This is ironic. I recommend you read How Big Things Get Done[1], by Bent Flyvbjerg, the world's foremost expert on megaprojects. The book discusses an analysis of about 10,000 projects of over a billion dollars each.
Which projects were most likely to come in on time and on budget, and deliver the promised returns? PV solar.
Which projects were third most likely to overrun by 100% or more, be 100% late or more, and deliver only a fraction of the promised returns? Nuclear power plants.
Edit: The book's ratings are based on construction phase only, after all the permitting and other planning work has been completed.
(Third worst? What could be worse? Answer: nuclear waste storage sites, and Olympic Games hosting.)
1. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672118/how-big-thin...
[1] https://atomicinsights.com/anti-nuclear-movement-strategy-ci...
In contrast solar PV and wind have now grown to the point where they are overtaking the growth in demand, meaning that fossil plants can soon start to be be retired.
In China and Russia they don't have as much clout, so they use lots of coal, if it's cheaper.
I mean the myth of the supposedly all powerful anti-nuclear lobby is actually hilarious. I mean took fukushima to get Germany (arguably on of the most nuclear sceptical countries) to decide on stopping nuclear (despite the majority of the population being against nuclear power for years prior) and under quite favourable conditions for the nuclear industry.
The planners know exactly how long it takes to build a nuclear plant, and they learn just as quickly as everyone watching from the sidelines. Their assumptions are being thrown by something - almost certainly anti-nuclear campaigners in government or regulatory forces warping incentives. Those are the only things that can consistently diver overruns. Otherwise it is hard for overruns of a nuclear plant to be different from any other project.
ICYMI: https://atomicinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/Antinuclear-st...
Given the absolutely massive popularity of the antinuclear movement, the fringe belief is actually to think the legal intervenors that came out of it had negligible impact.
Germany for example had a 100% complete fast breeder reactor called SNR-300, designed to provide sustainable low carbon 24/7 energy for decades. Before it could turn on for the first time, protestors rioted. They never turned it on. Today it's an amusement park. Now that is impact.
You both imply a conspiracy resulting from this document. You have no proof for any connection to anything relevant going from that.
The SNR-300 story is also completely unrelated. You just stacked it upon the conspiracy theory.
I never said there were no anti-nuclear movement.
There are many and in every country they have their own reasons and are more or less influential. For example: there hasn't been a anti-nuclear movement as influential as it was in Germany. This is why Germany was able to replace nuclear with renewables and push it's development for the whole planet. However, no German politician participated in your conspiracy.
Your pitiful attempt at derailing only say something about yourself.
You are correct that the obvious solution is standard production of modular designs are the solution to that.
This has all be true and obvious for several decades. Yet the realisation of this approach seems to still be far away.
It also doesn't factor in the non-technical hurdles, costs, and delays that are involved here. Environmental impacts, and local-population-resistance are significant, often terminal, factors in plant construction.
Put another way, nobody cares if I have solar panels on my roof. But if I have a tiny modular reactor in the garden the neighbours will (not surprisingly) object.
I say this as a nuclear supporter.
Yes, though your neighbours will probably also object to you putting up one of those big wind turbines in your backyard. Or a coal fired power plant.
Clearly a coal-fired plant would be an issue, to the degree to which they pollute the neighbours. There are diesel generators here attached to factories etc, and nobody really cares.
Objection to nuclear though is more visceral. With diesel I can hear the noise and decide if I don't like it. With coal I might notice the smell. But I don't think either would silently kill me. Nuclear leaks are invisible, and accumulative, so it can be (disproportionately) scary. Certainly those who are opposed to it will use fear to rally other people to their side. Fear is a strong motivating emotion that is easily manipulated.
You'd be surprised. There was a protest in my area against putting up five new wind turbines at an industrial site as the existing buildings are take down. People object that it would ruin their view... The current buildings is part of a massive coal fired power plant which is slowly being decommissioned and there are already three existing turbines.
