I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them."
And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.
I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc...
In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on.
So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years.
EDIT: preface
In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.
Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.
The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be.
Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.
And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.
Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.
V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.
First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive.
Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself.
>> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half.
Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.
[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...
Grid stabilization is priced in, usually using specific contracts with producers and large consumers (read steel, chemical, paper industrial sites and other with huge electricity needs). In that regard, the European markets are working fine and as intended.
Long term, we have to solve the issue of electricity storage. Short term, we are totally fine with renewables producing <60% of our electricity, and on some days even more. Base load became much less of a problem, most hige consumers in the industrial sectors found ways to be much more flexible in their demand, driven in no small degree by being to make extra money on the spot markets (and we talk 10s of millions here).
> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.
That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.
> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.
We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?
> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.
Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.
> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.
Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.
Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.
No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.
Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.
Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.
You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?
The fossil fuel industry has a huge interest in spreading FUD around nuclear, and the few accidents have been maximally exploited to hamper the development of nuclear. All the while, it has been known full well that fossil fuels have devastating impact on air quality and climate. Air pollution from fossil fuels alone is estimated at killing >3 million people per year. A great many disasters involving oil and fossil fuels have occurred, killing many more millions.
Yet, we act like nuclear is the danger, but we're happy to accept burning fossil fuels in the midst of our societies and offer up millions of lives each year to satisfy the lords of the fossil fuel industry.
The major exception to the above rule is China, but even that (massive!) government-sponsored nuclear buildout is only expected to reach <18% of electricity generation by 2060. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-27/china-nuc...
The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".
Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.
Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh.
Facts to found here:
https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f...
Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less.
And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).
That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back.
The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.
We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men.
These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early.
Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.
It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.
This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.
Is solar or wind energy not "free" in the same sense?
Also: are the balancing costs of the network paid by those people selling the "free" renewable energy? As I see they often don't pay for that (not to mention the pollution that causes, which is still not paid by any energy producer)
Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some budgeted, while others (like this one) are not.
There is a lot of PR sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that "contrary to popular opinion" it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to assume the financial risks, obviously.
Presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment and fully funded by donations from the environmentally conscious must be the ones who are misleading us. After all, "young climate activists" say it is being "old fashioned": https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/dear-greenpeace-nuclear...
Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste.
I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.
I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation installation that melted down but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing.
About those filters, a quote from wikipedia:
> They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident"
https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette...
And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.
Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.
You can't fix human nature and that's the root cause of many of these problems. And because of that I'm very much against nuclear power, no matter what the short term advantages may seem to be. Sooner or later every plant needs to be de-commissioned, will have an incident or will end up as a target or a casualty of something or other. Multiply that by the number of power plants that you'd need to make the world reliant on nuclear power and the number of accidents would quickly rise above what is acceptable (if we're not already there).
Nuclear proponents are quick to argue that this was all with old technology and newer designs are safer but people are still the same and even new technology resulting in working installations will eventually see those same installations age.