Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
canarymedia.com
canarymedia.com
- This is 6.8x the emissions of Sweden (25g) running on Nuclear and Hydro
- This is 4.1x the emissions of France (41g) running on Nuclear, Hydro and Gas
- This is 2.8x the emissions of Switzerland (59g) running on Nuclear and Hydro
But still much better than "Green" Germany that reaches 647g CO2/kwh.... with 22GW of power generated from Coal after closing its Nuclear powerplants for reasons.
Interestingly, these facts are not praised in the press as much as "Country X has been able to run renewable for X hours".
Maybe because, like the article point out, Nuclear is not entirely "privatised". Nuclear "just works" and consequently does not act as an interesting roller-coaster for speculators on the energy market and stock market ?
I am aware that reality can be harsh to accept sometimes. And that a world where renewable are our only source of energy is more seducing to our collective imagination.
But unfortunately, it is still the reality. And we have to deal with it, even if it is pretty unpleasant.
There is years of green washing to digest before accepting the truth.
It is nowhere near the desaster people like to make it seem so.
Also, isn't this thread about Portugal?
Primary energy usage in Germany is split 25% is electricity, 25% is traffic and 50% is heating and cooling.
As proven by the article the whole discussion is a huge red herring.
Amdahl's law applies [0], if I reduce CO2 from electricity production by 50%, my overall reduction is only 12.5%
From 2010 to 2020 (crisis) Germany burnt less and less fossil fuels for its electricity, and methane (gas) isn't booming (from 90 to 96), while renewables do: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by...
it induced a decrease in its carbon intensity: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
Comparing it to France implies to take every pertinent parameter into account, for example GDP/capita, climate (heating needs) and the fact that France imports more, and exports less (it lost approximately 50% of its industry since 1980) and therefore "avoids" emitting by using products built in other nations: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
What is the end of this work in progress? 1000% overprovisioning of renewables?
Some have taken to calling it "superpower" (terrible name) because by overbuilding to meet the peak demand, you end up with masses of cheap energy at all non-peak times.
So assuming Germany needs 60GW of power you need 240GW of renewables. Thing is, at 15% generation those renewables barely produce the required electricity. Countries don't like barely when it comes to electricity production.
In most nations "providing it when needed" was equivalent to "producing it when needed" because, then, the sole way to realistically store enough electricity (hydro dams) weren't a solution due to inadequate local features (geography).
It isn't true anymore, as we now can store huge amounts of electricity in batteries (mainly in vehicles), as hydrogen...
"Producing it when needed" was equivalent to "generating electricity in a fully controllable manner, using a managed stock of fuel in order to adjust production (especially: bumping it up whenever consumption rises)" because there was no real way to balance things on a large scale by massively benefiting from a remote electricity-generating equipment because transporting electricity over long distances was expensive and impractical (too much line losses).
This isn't true anymore, thanks to (U)HVDC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects ), enabling continental-sized grids reducing the effects of wind and solar intermittency ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... )
As a tought experiment, if all cars in Germany would be EVs, those could store 2 days of electricity usage.
For flat owners solar panel usage increased a lot, but battery production is way behind, the first usable ones arrived this year, but it will take some more years to get out of BETA. Also energy providers in Germany fight this tooth and nails, e.g. there is no easy way to get to the current usage data of your flat to regulate battery usage from solar storage ("zero feed-in").
If you didn't need to, you know, use those cars.
Storage is a huge unsolved problem.
- that Germany has 135 GW combined installed capacity of wind and solar?
- that wind and solar, combined, were only producing 15% of their installed capacity aka 20GW?
- that Germany needed 61 GW of electricity?
- wind and solar, combined, were producing only 30% of Germany's needs?
- that Germany needed to burn 20 GW of coal to cover this?
- that Germany needed to also burn gas, biomass, and import electricity to cover the remaining 20 GW?
This is a misrepresentation.
Solar for example is only ever planned for to achieve about 30% of its "capacity" (due to the whole sun going down at night thing). And even that varies with seasons.
So if you're claiming the German grid planners were expecting the solar to magically 4x overdeliver, and were suddenly let down then that's nonsense.
Onshore wind has a similar number (again, varies by season).
1. 30% is avaerage number which is a useless because at 10 in the morning when I was writing my text solar was even below that.
2. You're literally confirming what I was saying.
> So if you're claiming the German grid planners were expecting the solar to magically 4x overdeliver
I was claiming no such thing. I said, and it is backed by reality, that at 10 o'clock in the morning on a cloudy quiet day 135GW worth of renewables were producing only 20GW.
Which is a fact. I know it's an unpleasant fact, but reality has the unfortunate tendency to be unpleasant.
> Onshore wind has a similar number (again, varies by season).
So, again. What exactly was I misrepresenting? The fact that renewables are overprovisioned in Germany? Or the fact that they were producing significantly less than both their capacity and the needs of the country? Or the fact that Germany had to burn 20GW worth of coal to keep up with the demand?
Or the fact that even if you provision 400% capacity (4x times the demand), and it still produces 15%, you will still need to burn coal through the night.
So it's 18:44 when I'm writing this. Wind is at 12.69% and solar is at 3% capacity. In total 16% of Germany's eletricity demand. It's lower than when I was writing these numbers in the comment when someone called me a liar. 40% of electricity (26 GW) is coming from coal.
Reality has the unfortunate tendency to be unpleasant.
Funnily, but when I keep asking "how much more do we need to overprovision renewables" to meet the demands, I'm met with silence or wishful thinking.
The actual metric that reflects the total embodied energy, which is a much better proxy for CO2 intensivity, is Levelized Cost of Energy, and nuclear is typically one of the worst.
Not only does the high cost of nuclear reflect all the embedded energy, that high cost is taking money away that could be used for other energy saving and therefore CO2 reducing activities, like better insulation, upgrading equipment, smart grid, etc.
Also, lets look at the posts that are "minused" without explanation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38300495
That's complete bollocks, because all those CO₂ emissions are proportional to the amount of fuel, and the power density of nuclear fuel is such that the total amount is indeed tiny.
Solar panels and wind turbines also require emitting CO₂ for their manufacture, and it turns out that they emit more than nuclear, fuel included.
Additionally, while enrichment requires a lot of energy, to spin turbines or fuel gas separation, it's electrical energy, and in France for instance it's nuclear energy fueling enrichment.
You traced every aspect of the supply chain of both technologies to come to this conclusion?
> in France for instance it's nuclear energy fueling enrichment.
And tell me, where are the uranium mines in france?
And tell me, where are the
rare earth mines...
lithium mines...
solar panel factories...
windmills factories...
in France ?
Ah right, same as uranium mines, abroad, the only difference is one require much less transport and processing to get much more energy
There are known uranium reserves in France, they're not mined currently because the ore is dirt cheap and much more easily mined in Australia/Kazakhstan/Canada etc ...
The amount of ore is very small, and the environmental impact is also much less compared to that of mining rare earth minerals that so-called renewables need so much of.
If you want to discuss the capital expense of nuclear, its not too great either, really most countries can't even afford a nuclear power program, where even the poorest can utilize solar panels.
No different from reporters covering "Man bites dog" rather than "Dog bites man"
Do you perhaps neglect to average over the whole year?
Data provided by the French electrical network manager are also aligned with these estimations [2]
And other sources I am aware of also report similar numbers [3]
Are you sure your number is not also counting residential heating and not only electricity generation ?
[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT
[2] https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/synthese-des-donnees?type...
[3] https://www.nowtricity.com/
Edit: quick edit with exact number for 2022.
The average for Germany over last year is around 486g /kwh [1]. Something similar is also reported by alternative sources [2].
I remember the estimation about Germany bumped massively when the emission about Lignite powerplant and "Green" coal powerplant were re-evaluated.
Your data is from 2021 and probably still ignore this change.
If I remember correctly: the details about how the calculation were done, and why they updated it, were described on the twitter of electricity map if you are interested.
The original article speaks about electricity production, not primary energy, so are my numbers.
It is now 07h00 in Portugal.
- Solar production is reduced to 0% because it is night time. Like it is 30% of the time.
- Wind is not blowing much. Wind production is at 3.14% of its total capacity.
To compensate that, 29% of the production is guarantee by Gas powerplant. The rest from Hydro.
To compensate its high Hydro consumption, Portugal is also doing Hydro storage for around 500 MW by Night using electricity imported from Spain. Spanish Electricity is produced around 25% from Gas, which makes the entire operation looks pretty much like Greenwashing.
The situation is not exceptional. It can in fact happen for weeks when an heavy depression exist in northern Atlantic.