A nation made a bet on "let's do all nuclear". It basically worked, but there was no magical cost decrease. They have an immense amount of institutional knowledge, huge educational system, massive amounts of resources. Their nukes are big and expensive and not really on time. There is no magic at the end of the tunnel if Greenpeace disappears.
The world isn't Sim City, power plants need water access and have location concerns, and it's not a question of just dropping a bunch of truck-sized plants across the world and magically solving everything.
Having said that, France is a success story of course. It's cool that it's all set up. But even after building it up, running these plants are expensive, there's often load issues meaning they are not fully utilized... "nuclear is free easy energy" is science fiction. That's fine, though! It's normal that we have to do stuff to power society.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm cool with nuclear, but I am not picky about where my watts come from.
[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...
Oof, talk about a nasty abstract. Will need to find a way to look at this paper later.
https://www.tf1info.fr/economie/crise-de-l-energie-nucleaire...
The neglect was because maintenance costs money and as usual people (+governments, corporations ...) want to save money/increase earnings/profit, so upkeep gets neglected.
--- start quote ---
Following the 2011 Fukushima I nuclear accidents, an OpinionWay poll at the end of March found that 57% of the French population were opposed to nuclear energy in France.[119] A TNS-Sofres poll in the days following the accident found 55% in favour of nuclear power.[119] In 2006, BBC/GlobeScan poll found 57% of the French opposed to nuclear energy.[120]
In May 2001, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of the population had a 'good opinion' of nuclear power, however 56% also preferred not to live near a nuclear plant and the same proportion thought that a 'Chernobyl-like accident' could occur in France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Public...
--- end quote ---
It's also one of the major reasons why no new nuclear reactors appeared in France after 2000, and why the government would neglect the existing reactors.
However in practice it has never turned out to be that great. There's little to recommend it: it requires massive amounts of labor, double checking high skill welds, documentation, and nobody in the industry seems the least bit interested in making this an efficiency process.
Nuclear rockets sound cool. Nuclear electricity plants are pretty awful in practice.
Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear, it will greatly enhance reliability as they are super scalable and have the potential to massively increase the efficiency of grid transmission and distribution, the most expensive part of electricity for most. Nuclear has none of those benefits.
Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to. Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it.
Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
> Citation needed! Also: did you know that all existing commercial nuclear plants can ramp up and down in power at about 2-3% (~25 MWe) per minute? They often simply choose not to because the current market structure doesn't incentivize them to.
That's a nice way of saying that nuclear power is much too expensive to not run plants at maximum capacity all the time.
>Add a price to low-carbon load following and all the plants in the US will start doing it.
Citation needed. Considering the price of wind or solar, investors are much mor elikley to over provision using those technologies. Nuscale just had to axe their SMR (supposedly the future of nuclear) project in Idaho, because they couldn't find subscribers and their cost of overrunning massively.
> Batteries have a big disadvantage in that they do not generate any electricity. They also have pretty miserable energy density, which correlates eventually to chemical waste. To store power in batteries for a night in the US, you'd need many thousands of skyscrapers full of batteries.
Except you don't need to store the power to run all of the US for a night, you're just making a strawman.
Nope. It means that the variable costs are low. The fuel costs for a nuclear plant are so low that it’s essentially free.
Which is also the primary reason we throw away 95% of the fuel unused: given the low cost of fuel, recycling just isn’t viable. And again, not because recycling is so expensive, but because new fuel is so cheap.
If you bought a nuclear power plant for $10 billion and your calculation to get an ROI requires that you make $100 per MWh running at 80% load factor, you will not be willing to run your plant only at 50% of the time, because it does not make economic sense. Variable costs are irrelevant in this case.
The variable costs are not low because the fixed costs are too expensive, which was what you wrote before and what you imply here.
The variable costs are low because fuel is incredibly cheap for the amount of power you get out of it.
