seems _plausible_), then it may be more economical to just replace them early.

The renewable energy in Portugal is not generated by private owners. Solar panels are not very common on residential buildings.

Who mentioned residential panels?

> I'm thinking about the solar panels

Does not sound as industrial scale

Lazard's regular comparison of levelized costs of electric generation technologies breaks down capital, operating, fuel, etc costs.

In their latest PDF it's pages 12 and 13

https://www.lazard.com/media/nltb551p/lazards-lcoeplus-april...

Also most solar pv manufacturers warrant their panels at 90% for 25 years. I don't know if you consider that limited but to me that sounds pretty good.

Solar has a limited economic lifetime but it is in terms of centuries, not years. Panels just don't degrade that quickly in practice, and even when they do degrade at higher rates than expected, it's irrelevant to the economics of the projects. You'll be hard-pressed to find a large-scale solar power station that has been retired, even among the oldest of them.

So, this is what I don't get. If this stuff is install once, profit for 25-50 years, how is it possible that electricity in Portugal is so expensive ? Something doesn't add up here.

I don’t know but I do know the answer for California. The answer is: as distributed solar and battery power proliferate, normalizing the price of electricity per kWh makes less and less sense because increasingly what you are paying for is not energy but intangible grid stability. Until finally you’re not drawing any current from the grid and your utility charge is infinity per kWh.

...and gets more and more dependant on neighbouring countries to produce the electricity Portugal consumes each time the intermittent renewable are down.

...and presents a carbon intensity over 4 time higher than France, despite the latter having a share of renewable 3 times lower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com