So please, tell me again: How easy will it be to achieve 100% renewable we assume 50% curtailment rate ?
Shall Portugal increase its Wind capacity again by 20x ?
Can Hydro storage powered by Gas powerplants ever be considered "Green" ?
Or Shall we maybe rely on future magical Hydrogen electrolyser that do not exist yet to solve 22 GW of coal power consumption like Germany ?
Replacing 30% of a country grid capacity by an unproven technology never tested at scale. Associated with an hydrogen storage capacity (which we already struggle to do in labs and in the rocket industry) large enough to substain weeks of productions never also not tested at scale is easy ?
All of that should also be cost efficient right ?
And if I follow your initial post, it should be solved in the incoming years right ?
You see, that summarize quite a lot of my problems with the "all renewable evangelism".
There are two options now: Take it from there and figure out options to make that one point in time sustainable all the time (requires real engineering and creativity, and time and money). Or throw our hands up, blame environmentalists for shuting down nuclear plants (which wasn't always environmentalists, nor did we ever have enough nuclear plants to begin with). Guess which approach gives us a way forward?
Sure, but that's not sustainable, as the numbers on the parent comment clearly indicate. From that perspective, what gives us a way forward is acknowledging that headlines such as these are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and trying to design an energy strategy that is compatible with the facts at hand.
Besides being contrarian, which I get because I have the same tendencies, what would be your alternative? Not doing anything is obviously bad, new nuclear power plants take too long to build and are too expensive (all numbers prove that). So? Any other ideas?
> Then they start talking about things that currently cannot account for even 0.001% of our global energy storage needs
Not currently, but who's to say that it won't be possible to scale out manufacturing capacity for the technologies that we'll need? A couple of decades ago, EV production and EV charging networks basically did not exist, so by the same reasoning you'd be saying that it wouldn't be possible to have them.
But look where we are now.
Furthermore, the space of possibly feasible ideas/technologies is gigantic, you're just lacking in imagination. For starters, we haven't yet explored my idea:
1. Turn gym equipment into energy-generating devices.
2. Mandatory gym time by law for every able-bodied man and woman.
Solve the renewable problem and health/obesity problems at the same time. Boom.
If that's not enough:
3. Mandatory gym time also for pets and farm animals.
4. Install wind turbines on airplanes (deployed only when descending).
5. Install boat engines on floating wind turbines and remotely navigate them into hurricanes (imagine all that wind energy we're currently wasting!).
6. And if that's not enough, let's start constructing a Dyson sphere already. We already know how to build space rockets. So what's taking us so long? Less talk, more action.
And that's just the ideas that I, a layman, have come up with. So imagine what the experts could think of.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-battery-insta...
That is from 2022. From what I could gleam from a paywalled Bloomberg article, 2023 continued the growth curve.
Solar plus batteries are just cheaper and faster than nuclear. The pro nuclear argument would have won if we had started the carbon burn shutdown 20 years ago but they snoozed while the mad environmentalists successfully pushed solar and cell phones pushed batteries into economic dominance.
Hydrogen can be stored in underground caverns, nobody stores large quantities liquefied like you would in a lab or a rocket. See for example https://www.lindehydrogen.com/technology/hydrogen-storage
Large parts of our natgas infra can be refitted for hydrogen with modest investment.
In some countries that's a problem because they don't have enough water. Portugal is lucky with that. Water in dams provides seasonal storage of a sort (even if it's never literally pumped up - just used only when necessary, on a high throughput if need be).
It will also mean that at daytime and overnight when wind is strong, hydro plants will completely stop.
...In fact, that seems already done. Portugal has 7.6GW of hydro capacity, up from 5GW in 2008. This allows for peak hydro production to cover 1.37 of average and almost entirety of peak electricity consumption in the country. So the answer is very trivial: "when situations like today happen, just use hydro, and don't use hydro in other situations when either wind or solar are available".
No it doesn't. Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk and nuclear waste is not paid for. So nuclear operators are freeloading on society for decades making billions of profits [0].
To make nuclear "work", one would need to adjust insurance and establish a trust to pay for nuclear waste facility operation for the next hundres of years. But then, no one would operate them nuclear plants from the building costs to the operating and insurance costs.
As a car driver I need to insure my car, so the insurance company pays people I hit. Nuclear operators do not need to insure their plant to any significant risk level.
And if you think a disaster is not happening, well I also don't intend to have a car accident, so why do I need to pay insurance?
[0] Fukushima is around $80B-$200B, the US nuclear insurance coverage is $15B. Chernobyl was around $200B.
Unless you want to socialize the costs while you privatize the gains the cost for those 10.000 (in some cases 100.000) years has to be paid for in advance — unless we are just closing your our and expect future generations will happily do that.
Now I don't say there isn't a scenario (irreversible climate change?) where doing precisely that could make sense — what I say is that no fan of nuclear power managed to explain that part to me in a way that convinced me yet. I want more than a "trust me bro" or handwaving optimism.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa...
Sellafield is infamous for radioactive polution, reprocessingnof nuclear waste is dangerous, dirty and not always economically feasible. Or do you thonk anybody would buy new fuel rods if reprocessed ones were cheaper?
One thing so: France, or rather all French goverents, are as pro-nuclear as it gets. And even they only built one reprocessing plant. Should tell you something.
Some is done in Russia, of all 'partners'...
And btw. you also didn't answer my question who pays for the 10 to 100k years of storage. The current answer typically is "the state", all while energy companies get to keep the money earned.
There is none, therefore this is not a solution.
They lift most of the dependency towards uranium providers (needing way less of it), and considerably helps tackling the nuclear waste challenge (producing way less of waste, and less hot).
The challenge is technical: obtaining a satisfying industrial (big, predictable, not too expensive...) breeder isn't a solved problem.
It is not about failed attempts (there were numerous, for sure) not vague plans. This is about an existing solution, and therefore an existing model of breeder reactor ready for deployment. If you cannot name one, well, there is no solution here.
Instead of building new nuclear reactorsy taking decades, we couod use the same money and research better storage tech, better gris tech, make industrail demand more flexible and sponsor heat pumps for domestic heating. Just a thought.
https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1433463215321669633?lang...
What about the “not so high level” waste from coal which results in trillions of dollars of health issues worldwide?
I'm simply pointing out that this graphic may be somewhat misleading, because it only focuses on a part of nuclear waste.
Obviously coal is pretty awful as well, from air pollution to mercury in the oceans.
- Low- and medium-activity, short-life (FMA-VC): 60% of total volume. They are compacted and poured in concrete, then stored.
- Low-actiity, long-life (FA-VL): 6% of total volume, disposal method is under study.
The two categories below represent >99% of total radioactivity:
- Medium-activity, long-life (MA-VL) 3% of total volume, they are compacted.
- High-activity, long-life (HA-VL): 0.2% of total volume, they are vitrified.
MA-VL and HA-VL are then stored in stainless steel caskets, to be disposed in deep, geologically stable repositories (Cigéo in France, Onkalo in Finland, ...).
Just how you can jump from that to opposing renewables build outs is beyond me. And honestly, nobody is lobbying for new coal plants, except the operators and owners of those plants. And boy, do they have a lobby...
No you do not get it I think.
The world need Nuclear AND Renewable energy. Working hand to hand to accelerate decarbonization, as fast as you can.
We need low carbon electricity production. And try to achieve that exclusively with renewable due to (close to) religious beliefs is an extremely dangerous bet on humankind.
I am not aware of many lobbies arguing that we need a world 100% nuclear.
However, I know many old world lobbies (like Greenpeace) that would prefer to die on the hill of climate change instead of admitting that the world need nuclear energy.
It cannot be done because it financially condemns new nuclear plants. "The rates at which conventional power plants are utilized will continue to decrease as competitive pressure from near-zero marginal cost solar photovoltaic and onshore wind power, and battery energy storage continue to grow exponentially worldwide."
Eye-opening video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg
If you had that, Nuclear become competitive.
If you had that and tax properly coal and Gas plant proportionally to the emission they really do.
Nuclear become even incredibly cheap, specially if we consider its hydrogen co-generation capabilities.
Nuclear is, by any metric you want, on the actual happening markets too expensivebto build new capacity. No amount of "if-only-and-then-if"s changes that.
It is not true anymore [1]
[1]: https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/deal-on-eu...
> hydrogen co-generation
Nuclear-generated electricity is way more expensive than renewable-generated electricity, and on the hydrogen chain all other costs are the same whatever the type of electricity-production units. Therefore choosing to produce H thanks to nuclear instead of renewables is only useful in order to bump up their capacity factor (reducing their total cost) and may prove to be a bad deal as electrolysis equipment doesn't like (breaks sooner) when using an intermittent electricity input.