So you get the ratio correct, but miss on the cause for that ratio.
How often can they repeatedly ramp without getting into trouble with reactor poisoning?
To load follow with nuclear France devised an entire scheme where their monopoly owner would let reactors take turns reducing their output.
Then on top of that the fueling schedule is synced since the later a reactor is in the fuel lifecycle the less it can ramp.
Try that on a free market.
Every day, several times a day. That is literally the requirement for modern reactors (where modern means any reactor in the past 30 years, or more, and most retrofitted reactors from previous years)
Graph and text on page 8: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
It's not that it's one of the safest energy sources in existence that works in all weather conditions?
Didn't France very recently have to shut down or limit a bunch of reactors due to <checks notes> the river water being too warm.
It's one of the safest when compared to coal. How exactly do you accurately calculate the "safety" of something that produces toxic waste with a lifespan in the thousands of years?
Because of environmental limits to protect the river ecosystems, not because of any safety or operational constraints. Many of these limits were set years ago, when the water temperature in rivers was lower, and haven't been increased since - leading to very tight margins. When the grid is stretched, the plant operators usually get a temporary authorization to exceed the environmental limits.
Every year this is big news for some reason, even though it amounts to a roughly 0.3% reduction of yearly electricity generation. It only impacts river cooled plants, and only those that don't also have a cooling tower.
So what you're saying is, nuke plants can operate in any weather if you give zero fucks about how they affect nature..?
(And this goes for hydro especially, and somewhat for solar and wind as well, all have environmental impacts, which must be taken into account and sensible compromises need to be made).
This affects all thermal plants, it has nothing to do with nuclear.
And as the parent pointed out, it only affects plants where you cheap out and skip building the otherwise required cooling towers.
So it’s trivially solvable: build cooling towers.
No, no they didn't. Most reactors that were shut down that summer were shut down for maintenance after a decade or more of neglect.
I mean, if that claim of negligance would be true which I doubt it is of course...those things grow old and France failed to diversify it's power generation in the last decades but hey...new ones are planned...maybe in a decade one will even be finished...
More details on the problems: https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featuredealing-with-cra...
No. It would be an argument against anti-nuclear
> those things grow old and France failed to diversify it's power generation in the last decades
"Decades" implies 20 years or more. Even now France's nuclear provides more energy than anything it has, and France routinely exports energy to Germany who have shattered their nuclear power plants and are now busy burning coal and importing electricity to cover the needs.
Even the countries who "diversified" depend on those with stable electricity production all the time. See example from just today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38274335
> No. It would be an argument against anti-nuclear
How? Proper maintenance would increase the price of electricity produced by nuclear.
> "Decades" implies 20 years or more. Even now France's nuclear provides more energy than anything it has, and France routinely exports energy to Germany who have shattered their nuclear power plants and are now busy burning coal and importing electricity to cover the needs.
Their nuclear reactors are 37 years old on average (they were originally only commissioned to run for 40 years, until an extension in 2012) [1]. They don't have a reactor younger than 21 years old [2]. So I would argue they did not just not diversify, they also neglected to keep up with building nuclear reactors.
Their flagship EPR reactor (Flamanville 3) has been been delayed and delayed. Work started in 2007, in 2020 when it was already significantly delayed it was 5 times over budget and it is still not in operation. The current date is early 2024, but that's almost a running gag now. [3]
They are also planning to build new reactors which are supposed to come online earliest 2035, but based on what happened with Flamanville, that's completely unrealistic.
So in summary decades is very justified.
I encourage everyone to read the wikipedia article on Flamanville. You can't make this up. Construction started in 2007 with estimated costs of 3.3 billion euro and completion date of 2012. The last estimate was in 2020 with costs at 19.1 billion and a commissioning date at the end of 2022. Well that didn't happen yet. And somehow we are supposed to throw more money at this completely incompetent industry?
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/03/the-long... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351839/age-of-nuclear-p... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Yup. Thanks to anti-nuclear lobby.
