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 the improvements!
You cannot have a proper good faith discussion about renewables without nuclear and fossil fuels.
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.
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.
If the sun doesn’t rise one day… we have bigger problems.
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…
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…
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%”…
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?
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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..
Not sure what you are shocked about, or what point you are trying to make.
Meanwhile, you keep on stacking "opinions" without any facts even close to it.
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.
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’ll believe it has a future when I see people randomly bringing it up in oil price discussions or things like that.
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.