Which is entirely ok.
There is one thing people mis-understand often about Nuclear power: The cost of fuel is close to zero. Consequently running a powerplant at full charge or half-charge is exactly the same (It can even be inverted).
So using co-generation as a load regulation is only an economical benefit from a Nuclear perspective.
> may prove to be a bad deal as electrolysis equipment doesn't like (breaks sooner) when using an intermittent electricity input.
The problem is exactly the same than for electrolysis done associated with intermittent renewable. It is quite laughable to see the "full renewable church" bringing Hydrogen as the solution to every grid capacity problem and at the same time bringing that as an argument against Nuclear.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
LCOE (total, incl. CAPEX, in USD per MWh):
coal 82.6, combined cycle 39.9, advanced nuclear 81.7, geothermal 37.6, biomass 90.1, onshore wind 40, offshore wind (that one was a surprise, since offshore wind should be quite cheap, mainly driven by capital cost of 104 USD per MWh) 105, solar 33.8, solar hybrid 49 and hydro 64.
Variable cost (same as above):
coal 23.7, combined cycle 27.7, adv. nuclear 10.3, geothermal 1.2, biomass 30, onshore wind 0, offshore wind 0, solar 0, solar hybrid 0, hydro 4.1
All number from here:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation...., page 9.
Nuclear power: about 10% of global electricity generation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Production ) which is about 22% of final energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum... ). Therefore the nuclear fleet (~440 reactors) now provides a meek ~2.2 of final energy. To reach about 11% implies building 2200 reactors (good luck with this), and would only let known uranium reserves provide each reactor for ~40 years, with few hopes towards the discovery of new reserves ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288706 ).
In such a context uranium will become more and more rare, and therefore more and more expensive... and strategic (keyword: 'embargo').
This is false from an economical/financial point of view: "Another important factor in estimating a NPPs lifetime cost derives from its capacity factor. According to Anthonie Cilliers, a scholar and nuclear engineer, "Because of the large capital investment, and the low variable cost of operations, nuclear plants are most cost effective when they can run all the time to provide a return on the investment. Hence, plant operators now consistently achieve 92 percent capacity factor (average power produced of maximum capacity). The higher the capacity factor, the lower the cost per unit of electricity." Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
This is also false upon a purely technical considerations as modulating induces thermal shocks leading to failures.
>> may prove to be a bad deal as electrolysis equipment doesn't like (breaks sooner) when using an intermittent electricity input.
> The problem is exactly the same than for electrolysis done associated with intermittent renewable
Nope, as an electrical system based upon intermittent renewables must be continental ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ), the powerful grid needed being paid by the low LCOE of renewables and enabling the system to route overproduction, wherever they occur, towards centralized water-electrolysis plants. Good luck trying to convince anyone brain-equipped to pay for such a powerful continental grid along with the high LCOE of nuclear. 'Laughable', seems adequate.
Source? There are several studies looking at what it’d take to go for 100% renewable energy that ends up with a lower total cost of energy than what we have today. Including costs for balancing the grid. This assumes no technological improvements.
Considering the cost of nuclear today, I don’t see how nuclear could ever contributing to lowering the total costs.
Yes, with technological improvements, and scaling up manufacturing, I’m sure nuclear could become much cheaper. But so could renewables and energy storage solutions. And energy storage solutions have network effects with decarbonisation of transportation that nuclear power doesn’t get to benefit from. I don’t see a way for nuclear to catch up considering how solar and battery technologies are rapidly becoming essential to every aspect of society. The amount of R&D going into these fields is absolutely staggering.
And nuclear power has this sword of Damocles hanging over it: if advanced geothermal gains significant traction, nuclear is doomed. Both nuclear and geothermal is essentially ways of getting thermal energy with near zero operating costs. But geothermal is much easier in terms of regulation and have zero concerns regarding waste management. What do you think will happen when the entire oil and gas industry is made redundant? An industry whose main competency is drilling deep. Just focus on drilling deeper, cheaper, and you get infinite free and green energy forever.
And you may think: well there you go, let's get rid of all of that and just use renewables then. But we can't, as the parent comment demonstrates. Some days you just need a stable energy source, and your only realistic choice for the next 20 years is hydro (already maxed out at most places), nuclear, gas or coal. Pick your poison.
Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources.
So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.
Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does geothermal, so we are left with nuclear as the only real clean and reasonable path forward that we would have done decades ago if not for oil and gas doing everything to prevent it.
So what is YOUR proposal to provide a stable base load?
I'm not the person you're replying to, and I mostly agree with your points, but I think its necessary to point out that nuclear and hydro have long lead times to build the infrastructure. And we basically don't have enough time left to build it.
I don't have good answers. Solar + interconnectors, maybe? So that areas in daylight can power areas that aren't? But this obvs requires cooperative behaviour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plenty of gas. Much of it is cheap to extract.
The strategic reasons for doing this are that gas turbines will be able to handle the extreme 'duck curves' and other demand volatility we will see when both renewables and electric vehicles are ramped up hard. Those are the two levers which are currently easiest to push on - because individuals can replace vehicles and heating systems, and will do so given smallish financial incentives. And because solar, wind and storage, can be scaled easily without excessive top-down planning or insane capital needs.
If nuclear is to be the solution, we have to quickly commit to it hard as a society. Compared to gas, nuclear will both make electricity more expensive and make swings and volatility in demand or in renewable supply more costly to deal with. It will on the margin discourage EV and electric heating, and discourage other renewables.
Nuclear is good at 'base load', but not much else. This is fine(-ish) if we rapidly switch to almost all nuclear. It works well in a 'Star Trek economy' where governments can act quickly and cheaply and impose choices by offering abundance. If this was the case, it would make sense to call a 50 year decision that nuclear with a modest amount of over-provision will replace almost all generation. (This has succeeded historically only in France, a very centralized economy for a Western democracy, with a high degree of regulation, and where the government has abundant access to capital.)
The real climate/energy economy is not like this. If you want to see an example of rapid change in action, look at the fracking revolution in the United States. Small players who saw opportunities created a whole new set of technologies, techniques and practices. They did this because they could react to incremental incentives. They didn't have to win everywhere at once. They could win field by field, installation by installation. We need the situation for new renewable generation and power storage to work like this. We need it to be the case that someone who provides storage in the right place at the right time can make money from it. We need it to be the case that someone who makes batteries (or gas storage or gravity storage or turbines or EVs) slightly cheaper or more efficient can make money from that. There is no reason why this type of progress can work for environmentally damaging tech like fracking and not for environmentally beneficial tech.
Gas isn't a 50 year decision, more like a 20 year decision. It reduces emissions a lot in the short term but leaves the playing field wide open for further rapid and drastic reductions in the longer term.
(A subsidiary concern but still a real one: if you could press a button and replace all fossil fuels with reliable and safe nuclear, you would instantly have catastrophic political breakdown in places where societal cohesion depends on money from fossil fuels. Moving from oil to gas and then ramping down gas progressively allows these places to gradually develop other incomes, and allows the rest of the world time to deal with them and political problems which they are likely to export.)_
The "Cleanest" is around 400g/kwh which is still very far from clean. It is around 20x more emissive that what Nuclear would give you.
But congratulations, you just described what was the German strategy for the previous 20 years. With a lot of pipelines connected directly to Russia (Because Germany does not have Gas) and with a very happy Vladimir.
And then the Ukrain-Russia war came. And the rest is history.
Since the war in Ukraine happened a year ago, and isn't over yet, the rest cannot be history. The problems with green houses gas emissions and enegry are souch older so, with the first measures being taken 20 odd years ago (too little, but better than nothing).
As always, people cry over spilled milk, what happened happened. Now we have a ton of options to deploy, nuclear power is not a feasible one (cost, time...). Organizations active in nuclear power agree, new projects aren't launched anymore. And the last one to be launched are delayed, and come in above cost, when planned cost already wasn't competitive.
Funny so, it took quite a while to reach the point of "Germany bad because gas financed Putin, nuclear power would have prevented that".
Nuclear power plants projects are ongoing everywhere around the world [1].
Do note generalize Germany fanatical behaviour to the entire world, this is not representative.
[1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
In roughly the same period of time 30 TW of wind capacity have been installed. Even if you discount windfarm capacity at an aggressive 4:1, wind has already succeeded in producing 2.5 times what nuclear said it would be able to and failed at.
Onshore wind is being delivered at a per MWh cost below that of the new nuke, if it ever runs. The offshore cost is much lower still.