Please show us some sources.
1. France isn't an isolated country.
2. That "lobby" is decades of various actvists fear-mongering and politicians afraid of unpopular decisions.
And so you have:
--- start quote ---
In May 2001, an Ipsos poll found that nearly 70% of the population had a 'good opinion' of nuclear power, however 56% also preferred not to live near a nuclear plant.
In 2006, BBC/GlobeScan poll found 57% of the French opposed to nuclear energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France?wprov=...
--- end quote ---
Follow the link above for a description of anti-nuclear activism
What is this supposed to mean? Do you want to imply that the German Green party for example, dictates the politics in France??
> 2. That "lobby" is decades of various actvists fear-mongering and politicians afraid of unpopular decisions.
Nuclear is popular in France...your own quote says it.
Not wanting to live near a nuclear plant is hardly an argument against nuclear power itself. You are twisting the facts.
> Follow the link above for a description of anti-nuclear activism
I did. The newest info on this powerful lobby:
> In March 2014, police arrested 57 Greenpeace protesters who used a truck to break through security barriers and enter the Fessenheim nuclear in eastern France.
This is hilarious. THIS is supposed to be that powerful anti-nuclear lobby in France? 57 Greenpeace protesters? Are you joking?
Adding to what cycomanic wrote already:
Germany has replaced what it lost on the nuclear shutdown with renewables years ago. They also reduced coal and even have a law to phase it out completely. The fact that Germany imported nuclear power doesn't say anything about the fact that they HAD to import it. Just like anyone connected to the grid, they buy when it's cheap and sell when it's expensive. Due to Germany's mix they're flexible there while France has to keep on running and selling as much as they can since they're losing money. See EDF.
Funny how today they were burning 20GW of coal because they replaced 20GW of nuclear power with renewables.
> The fact that Germany imported nuclear power doesn't say anything about the fact that they HAD to import it.
Of course they had to. Because they don't have enough energy generation of their own when the day is like today: cloudy and quiet.
This is a lie.
Germany has been reducing coal and will keep on doing so until there is none. It's a law.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/156695/umfrag...
> Of course they had to. Because they don't have enough energy generation of their own when the day is like today: cloudy and quiet.
This is a lie also.
Germany is an energy export nation since 2002 even with the EEX trading you probably never heard of. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/153533/umfrag...
Funny indeed...
They were literally burning 20GW of coal yesterday because the 200% overprovisioned renewables were producing only 15% of their maximum output
As I have said: the transformation is not finished yet. Germany did almost nothing during Merkels time and renewables have still generated more than they lost due to the shutdown of nuclear.
Meaning: Germany would STILL burn coal even if they'd have kept nuclear.
It's not that hard to understand if you know the facts and the facts are that Germany has a law to phase out coal completely while expanding renewables. A law which few (no other?) countries even have. Even France will keep on burning coal when the last plant is closed in Germany.
Though honestly, they just heat some pieces of metal, instead of heating water.
Photovoltaic heats a bunch of hydrogen ions until they glow. (But those ions are in the sun.) Wind power mostly comes from air and water being heated unevenly.
Tidal power is perhaps the coolest here: no heat involved, the energy comes from the motion of the earth and the moon.
The PV/turbines are intermittent and will suffer more in extreme climate conditions (winds forcing shutdown and PV getting caught in dust storms), than nuclear (which are more vulnerable to droughts).
> Batteries are about 1000x more useful on the grid than nuclear
Even if I agree batteries are the answer, how do you intend to charge this batteries?!
Solar is great, wind is great, Hydro is great - what happens when these don't work? What will you use?
The chances of a simultaneous and extensive wind, solar, and hydro outage on a national grid scale is... fairly low.
Solar drops to zero every night.
