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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...
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.
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 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).
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...