In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore. Those legacy projects, Hinkley C or in Finland, run late and cost more than planned. And they a certainly more expensive than solar and wind. Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed. Hence all serious new capacity being either wind or solar. No idea why facta can be so ignored.
By the way, my opinion about the solar industry, makers and sellers of panels, is rather low, so I deffinitely don't cheer those guys up.
There is Korea, USA, France, UK, Slovakia and the UAE in the list.
In longer term, you can add Japan, Czeck Republic, Poland (under investigation) and even Italy is considering it right now.
You should certainly said to them that they are not part of your definition of the developed world.
> Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed
Good. The grid worked on good old inflexible based load for a century now and it prooved it works. Lets continue on that and make it low Carbon at the same time.
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
With one reactor. Wow.
That being said, the majority are in Asia. The UAE have one under construction, they did install more solar capacity already.
Two Japanese ones are suspended. Which leaves China as the leader.
Just as a reminder: these are the capacities
Under Construction (grid connection, as of Nov. 2023, between 2023 and 2030): 68 GW
Planned: 109 GW
Proposed: 353 GW
Total: 630 GW
Solar capacity installed between 2018 and 2021: 500 GW
Solar capacity estimated to be installed until 2025: 1.3 TW
I hope that puts it into perspective with regards to where the money goes. Nuclear proponents are at risk of becoming a serious road block when it comes to a fast energy transition, even more so if they continue to ignore raw market numbers.
Massive build out of renewables, mainly solar and wind. Build the grid for that as well. Use gas peaker plants, if needed. Keep nuclear plants running as long as safely possible. Invest in a green hydrogen network for storage. Make industrial demand more flexible. Reinterate, rinse and repeat.
I work from memory here, based on what I learned during my masters and a couple of stints in energy hungry industries a couple of yeaes ago. Besides gas peaker plants and green hydrogen, all of that is already happening in Europe.
Especially solar and wind build out is progressing massively across the world, even without a concentrated effort behind it.
Regarding industrial demand flexibility, that is also happening for a decade now (I personally know it does in the chemical industry, paper industry and graphite industry, surprising how much flexibility companies can squeeze out of production tech that was historically seen as being not flexible at all when there is loads of money to be made). Domestic demand is different, convenience beats saving most of the time, also households don't have professional energy management (hint: there isba massive, hard, start-up idea here: provide automated consumption control of electricity for households beyond smart thermostats ansball the other "smart" home crap).
Nuclear is a dead end in the developed world: too expensive (Hinkley C was already more expensive than wind like 7 years ago), takes too long install (just google year per kWh for the last NPPs installed) and has additional, unsolved, long term issues (waste storage only being one of those). Heck, even investors are quiting NPPs across the Western world. Nuclear has a future so: existing plants need be run as long as safely possible (the main reason German plants were shit down, they reached the end of their service live), for countries with nuclear arsenals, for the production of medical radionucleoids, for research... New ones are a waste of time, energy and money right now so.
And yet again, you said why something doesn't work, because just building dozens of plants and go fully nuclear is not feasible or realistic for the developed world.
For developing countries it is different, and they should build nuclear plants instead of coal ones, but then those have a lot of catching up to do. They could also go fully renewable right away so, they should have an "easier" (nothing is easy about any of this) life doing so without a century of legacy structures and systems to worry about (grids, industry, domestic use...).
Why would you want to use battery storage instead of pressure or gravity, for example? You can do gravity by moving stuff around underground, not just classical pumped storage. Digging big and deep holes is something people know how to do quite well, same goes for moving weights/mass up and down.
Could also do some chemical storage as another avenue.
For heat you can have certain thermal storage, too.
Reducing emissions related to transportation leads to electrical vehicles, and therefore to a vast amount of batteries, most not used at any given moment and therefore ready to store overproduction or release needed electricity.
Batteries' performance are quickly progressing, and their prices history is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
This is part of the solution, as we have ways to reduce effects of intermittency on production (mainly a mix spread over the continent), other ways to store electricity (hydro, green hydrogen-burning turbo-alternators...), and curtailment...
Sometimes the only realistic answer is "We should have done X, many years ago" - I think society and humans in general need to get better at admitting this. Sometimes we back ourselves into a corner and we just need to accept that as a fact.
But due to the situation we are in, the actual realistic answer I have is continue to burn coal and gas as a bridge while we do a crash program to train up the next generation of nuclear engineers and construction workforce.
Start 100 reactor sites right now and understand they are mostly going to be used as on-the-job training for construction crews for the next decade while we burn co2 and learn how to build things again.
Of course continue to install as many gigawatts of solar and wind during that time period as you can while expanding the grid. As you spin up your "nuclear batteries" you can then start spinning down coal and gas and let your renewables take up the peak loads. Load prediction and larger grids have become reliable enough now that you can spin up nuclear in a predictable fashion for load-following, with a small amount of grid battery hanging around for those few hours of surprises per year.
Hydro is interesting but effectively 100% utilized worldwide at this point. Once you get your nuclear workforce geared up and the initial surge of demand completed, perhaps start looking at modifying as much hydro capacity in the world to act in both directions as pumped storage. Imagine pumping water back into Lake Mead from downstream when there is excess power generation. Exceedingly inefficient - but starts to become interesting when you have grid-tied batteries that actually work at scale.
Edit: Nuclear is only dead in the developed world because we chose it to be so. Society can decide tomorrow to change that decision if properly motivated. We have many times in the past for much harder things than building a few hundred industrial plants we already have built before.
You see the maths here, right? Not to mention wind and solar are cheaper than Hinkley C, already were in 2015 or so (based on 20 year bid prices per kWh for both alternatives).
Nuclear in the developed world is dead because it is too expensive. Nuclear isn't dead in the developing world because governments there want it, and it is better than coal (which makes nuclear a better choice for me, no idea if that really factors into those decisions or not). Developing countries could as easily go for renewables straight away as well so.
It is not society that needs to change to make nuclear viable again, it is the economics behind it. And with renewables, especially solar, following Moore's law to a T so far, that wont happen ever.
Well, sure. But why is it that expensive? It's expensive because we decided it to be so.
If it became an existential problem for society you would see the cost per mile of rail plummet 10x or more.
The same goes for nuclear. The expensive bits are almost all societal constructs. Much like all large projects in the developed world. Once the shit hits the fan so to speak, those costs tend to mysteriously evaporate and society magically gets stuff done in record time. See: historical shifts to wartime production.
If your only argument against nuclear is cost, I'm afraid it's not a very compelling one to me.
Now, renewables may surprise me and somehow we crack the storage problem. But I will continue to posit nuclear power plants are the best grid-scale battery tech we've yet to invent. I say this due to the costs. Not the monetary costs, but the return on energy invested cost which is really the only thing that will end up mattering in the end.
Edit: Cost is the compelling argument for everyone with the money, everything else is either political or ideological. And the money truely has spoken.
Also, energy storage is emerging as an electricity grid stabilizer. The cost trend of solar+wind+storage is looking very promising when compared to nuclear.
Are Coal plants insured for the environmental damage they cause?
Maybe they are under insured, but the whole fossil fuel industry is too
So you speak about $400B, lets consider it upper bound and even up to $500B by adding the cost Three Miles island incident and the various minor ones around the world.
Spread over 60 years of the humanity nuclear power usage, that makes us an insurance cost of 8.3 billions dollar per year at world scale.
So the risk cost $8.3B per year at world scale for a source of energy that generate 25% of the world low-carbon electricity [1] and make us save around 470 millions tons of CO2 per year [2].
To put things into perspective: the US spend $150B in natural disaster cost coverage per year alone [3]
The EnergyWende of Germany alone cost around $40B per year.
And the cost of the death related to fossil fuel emissions in modern history is estimated at $1.7T in the OECD alone [4].
So I think it is fair to qualify $8.3B/year for a nuclear energy insurance cost to be pretty cheap deal at humanity scale.
I would even qualify it to be ridiculously cheap.
Your sentence "Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk" is pretty typical of the anti-nuclear argumentation: Mainly based on feelings not on facts.
Based on facts, it is currently plain wrong.
[1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
[2]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
[3]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/2022...
[4] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/d1b2b844-en.pdf?expi...
However, to your last point: You are saying that nuclear power plants then are insured to risk. Can you point me in your sources to the place where it is shown how nuclear power plant operators today then are insuring "to risk" the risk of nuclear disaster and all costs and risks of the disposal?
Coal plants don't cover the costs and risk associated with the disposal of their _nuclear_ waste as well as their CO2 waste. They just vent it out into the atmosphere.
https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-wastes-coal-fired-po...