For hydro, there's already seasonal variation with rain/snow melt. Beyond that, it looks like the majority of hydro in the US is on the west coast, which has been experiencing a drought for years and is projected to get worse. The west coast is big on removing dams for habitat restoration, too.
Wind: Admittedly I have no idea what sort of consistency wind has. But it does seem reasonable to assume the overall reliability of wind power will decrease as installed capacity increases, assuming we started with the most productive geographies first and then move to increasingly marginal areas.
In the same way that storm fronts travel through an area and bring high speed winds perhaps there is the opposite, where relatively sudden, large-scale lulls form?
To minimize the likelihood of blackouts we'd need to either:
1) Build sufficient excess capacity of wind/solar/hydro to overcome variance in output. This may not be feasible, if even possible, considering the points above.
2) Maintain fossil fuel peaker plants.
3) More nuclear for base load.
Having written these thoughts out I now realize your statement presumes we can ever (and always) meet 100% of electricity demand with wind/solar/hydro in the first place.
Yes.
There's enough countries out there that have been using renewables consistently for years (esp. EU countries). I don't understand how this is still a talking point. Daily variance in supply is equalized by trading energy with your neighbors which uses the phenomenon described above: The sun is always shining somewhere.
For Germany in particular it was a mistake to move away from nuclear before coal (imo lobbying is mostly at fault here) but they've been building renewables since the late nineties. It took them the time it takes to build a single nuclear reactor to move to more than 50% renewables and those are much easier (= cheaper) to maintain for the years to come.
And there are great savings by packing batteries behind the inverters along with the DC panels. Inverters can be a shared cost between the panels and batteries. Already, falling panel prices make the inverters an be increasing cost. Second, because panels are so cheap relative to the full install cost, most installations already have undersized inverters compared to maximum solar output. This lets all that "wasted" energy get stored and delivered later when it has much more value and a higher grid price.
Honestly, in the year 2023, batteries are a much more capable and scalable and realistic grid asset than a nuclear reactor.
Solar definitely does drop to zero every night and no, we don't have the connectivity, or the land-mass, to have sunshine somewhere all the time. Russia does...but well, Russia.
There is not "literally always wind". And we've had several days of "Dunkelflaute" in Germany per year now, much higher than anyone predicted.
Renewable advocates like to average over time, so having too much energy at some point in time (which makes the energy worthless and prices go negative, as in "please stop feeding energy into the grid, it's harmful!!") and having too little at other times averages out. As my statistics professor used to joke: if your left leg is standing in liquid nitrogen and your right leg in boiling fat, you are enjoying a nearly perfect mean temperature. Variance matters.
And so the real world does not work the way renewable advocates would like, and no, we don't have nearly the storage to make that work, nor a credible way to create such storage at remotely affordable prices, never mind the horrific environmental impact of that much battery production.
> There's enough countries out there that have been using renewables consistently for years
Nope. One example that is frequently cited is Denmark, but they themselves say that this is only possible because they are a tiny country with lots of neighbours with reliable electricity supply from whom they can purchase when they need it. They also have more interconnect with those neighbouring countries than typical total demand. This is not a model for other countries, particularly not for larger countries.
> The sun is always shining somewhere.
This is simply not true.
> For Germany in particular it was a mistake to move away from nuclear
Absolutely. Probably the biggest political mistake of the after-war period.
If you don't believe that we can meet our needs with wind/solar/hydro/batteries, then you haven't bothered to study the problem at all.
There's soooo much literature out there on how to do this.
And even without 100%, getting to 90% wind/solar is super cheap and deployable today, and by the time we spend the 15+ years deploying that, we will have tons of new tech to deal with the remains few percent.
Even France never got to 100% nuclear carbon free power, why not do the cheap thing to get to better than France levels of low carbon energy?
If you have any literature to recommend, I'm happy to read it.
As I write it right now Denmark is producing 0 solar, and only 12.5% of its wind production. Because its cloudy and there's little wind.