No.
"Your sentence "Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk" is pretty typical of the anti-nuclear argumentation: Mainly based on feelings not on facts."
A: Fukushima is costing $200B
B: US nuclear power plants are insured for a payout of $15B
A+B: US power plants are underinsured by $185B
Moving goal posts, hand waving, talking about my feelings (thanks for caring!), personal attacks and sources unrelated to nuclear power plant insurance doesn't explain the fact away, that "Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk".
PS: "EnergyWende" is not a German word. While Java is using Camelcase, German is not using Camelcase.
Quick question, outside of the necessity of CamelCase.
Are water dam operating companies insured up to the damages of a damn rupture ? Like in the case of the Vajont damn in Italy ?
Even for your car insurance: Will your insurance pays for the society cost of two disabled persons for life after you hit them when your tire exploded ?
Quick answer: No. In both case, the society will pay. Nuclear is no different.
Nuclear power plants are massivly underinsured. That was my point.
Funny. I have the opposite take. Society has freeloaded off of nuclear for a generation or two by ignoring the wider social benefits and putting all the risk on the operators.
Cheap, clean, reliable power matters. That we made it expensive via some made up social construct isn't very material to me in the bigger picture.
> As a car driver I need to insure my car,
As a car driver you pay a tiny fraction of your externalized costs to society. Most folks recognize this and are ok with the situation because of the wider social benefits overall.
The problem with measuring CO2 per person is that it is heavily influenced by the wealth level of the country's population. Poor counties have very low CO2 emissions, but people in wealthy countries wouldn't want to trade their living standards for those of a poor country. That would arguably be worse than climate change in the first place.
So optimising for CO2 g/kwh allows us to reduce our emissions without reducing our quality of living. Which is great.
That being said, I agree that running escalators at night is a terrible waste of energy.
Without nuclear no risks tied to a major accident, dependancy towards uranium providers, hot waste disposal, overcentralization, overcentralization, proliferation, daunting building and decommission projects... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38288706 )
Not a bad deal.
When will it be done? What really is the answer to the challenge?
Germany has ~140 GW of installed renewables when it needs about ~70GW of electricity.
When I was writing this (before I forgot to send it on a cloudy morning) 140 GW of installed renewables in Germany are producing a grand total of 14GW of electricity.
Germany needs 61GW.
Right now it looks like all of Europe [1] is busy burning gas and coal because it's cloudy, and there's very little wind.
So what happens when everything becomes electrical? Say, Germany needs 150GW of electricity, builds 500 GW of renewables, but those only produce 50GW (10% of installed capacity, like today)?
[1] Except three countries with stable electricity generation: France (nuclear), Sweden (nuclear + hydro), Norway (hydro)
Hopefully we build better ways for storing large amounts of energy.
If Germany could at least reach the 90s levels of France, that's why I would consider that some work in progress already
But let's role with it for second. Renewables are, unfortunately, not at a point yet where they can cover 100% of demand. We cannot change the current mix neither. So, what would be your proposed way forward to "solve" climate change? I am really curious, because most of the time people just ignore the time schedule behind those transitions (power plants have to be built, grids to be extended...).
> assume you mean, was built, there was no war in Ukriane or elsewhere involving Russia, and hence no lessons to be drwan from it!
And what about the talks with Azerbaijan and the increase imports from Algeria then? (both great countries aligned with the EU I'm sure). More pipelines are planning to be built following the war.
Unless of course, you want to go pre-industrial that is.
Building more gas pipes after the Russian war is pure insanity, even if you don't care about the environment
There's not many places you can get gas even if you don't care about the environment.
And yes, getting gas from Algeria was a problem before the war as well.
Realistically,the only good choice in the EU is Norway.
So, no fossil fuels from oppressive regimes then (I'm all for it, really, the sooner the Saudi can no longer pay the way into everything the better). Which leaves us with what exactly?
Renewables, meaning sourcing from China. And nuclear, just remind me, where does the reactor fuel come from again?
So yeah solar panels imports are also a big issue, I'm worried that China will close off the exports at some point.
As for nuclear, it's not as big of an issue as you think, most of the value is in the plant, there's lots of countries exporting the raw material which are not much related and storage is pretty easy. (Conditions may apply of course, some nuclear grids are much more dependent than others but it's possible to be relatively independent with it)
Fossil fuels are a diplomatic, environmental and economic issue, even if you don't care about the environment, three's lots of other downsides.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-renewables-electr...
The only grid that got shot up was the Ukrainian one. And even then gas still flowed through to Eastern Europe...
Before 2010 and the privatisation of the grid, France only had a single working gas plant on the whole grid and not even connected to the pipelines, it was a plant reusing factory gas. Those gas plants are brand new and there to support the new wind and solar installs.
Check the construction dates here, it's really obvious: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_centrales_thermiqu...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?time...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-based-carbon-...
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?facet=none&country=...
This is heavy industry, nothing can be done in a jiffy.
Germany managed to have dirty electricity with nuclear energy, too. Why do people point at Germany and pretend it's a green energy failure, when Germany had a conservative government for 16 years that never cared about green energy? Green energy was never a policy*, what makes Germany the poster-child of a green energy failure? The conservatives said renewables drive electricity prices up and set out to stop them, and around the time they shut down nuclear power plants, they considered it an achievement to have prevented new photovoltaic installations.
* Germany had exactly one government that put their faith in renewables and that was a noble goal, considering that renewables were at the very bottom of the S-curve, which also means that one could only make babysteps towards green energy. Now we're in the middle of the S-curve and countries can add GWs of renewables to their grid, which makes Germany's early attempts look pathetic, but you simply can't move at that pace at the bottom of the curve.
That coal was increased instead of renewbles was a really bad devision. One driven by a strong lobby and (mostly) conservative politians with a vested interest in coal.
https://www.agora-energiewende.de/daten-tools/agorameter/cha...
And even this source is a bit dubious, as there's no clear correlation between the amount of coal and gas and the emissions. Presumably they also count imported energy.
You can see the instant consumption today at 653g/kwh [2] and normalized over a month here 416g/kwh [3].
Values are also aligned with what other specialized sources estimate [4]
You can also extract similar numbers on the site of European Union itself [5]
Wierdly I have more doubts about the partiality of the data of your source. Specially when tags itself as "EnergyWiende" in the title.
> Presumably they also count imported energy.
It does not. These number account only for production.
Germany numbers considering consumption are generally better because most of its neighbours have cleaner electricity production than Germany (excepted Poland).
[1]: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
[2]: https://postimg.cc/zLPrw1K0
[3]: https://postimg.cc/14BLDSS6
[4]: https://www.nowtricity.com/country/germany/
[5]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
All these metrics should just support a much needed trend towards renewables. For me the metric days off grid is very compelling, that is what we are trying to achieve aren't we? PT is at 6 out of 365, where is DE? It helps to motivate others in a positive manner.
And on your topic, nuclear is a pipe dream. It is a toy for politicians to evade the raw fact that very hard measurements are needed (tax flying, much higher fossil energy pricing, tax on meat, tax on children, etc). Governments cannot buy their way out of this mess, I have no confidence at all other then spending on infrastructure, that government spending will solve the climate crisis.
Just look at the map, Portugal is still ranking pretty good globally.
It's not as simple as having the capacity because power is used the instant it's produced.
Today: - Hydrostor just signed a near $1 Billion contract to build their first underground facility in California using advanced compressed air with water to help efficiency. See also: Green Gravity, Gravitricity, Terrament, Renewell, RheEnergise, and more.
Variable load sources often change transmission requirements on existing lines because there can be power draw increase between A and B where previous there was less generation at A.
With financing getting more expensive its almost certain that some of the more financially on the edge projects would get cancelled and since offshore wind is easily the most expensive, it’s unsurprising that in renewable energy those are the projects getting cancelled.
There are offshore wind farms with nearly equivalent capacity factors to some (aging) french nuclear power plants.
The calculation depends on how good the specific location is for wind/solar but outside of unusually poor areas, like the UK, solar is easily the cheapest option.
if you want a public markets proxy, look at invesco's solar etf; down by around half. sedg is down 75%
existing infrastructure is more maintenance than construction
I found: Natural gas: ~1200 USD/kW, Solar: ~1500 USD/kW, Wind: ~1500 USD/kW
Let us say that solar and wind is about 25% more expensive to build. All types have high up front costs, so interest rates will affect nearly equally. However, operations for solar and wind must be way cheaper over 10/20/30 year time frame. To be fair, I never read anything about maintenance costs for solar and wind. It certainly isn't zero, as the wind turbine will need periodic servicing, and the solar panels need to be cleaned.