So they have to import almost 40% of electricity from Norway and Sweden where electricity generation is propped up by nuclear
When I wrote this it was even worse in Germany. 30% of total electricity coming from coal. Because:
- The total installed capacity of wind covers Germany's needs. Only 28% of installed capacity is produced
- The total installed capacity of solar exceeds Germany's needs. Only 2.7% of installed capacity is produced
That is, currently Germany needs 65 GW of electricity. Solar + wind have a total installed capacity of 134 GW, double what Germany needs. And together they still barely produce 30% of what Germany requires.
So Germany supplements that by burning coal, biomass and gas, and importing electricity.
The lesson learned is not “green power bad”, it’s “don’t rely on gas from dictators”.
Ah yes. This war is the reason why 134 GW of renewable energy only produce ~20GW, and why Germany burns 20 GW of coal (by pure coincidence that's about as much as the capacity of all decommissioned reactors since 2011)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...
The long term plan was always EU-wide energy projects to account for “its cloudy in Germany” scenarios. That plan isn’t complete.
Again:
- is it war that makes renewables produce 15% of their installed capacity?
- is it war that made Germany shut down 20GW of nuclear power plants?
> That plan isn’t complete.
And it never will be complete. Because when it's cloudy in Germany, those clouds don't stop at Germany's borders. Literally see the comment above about Denmark.
No form of power meets its theoretical "installed capacity". No one runs their nuclear, gas, coal, or oil plants at 100% 24/7/365 either. Yes, some days it's less windy; some days it's more cloudy. The dramatic fall in cost for new solar and wind capacity makes the solution pretty obvious; you build more to account.
> is it war that made Germany shut down 20GW of nuclear power plants?
It's war that makes Germany temporarily wish they hadn't.
> Because when it's cloudy in Germany, those clouds don't stop at Germany's borders.
They're unlikely to cover the entire EU's interconnected grid (and there's talk of generation in Morocco; https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/04/13/...). When the entire EU is covered in clouds, it's especially unlikely that there's no wind at the same time.
Given Germany's plan is 60% renewable generation by 2050, not 100%, they clearly understand the need for some flexible options for the tail ends of things.
And yet unlike renewables nuclear (and coal and gas etc.) are very close to that. And nuclear routinely runs close to its capacity, predictably.
> When the entire EU is covered in clouds, it's especially unlikely that there's no wind at the same time.
So each EU country has to overprovision enough solar and wind to potentially generate power for the rest of the EU countries? Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38276778
Sure. Apples to oranges; they're not the same thing. Theoretical perfect-day max generation isn't how you provision solar/wind, that'd be stupid; the folks building out Germany's renewable efforts aren't stupid.
If you need a certain baseline of a certain renewable, you overprovision (and trade capacity with other areas and generation methods). Given the cost of new solar/wind capacity these days, that still makes perfect economic sense. Any long-term renewables plan is going to include energy storage and peaker plants of some kind to ensure a reliable grid on a national/continental scale.
How much? Is 200% of required generation enough? Is 500%?
Germany - and the rest of their interconnected EU grid - will continue to build out cheap, clean power for the forseeable future.
Indeed. And what's your point?
> By building more renewable sources, we will need less and less fossil capacity.
How many more renewables?
The installed capacity of renewables in Germany is double its needs for power.
The installed capacity of renewables in Denmark is 1.5 times its needs for power.
Do we need 10 times more? 100 times more?
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the peak production makes German electricity cheap enough to make everyone around them use it when it's available. If all the neighbors used this approach too, over the course of a day it would be everybody's turn to provide energy for the neighbors as renewables production will never be zero globally.
I'm not.
What I'm pointing out is that renewables in Germany are significantly overprovisioned. And still produce just 15% of their installed capacity because it's a quiet cloudy day.
> the peak production makes German electricity cheap enough to make everyone around them use it when it's available.
Ah yes. When they are available. That's the point, isn't it?
> If all the neighbors used this approach
Denmark is at 150% of its needs, was importing 40% of its energy from neighbors, and, ironically, from Germany which was burning coal.
So. How much each of the neighbors, and each of those neighbors' neighbors etc. need to overprovision renewables?
And we get it, Germany burn coal for electricity. And we all know that is bad. Point taken and not objected.
To be clear, Norway has no nuclear. 99% of generation there is hydro. Low wind in Denmark likely means they release more water for a bit; system works as intended.
See my addendum comment about Germany for example. They had to burn coal to keep up with the demand while their 200% overprovisioned renewables could only generate 20% of required electricity.
Today the only countries were renewables worked at close to 50% installed capacity were UK (wind) and Greece (solar). Everywhere else at best wind and solar were at 30% production. The entire Europe was busy burning gas, coal, or hoping that neighbours have enough nuclear and hydro installed.
> Norway has no nuclear. 99% of generation there is hydro.
Yes, this was my mistake. I should've said: propped up by stable energy sources: nuclear (Sweden) and hydro (Norway and Sweden)
Which is up from pretty close to 0% just a few decades ago (example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany#/media/F...). We're just getting started; this is a multi-generational megaproject.
You seem to think people are declaring the shift to renewables to be finished. I'm not sure where you obtained that misunderstanding.
Germany already overprovisioned. 200% of electricity requirements. And yet...
When I point out that even overprovisioning doesn't seem to work, people deflect, deny, stop responding, or reply in non-sequiturs.
So. Given that yesterday renewables in only two countries (Greece) managed to reach 50% of their installed capacity (not all renewables, but different types of renewables), how many renewables need to built to make sure that all of EU needs are met?
You keep saying this, and then you keep saying they don't have enough. These both cannot be true, and Germany's continuing to expand their wind/solar efforts indicate they don't believe they've "overprovisioned" yet.
Germany's plan goes out to the 2050s. Your complaint that they haven't provisioned enough yet is not in good faith.
They are not.
With the cheapest, most scalable, safe, and environmentally sustainable methods we have, which are wind and solar.
Batteries have the potential to make transmission and distribution far far cheaper than they are today, because without batteries, the grid has to be able to respond to the maximum demand at any given time, meaning that all parts of the grid are sized for maximum capacity, even if that maximum capacity is used less than 0.1% of the time.
With storage on the grid, we can now delay transmission and distribution upgrades far into the future, which decreases the biggest chunk of most electricity bills: transmission and distribution.
Christopher Clack's grid modeling on this shows a route to by far the cheapest energy models which includes massive amounts of highly distributed solar and beefing up the distribution system to match.
Too many people optimize energy costs without even considering that most expensive part of electricity: the grid.
Renewables already figured it out. They're already cheaper. Nuclear already lost.
Until next-gen nuclear is developed, it's over. They're welcome to keep researching it though. Meanwhile, renewables are also getting better, and much faster. And they're already better than nuclear.
Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.
Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.
But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.
If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...
> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.
> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.
Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.
Shoeboxes are dead.
But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.
> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.
I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.
It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.
"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?
Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.
The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_Ch...
440 people die for every 1000TW of solar, compared to 90 for nuclear: https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...
Solar panel disposal impact: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
Renewables have a place in our energy future. Fanaticism about them does not.
"The number of deaths for every 1000TWh of energy generated by rooftop solar panels is 440. Put simply, this means that for every 1000TWh of energy produced via rooftop solar power, 440 people lose their lives. Other estimates [obfuscated hyperlink to a Forbes page] place this number to be around 150. These deaths are mostly the result of electrocution and other hazards that occur during rooftop solar panel installation (such as falling)."
So they're not happy with the official statistics bureau that is Forbes and chose to stick with their uncited 440. It sounds made up to me. Searching for that exact datum actually yielded the original source [1], and yeah - it's made up. It's from a 2008 article where some guy just started hand-waving hard in a not entirely coherent fashion.