Indeed. Those costs are never counted (e.g. how do you service and repair offshore wind farms in the middle of the North Sea). As the costs of decommissioning and replacements are never counted either. Neither are the costs of overprovisioning required for renewables.
They sell to the grid at a price that makes them a profit. How did you think this all worked?
This link is to one from a couple of years ago that I found on the web, but you can look up the latest one in their PDF:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/lazar...
Some things are affected more than others, especially nuclear, but it doesn't really swap relative positions to any great degree.
That's if you make up some number for fossil fuel externalities and count it as a subsidy. Pollution from fossil fuels is a very real and very big issue but it has been presented in such a way that people think governments are actually giving oil companies trillions of dollars in direct subsidies. No other business has had this kind of math applied to it. The fossil fuel industry is taxed heavily from when the oil comes out of the ground to people pumping gas into their cars, it is a huge tax revenue generator.
I really want to emphasizes the "make up a number" part. Trying to understand the physical part of climate change is already a monstrous task with big uncertainty. From there trying to to estimate economic effects is basically impossible.
Back in 2006/2007 I had a job as a consultant for an energy trading company and it was huge the first day when the entire country ran solely on wind power. If was during the Christmas holidays, so less power was used overall, but still it was absolutely a huge deal for us. After that if has just been more and more days on renewable energy powering the majority of grid and more and more frequently 100% renewable.
I get the problem that it's only for a short time and then Portugal is back at emitting CO2, but it also does mean that they are moving in the right direction and it's only going to get better.
like what?
Does this help? Doesn't seem to me! And besides having to pay full price to the renewables producers (while exporting the same energy at ZERO), which amounts to a significant energy deficit, they are talking about even more H2 or whatever schemes??? This is the reason why Portugal has had one of the biggest rises of electricity prices in Europe over the last 15 years...
I don't think that takes away from the achievement.
We also have negative prices on windy days and the interconnects tend to be exporting power to Europe at night.
Population of Portugal is 10.5 million people.
We have such a long way to go.
Global fossil fuel will hopefully peak by the end of the decade.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...
And for good reason, it proves wrong the mainstream thinking that this is impossible. Quite a few countries already run the full year over 90% renewable[1] and we still neglect it with all kind of excuses.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/eu-fossil-genera...
"The first half of 2023 saw a collapse in EU fossil generation, leading to the lowest output on record. Wind and solar continued their growth, with solar generation increasing by 13% and wind by 5%. Hydro and nuclear are recovering from their historic lows in 2022, though their long term outlook is uncertain."
The section "Wind and solar are leading the renewables charge" has graphs for each EU country showing H1 TWh generation by either fossil or renewables.
If you have lots of hydro you can have 90% plus renewables.
It's still way cheaper than nuclear.
Secondly, the current best for renewables is nowhere close to 90% year round. Those 6 days in the article are a huge record for Portugal. 90% would essentially mean 330 days of exclusive renewables use, which no one in the world is close to, except maybe Iceland.
This is quite different to coal fired power generation which doesn't have low energy standby mode with rapid online to full generation ramping up in the manner of gas fired turbines.
During the six day period the national grid was supplied only with energy from renewable sources.
What are you trying to achieve with this banal line of questioning?
It's quite possible Portugal has put out a white paper on their transition toward renewable energy that you can find with some hunting about.
Wikipedia has a rough overview that'll provide some points to drill down further into if you're interested in the per capita comparative costings of a hybrid national power scheme.
Most countries have policy and costing papers, most companies file technical reports with stock exchanges, fossil fuel companies such as BHP have fat technical reports on the energy demands that they meet and project - these are all sources for hard data that can be compared (after normalising for apples V oranges).
The US is a mixed bag - Federal infomation is free and transparent, digging into details can get harder. The UK has a good civil service that puts out a lot of infomation on things that affect policy - from crime to consumption to energy use.
My comment was intended to encourage the user asking "at what cost" to form a better question and pursue their own answers.
So, marginal cost is lower. Total capital outlay might be higher. Portugal provides energy at an average of 9.7¢ / kWh which presumably is high enough to pay back all the capital costs in addition to the marginal costs. Mississippi only has 1% renewables and provides electricity at 11.55¢ / kWh.
So it would appear at a very rough glance that the answer to "At what cost?" is..."Negative cost".
Standing by to supplement power on load spikes is one of the primary roles of gas plants (together with pumped hydro), and that they didn't need to supply any electricity over those six days is noteworthy.
From a climate standpoint there also isn't much wrong with having generating capacity in fossil fuels, what matters is how many greenhouse gases and how much pollution they put out. Which isn't much if they are just standing by.
You are repeating a myth.
Load following is used in France: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
It mostly isn't used in the US due to regulations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716
The reason load following is not generally used is because because the economics of nuclear (large fixed costs) favour base load.
There are safety-related limits (power modulation proportion, duration of a pause needed after each modulation, modulations frequency...) to nuclear load-following capacity, and the very combustible status is a major parameter.
Pertinent document (French ahead!): https://www.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
Quote: « un réacteur peut varier de 100 % à 20 % de puissance en une demi-heure, et remonter aussi vite après un palier d’au moins deux heures, et ce deux fois par jour »
Proposed translation: "a reactor power output can vary from 100% to 20% in 30 minutes, then after 2 hours can go back to 100% at the same speed, and can cycle this way 2 times per day".
This is quite a good performance when it comes to load-following (French engineers are very good at this), however it is insufficient in the real world (save any ridiculously expensive over-provision of nuclear reactor, most idling) and very weak compared to gas turbines performances.
Even in nuclear-packed France (which exports electricity) fossil fuels are also burnt in order to produce electricity since nuclear's inception, for most of the load-following and peak (about 9% in 2021), and it would be much worse without hydro. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
On the other hand green hydrogen (produced by intermittent renewables at over-electric-generation time) can be stored then used at insufficient-generation time.
Load following with a nuclear plant basically means provisioning a 2GW plant and then using, say, 0.5GW of that - throwing away the rest.
(since the vast majority of the cost is capex not fuel)
Every kilowatt hour produced by that 2GW power plant is already 5x the cost of a kilowatt hour produced by a wind farm. If you assume it is used for load following that goes from 5x-20x depending on capacity utilization.
Pumping water uphill (snowy 2, coire glas, etc) is way way WAY cheaper and the geography to do that is ridiculously common.
Electrolyzing water and storing hydrogen underground is way cheaper too, and can be stored for months cheaply.
Pretty easy equation, much more reliable and much more scalable and not subject to the whims of the elements / can be done anywhere and on any planet in the solar system.
Beyond that, bitcoin works and is here to stay. It is the first sovereign currency free from the tyranny of small minded rulers. It will always have significant and likely increasing value over time, and its pattern of value generation (bound to physics / energy) will always exist now in one form or another.
Then when the grid needs more power you do less of that, and instead send electricity to the grid.
That's only a big deal with fossil fuels due to the fuel cost, the fuel cost of nuclear is marginal.
Yes, I agree that it's stupid to build a (big) nuclear power plant only to use it to boil an Olympic sized swimming pool most of the time.
But that's stupid because we're over-relying on "green" energy that can't provide baseload power.
It's even more stupid with fossil fuels, now you also need an entirely different backup infrastructure, but the fossil one pollutes much more than nuclear.
(And yes this ignores a certain amount of externalities, like the tendency of requiring large scale evacuations in their surroundings every second decade, but we can set that aside, as it’s irrelevant for the economic argument above)
What matters is what is the most realistic mix of power generation and storage for 24x7 reliability. This can of course look very different depending on the situation. Many will argue for distributed storage (e.g. home batteries) - but that just means poor people don't get reliable electric service.
I really don't find that solar is "too cheap to meter" during peak sunlight very interesting. Who cares. What I find interesting is that I can turn a dial on my nuclear power plant to whatever it is I feel like at any time, and have it operating at that capacity within an hour or three.
Since we have such a dial, if you owned both the solar and the nuclear plants you would very likely combine them in a manner that maximizes profits while maintaining continuous service. Short of clouds, regional solar and wind prediction is extremely good to the point that modern nuclear plants may as well be load following. Add in a bit of battery for those minutes (hours max) that surprise you and you're good to go on that front.
You still will need some gas peaker plants for those crazy once-in-a-decade days you don't want to overbuild nuclear capacity for, but you could drastically reduce this infrastructure from what is effectively a 1:1 ratio today.
The main reason is that we price pollution and radiation control into nuclear plants, but fossil fuel plants get a free pass.