A quick search for something more reasonable turns up this. [2] The data comes from multiple studies and the UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Wind/Nuclear/Solar all have pretty much the same mortality rate: 0.04/0.03/0.02 per unit of electricity, respectively. If I want to be disingenuous I can claim [accurately] that nuclear is 50% deadlier than solar (and obviously many many magnitudes deadlier per installation), but the numbers in terms of energy/watt are low enough to be irrelevant.
[1] - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...
[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
If solar profitability is affected by higher interest rates (I'm not arguing this point) nuclear would be much more effected. Nuclear power is the most capital intensive form of power, they are a huge up front investment with very long ROI (incidentally they almost always require significant price guarantees over for decades and backed by the government to derisk the investment).
China built as much solar as the US has entirely last year alone, it can be done
We have the money to afford it, ergo we have enough of a workforce to do it.
I'm also personally still concerned about transportation accidents resulting in permanently contaminated areas.
[1] https://www.posiva.fi/en/index.html
As for transportation, this has been a big concern for some time but has pretty rock-solid technical solutions [2]. We regularly ship high-level nuclear waste around (e.g. from nuclear submarines to Hanford) and haven't really had any incidents. I'd claim that the issue is basically solved with these robust containers.
There's only a tiny amount of high level nuclear waste.
Yucca mountain has been designated as the long term storage site since 1987 by Congress. Every change of party majority since then has either stopped or restarted work on it.
The bottom line is the nastiest stuff in spent nuclear fuel are the actinides. They're all naturally radioactive and most of the stuff with long (10,000+ year) half lives that requires long-term storage. You need Yucca Mountain mostly for the actinides. If instead you smash them with fast neutrons you can get them to fission, releasing some energy (though sub-critical) and transmuting them into either much more stable isotopes (little radioactive decay) or really unstable ones (nasty but they decay so fast you only need to hold onto them for a few days/months/years).
The short version is besides reprocessing spent fuel we should be putting the nasty stuff through the sausage grinder again to turn it into much less nasty stuff instead of fighting over where to keep the nasty stuff safe for 100,000 years.
And it's true that the sun shines about 100 PW, or 5000x humanity's total energy usage (≈20 TW) on the surface of earth on a nice day.
Even if you assume that the fusion part is cheap, you still have to convert the energy to electricity or at a minimum mechanical work (unless you're using the process heat, which is admittedly a possibility for a fair bit of current demand).
Steam turbines aren't exactly cheap to build.
Yes, there are alternative energy conversion possibilities for some possible fusion fuel cycles, but as I understand it those fuel cycles are much more difficult than D-T fusion and therefore are even further away from being a practical power source.
If you just plant a single wind turbine in some unused space of an otherwise productive piece of land you can obviously derive value from it. That's not what I was talking about though. I was talking about massive wind farm power generation operations. There's better uses for that area. Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area. Better to put them on everyone's roofs.
You seem to have a funny definition of "empty space" when the post you're replying to explicitly called out the uses for land in between wind turbines or leveraging wind turbines in areas where much of the land isn't usable for much else. If your argument requires completely ignoring points made by someone else, you probably don't have very strong of an argument.
Which are almost universally placed in said farm fields, unproductive hillsides, and open ocean. No one's clearing city blocks to place a wind turbine. These "massive wind farm power generation operations" already exist in the middle of Indiana's cornfields. Drive from Chicago to Cincinnati and you'll quickly see how little land they can eat up.
Concrete example: https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B035'55.2%22N+87%C2%...
> Same logic applies to just laying massive amounts of solar panels over a wide area.
Same response; they only make financial sense to place on low-value land. A solar farm will be very happy on shitty land that's not particularly suitable for farming, grazing, or habitation. They can even benefit farmland in some climates; https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/03/made-shade-growing-....
Putting them on peoples roofs is actually a terrible option from a GW/$ equation due to install costs, and lack of operational scale.