All modern nuclear plants work in load following mode with ability to change ant the rate of 3-5% of their rated capacity per minute.
Graph and text on page 8: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
> Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off,
Fukushima happened because the plant was hit with both an earthquake and a flood significantly exceeding its operational parameters (already extremely high)
Fukushima had been in operation since 1971. You truly really believe that there were no earthquakes in the meantime, and the only reason for failure in 2011 is that they didn't plan for the largest earthquake and one of the worst tsunamis in Japanese history?
>> The seismic hazard and tsunami waves considered in the original design were evaluated mainly on the basis of historical seismic records and evidence of recent tsunamis in Japan. This original evaluation did not sufficiently consider tectonic-geological criteria and no re-evaluation using such criteria was conducted.
Source:
https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1710-Repor..., page 48.
Stop speculating and assuming, stop thinking from first principle and do the following instead:
- read text books on basic engineering, electricity generation and grid operation
- read some basics regarding nuclear reactors (or, in all seriousness, watch Chernobyl which provides some really good basic explanations)
- read the publicly available incident reports from the IAEA on thebaccidents of your choosing
All the questions you might have about any nuclear accident are answered in those reports. Those reports are prepared and investigated by experts in their field, going painstackingly over documents, event logs, design documents, meeting minutes (like a real and thorough investigation you know). Try understand all of that, and then draw whatever conclusion you want. Because by doing that, we have a basis for discussion, one rooted in reality in facts, as opposed to the headline-talking points fairytale stuff we have now, where people without any basic knowledge how things work draw assumptions from some headlines...
Once HN was a place where people applied critical thinking to topics, and where curious to learn from people knowing more (of which you find a ton around here). Since COVID, more and more people seem to think some general smartness allows them to understand even the most complex issues better than anyone else based on headlines, opinion pieces and social media talking points. I hope we can return to how things were before, it is getting really frustrating at times.
Edit: Some general engineering advice: Those once in a life time event are actually planned for, the USSR had rules for that in the 70s as well. The approach od identifying those risks was formalized as Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, FMEA. They are done for the design, production and operation, for processes, in order to identify those risks, the likelihood, the criticality and the ability to detect them. Following that, mitigation actions are defined and put into place. And, very important, they revisited regularly.
This wasn't done neither for Chernobyl nor Fukushima (just because the formal process didn't exist back then doesn't mean engineers didn't do those exercises, and the USSR had regulations in olace basically asking for the same thing. Regulations that were ignored by everyone for Cherbobyl unit No. 4). The IAEA reports for Chernobyl and Fukushima point thaz insufficient planning out explicitely, as do the USSR reports on Chernobyl. And if you think those fuck ups only happened in the distant past, the Boeing 737 Max can basically be traced back to the same root cause. Because these failures are not as much about people as they are about organizations. Hence processes and rules to follow in safety critical industries, and other large scale organizations. The cowboy style of operating in a start-up doesn't translate well to those places.
Not a single one of these FUDers said anything about Fukushima in the 40 years of its operation in an active seismic zone (translation: multiple earthquakes) in a country that had at the time over 50 operating nuclear reactors.
But the 2011 happened. And look at them crawling out of the woods with armed with overconfidence, thinly veiled ad-hominems and TV shows.
But let me guess, you don't even know where to find said IAEA report, do you?
>> Prior to the earthquake, the Japan Trench was categorized as a subduction zone with a frequent occurrence of magnitude 8 class earthquakes; an earthquake of magnitude 9.0 off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture was not considered to be credible by Japanese scientists. However, similar or higher magnitudes had been registered in different areas in similar tectonic environments in the past few decades.
Now, tell me again, how the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami were totally impossible to predict events?
And it gets better:
>> In addition, a number of trial calculations were performed by the operator before the accident, using wave source models or methodologies that went beyond the consensus based methodology. Thus, a trial calculation using the source model proposed by the Japanese Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion in 2002, which used the latest information and took a different approach in its scenarios, envisaged a substantially larger tsunami than that provided for in the original design and in estimates made in previous reassessments. At the time of the accident, further evaluations were being conducted, but in the meantime, no additional compensatory measures were implemented. The estimated values were similar to the flood levels recorded in March 2011.
So, in 2002 they predicted pretry accurately the strength of potentail tsunamis. And then they did nothing for next nine years. The USSR knew about the control rod issue of RBMKs, and as TEPCO in Japan, did nothing until Chernobyl. See the inherent risk of nuclear power here? Because both, Chernobyl and Fukushima were pretty much predictable (as the risk was prpoerly identified before both accidents) and preventable if people in charge, and the organizations, would have put counter measures in place.
Edit: And now you can google the material difference between common and special causes.
>> The common cause failures of multiple safety systems resulted in plant conditions that were not envisaged in the design.
That's exactly the incorrect analysis that caused the meltdown!
That use of "and" and "both" is simply wrong. It wasn't an unforseeable collision of two events, it was a single event (an earthquake) with a predictable correlate (a tsunami). It's not like people didn't know that tsunamis follow earthquakes, and no one who does know that would make the argument you just did.
The point of the article was that there is sufficient renewable capacity that the standby wasn't needed, for six days. So that's a milestone of some sort. Or, if not a milestone, then at least a checkpoint that shows that seven, eight, ten, or twenty days is only a matter of continuing to scale up.
The reality in poorer countries is that pollution reduction is not as much a priority as saving money. So yeah, I mean, I always find it funny when Portugal is presented like this ecological example. Again, it’s not “their fault,” it’s poverty, but let’s not fool anyone here. There are also piles of old furniture, concrete, and other construction materials that people are just in the habit of dumping on the side of the road in most rural areas.
It’s good PR but I just find it relevant to point out that it’s not necessarily an “example” beyond that. But yeah, they are getting cheaper. They’re just particularly cheap for a country with great weather and wind with low consumption.
For your information the EU average fleet age is 11.8 years, Portugal stands at 13.2 and France at 10.3. Perhaps not the story you're trying to tell.
I understand that you disliked my comment. I live in Portugal, and I have lived in France and US as well. I’m sorry to say that people trashing stuff in nature is far worse here than these other countries. You don’t see people dumping fridges or old bathtubs in nature there. I see it in Algarve, Alentejo, outside Lisbon… that + the poop everywhere on the street, I’m sorry man but people don’t have the same standard for respecting nature and keeping the streets clean. Doesn’t mean anything about the people themselves, people are very nice and considerate to each other. I think that’s alright to recognize flaws though.
I mean, 13.2 vs 10.3 is quite a big difference - and that doesn’t address the fact that a lot of these old ‘95 trucks or weird scooter-truck things have pitch dark exhaust fumes and are driving around like nothing’s going on. I’m pretty sure you’d get pulled over by cops and forced to fix your car in France or US. It’s not legal in these countries to drive cars like that. Again, I get that people don’t have the money to get a newer car, I’m not blaming them. Just noting that while the electricity is clean, a lot of progress remains needed in other parts of the economy.
If you want I can send you many pictures of my travels in France so we compare the number of abandoned tractors, completely trashed banlieues and so on. Or I can send you pictures of how Dutch people every week have a day where they dump trash in the sidewalk, the same fridges and old moldy furniture that you speak of, all around the city, or all the bicycles and trash in canals. Or about all the human shit in Paris homeless encanpments that are worse than dog poop in the street of Lisbon, etc.
Obviously I'm a bit defensive, and of course every country has people who don't care, and maybe there's even more in portugal than other places, which I'm glad to accept if you have any data, but you didn't present any data, just your stereotypes based on anecdata.
I don't get it how common sense went so much out of the window when discussing these issues, that people are now effectively arguing that's more environmentally sound, to build an whole new car, then to use an older one.
It's just blatant propaganda.
Replacing commercial fleets that are involved in shipping, deliveries, mass transporation etc will be net positive for the environment very fast.
Buying an electric car if you have an existing car and don't drive a huge amount per year might never pay off as a private person though. Again it really depends on how much you drive and what the difference is between old and new. I'd bet for most regular people it doesn't make sense to replace a car before it's useful life is up, while for companies it probably makes sense to replace ASAP.
Probably not hard to create a calculator with car models and miles driven per year and establish which models make sense to replace and how soon.
Portugal has gone gas. America will, too, in all likelihood. Both will be subsidised by countries without natural gas reserves who have decided to shun nuclear.
EV charging won't raise overall power consumption that much, and the majority of tthe EU will stop burning coal around the 2030's. Nuclear isn't much on the table in Europe, especially since new wind developments produce cheaper power than nuclear plants.
Solar works quite well at lower latitudes, but at higher latitudes in Europe it can work as a supplement to hydro in the summer (as there's less water around then), but it won't play any significant role in power production (some 10s of percentage points perhaps).
Biggest challenge for the next few decades is inertia as well as base load when there's low wind over large geographic areas. We need cheaper (and better) grid scale energy storage. A lot of people forget about the cheaper part.
It does create a better use for batteries. Both for raw materials and talent.
Replacement isn't binary, though. What I want is to go like 80-90% solar+wind immediately by following Denmark model but with addition of solar & overbuilding & inter-country sharing. The last-mile is made up of natural gas until cheaper storage tech is invented.
Nuclear can get you to 100% but you have to look at AUC of emissions from now until the future, which is potentially worse for nuclear because it takes longer to build, not to mention the higher financial cost of getting there.
If you really want to make a purely climate argument, you could even say that with the money you save by not going nuclear, you can subsidize renewables in poor countries. Two countries with ~60%+ renewables can be better than one country with 100% nuclear. Notwithstanding the AUC emissions benefit of renewables that I describe above.
We're already a poor country, and we're kept in mediocrity because we keep getting crushed by rising prices.
So the question is: if we don't get anything positive out of it, other than a green drop in the ocean of pollution which won't change that tide of events, why are we paying a premium for it?
Shouldn't we be one of the last European countries to perform these achievements, until we got the means to do it? Or is Portugal going to collect a tax from those countries that are not performing?
With this, I'm not saying this isn't a positive achievement, of course it is, but the Portuguese people are so numbed from an economic point of view that at least I, and my circle of family and friends, don't rejoice.
It's like the EU giving tax benefits to those who buy electric vehicles, and slapping taxes on those who burn dinosaurs -> when a lot of those have no choice but to burn dinosaurs, and they have to drive old cars because they can't afford new electric vehicles.
How do you expect "regular people" to be onboard, when they are getting squeezed and penalized for being poor/middle class? It's not like they have a choice.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but the " something that can and should be solved in different ways" should have come first, before anything else, and it's not happening any time soon.
Guess who is paying in the meantime?
The sentiment that fuels extremism and movements that oppose these measures don't pop out in the vacuum.
The country has the geography and a long history of politicians focusing on large infrastructure projects, dams are needed for water supply since most water has origin in Spain who itself also hogs it.
The hydro turbines are a bonus on top of water supply since the country has to import most hydrocarbon based fuels.
All countries with the funds for it should continue to invest in Wind and PV but unless we as a collective of nations seriously invest in renewable 'storage' there will never be a renewable assured base load.
This is not true. Portugal produces more wind power than it does hydroelectric:
https://datahub.ren.pt/pt/eletricidade/balanco-mensal/
10 TWh versus less than 8 for hydro. Solar is also already past 3 TWh and has barely started in a country with excellent conditions for it. We also already have quite a bit of storage. Hydro already contributes over 3 TWh of storage.
My point still stands storage infrastructure for intermittent renewables (Wind, PV) is still the key problem to solve for Gas/Coal to finally stay in the ground.
The available hydro does not allow to cover all base load. It needs to be supplemented and the other renewable sources available are by their nature intermittent.
So the problem of energy storage needs to be solved fast in order for gas/coal to be finally sunset.
1. The retail competition of Texas, which has the highest renewable energy production in the U.S. [1], but is also a market where consumers overpay for electricity [2].
2. The regulated competition of California where municipalities have the ability to buy electricity in bulk and pass the savings onto the consumer. This ironically leads to more local government involvement in electricity procurement, and also gives private electricity generators more customers to sell to and rate payers at least two options to choose from. This leads to lower electric rates and higher renewable adoption, with some municipalities reaching over 90% renewable adoption [3].
3. Then you have what I call the energy tyranny of Arizona where ratepayer dollars are directed into the pockets of shareholders through legal fictions of “fair and reasonable return” for private investor owned utilities. Private companies are granted monopolies and guaranteed profits. Any form of competition is suppressed, community Solar is essentially rejected by the utility board [4], and the state legislature repealed competition laws to prevent it from being used to compete with utilities [5]. Renewable generation is just 10% of the states energy supply [6] despite having the most favorable conditions for solar in the nation.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/these-sta...
[2] https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/report-texans-overpay-for-...
[3] https://www.mcecleanenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20...
[4] https://ilsr.org/arizona-useless-community-solar-policy-2023...
[5] https://www.nrg.com/assets/documents/energy-policy/_2022/ari...
Uhh, come again? Price savings? Here in SoCal, I am paying for the most expensive electricity in my life. Almost a 4x multiple of what I was charged in the midwest.
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/pge/pge-bankru...
They now switching to geothermal.
For e.g. in germany 60% of energy is produced from renewable source, but there are weeks when it is only 10%. So you have to have coal or gas station to compensate it
Where I live, for most of the Winter the sky is overcast with clouds. So that somewhat limits solar panels. But I'm sure California is great place for them.
> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.
That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.
If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.
They rarely say where they actually are.
The thing that most countries - a convenient non-geo construct only because most countries have a national grid - who claim to be exceptional have in common, is a firm commitment to the idea that they are exceptional. I am reminded of that onion headline that ends 'says only nation where this regularly happens'.
I concede that it's possible you happen to live somewhere that is out of reach of a grid that in turn has potential feeds from hydro (pumped or otherwise), solar pvc, solar thermal, geothermal, tidal, wind, and so on.
But I doubt that's likely to be the case.
(That you mention California makes me assume you're somewhere in the USA.)
This guy explains it better than I can. https://www.tiktok.com/@freightfamous/video/7294648129654246...
'It can't work here, and can never work here, because ...' and then followed by some basic math mistakes wrapped up into some wild extrapolations, augmented with some demonstrably pessimistic assumptions that every piece of the stack can't ever get better, or be swapped out for something better.
That suspiciously well-prepared rando on tiktok you used as a citation - the comments attached to that thread quite rightly point out his math mistakes, around hydro generation, dam sizes, and so on.
He's also assuming that rail will never augment / replace large tracts of (currently) road transport - which is a despairingly safe claim in the USA, where rail infrastructure is just awful, but it doesn't need to be forever.
He then assumes the only way you can 'green' truck transport is to use current-tech (Lithium) batteries - this is obviously not the case, and Lithium / solid state batteries are probably NOT the answer there anyway.
He says the logging truck uses 2.5 MW (not MWh) of power per day - and then talks about '3 megawatt battery pack' - not MWh.
Essentially he's ignoring the fact that the height of technology that is transport infrastructure today is the result of a century of roads, mining/drilling, refineries, fuel distribution, engine/truck design.
He's effectively repeating that standard trope - 'green tech' at year #10 isn't as integrated as fossil tech at year #100, so it can be dismissed.
Clearly some practice has gone into reciting this rant, but it's not a compelling argument for the 'we can't get there from here' camp.
https://www.tiktok.com/@freightfamous/video/7292048160296406...
If you think BC's mountainous forests can be logged using rail lines ... I don't know what to tell you. The rest is you projecting "exceptional claims" about green technology, that amount to wishful thinking.
I have no idea about local terrain, and really, if the mill(s) are at the bottom of the hills, and there's no longer-haul trucking component to the transport from felling site to mill location that could be better served by rail, then I'll concede that point.
On the other hand, you used this guy's argument to explain why electric trucks can't possible work in this environment.
And then used this same guy's electric truck to demonstrate how they can.
Pick one.
BTW, eventually "green" energy _has_ to work, because sooner or later, fossil fuels are going to run out. I mean, the sooner we figure this out in an effective way, the better. It's literally pointless to argue against the inevitability of needing truly renewable energy.
Depends on what you mean by "run out".
In reality, it will never actually run out. It will just keep progressively increasing in cost, with progressively less profitable uses for it, which will progressively be replaced by other technologies (including renewables but also others like sustainable aviation fuel).
Scaling to 365 days and 8 billion people is harder than 10 million and 6 days. But it’s a nice step in the right direction.
Whether burned forests are ever regenerated at all is something that I'm incredible sceptical about - there's very little oversight into companies' claims. Even if they are being replanted, you are tearing down potentially primary forest and important habitat and replacing it with tree farms.
Finally, burning wood is incredibly polluting and awful for anyone in the region of said power plants.
What happens is that combustible waste and young growth (especially the bits unusable by the lumber industry) get burned. This is a cylcle, not to be compared with coal or oil.
Yes, it's still polluting.
I wouldn't be so sure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63089348
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-ca...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/estonia-h...
- Portugal per capita GDP: ranks bottom 30% of the EU