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Comment by ktzar | Hacker News Reader

Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero.

It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.

I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online

During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other countries, that's why I claim that 70% of its electricity is from renewables, even though the production share only accounts for 66%.

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> It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery.

IN PARTS of the country. In other regions (Catalunya, Andalucia) there is an ongoing drought which is severely impacting everyone and yeah, hydro-electrical companies had done some, let say questionable decisions regarding their water reservoirs.

it's easier to move power than water :-) So as long as it's rained a lot somewhere, that can be used as a battery. Most hydro power plants are not in Catalonia or Andalusia (https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1jVN1LmOoTTqg3e...)

I'm not saying that water should not be used as a battery. I'm just saying that there is a very serious water crisis in big places in Spain, and to make the people not very familiar with Spain about the difference in weather and climate that exists within the country. Basically, the parts near the Atlantic ocean are always very rainy, and this year some other zone with no sea got a lot of rain, but the Mediterranean coasts have really low raining in general, and in recent years the situation worsened even more.

Water is more and more becoming a scarce resource unevenly distributed. Industrials and agricultural processes, energy storage and domestic consumption are all crucial for the people and the economy.

> it's easier to move power than water :-)

It's easier to drink water than electrons.

> IN PARTS of the country

Figures. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

...I'll show myself out.

Spain and Portugal did something incredibly smart - both went against EU and won right to cap gas price for power production. That way MWh price is 1Euro in Spain right now while 56 in Germany 74 Italy. This one simple trick fixed their grid. Gas turbines no longer generate 24/7 while charging premium and skewing whole market.

https://euenergy.live

Gas turbines only run when no cheaper alternative can satisfy demand.

They also run to provide grid inertia when there aren’t enough utility scale batteries or grid forming inverters to do so.

https://brisk.news/read/articles:ykn94y0xr6ex9zt66zfs

nice website, would be cool to see at EU level.

https://energy-charts.info and https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

But the government is closing down the nuclear power stations so we'll be back to gas and coal soon enough!

Why is that a concern if already over 66% of energy is made of renewable sources?

Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)

There is no need for backup fossil power to account for more than a few percent of electricity production in the medium term.

https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining

Nuclear is different to fossil fuel power. It comes from a renewable source. It is bad only because it produced waste, but we're working towards solving this issue.

Uranium is not a renewable resource. All of the uranium on earth was formed in another star’s supernova and seeded in the proto planetary nebula before the earth coalesced.

That's why you use a fast neutron (breeder) reactor to extract up to 90% of the potential fissionable "fuel" from that uranium instead of just a few percent. Another option is the use of thorium of which is there is ca. 3 times as much. By the time both uranium and thorium run out there'll either be practical fusion energy or one of those new battery technologies which are always popping up.

Now we just have to invest a few hundred billion for a few decades until er have practical commercial breeder reactors, while still burning coal and gas while we wait and see whether the engineers can figure it out.

So you need nuclear to be scaled to the maximum demand?

People always forget that a mostly nuclear grid also require a some kind of storage or demand scalability.

With nuclear you have the option of running the reactors at 50% peak and produce energy at approximately twice the cost per kWh.

That's it. If you need to have nuclear capacity for a grid for say 30GW, despite average usage being just 10GW, your price is now $300/MWh rather than $100/MWh if you can run them 24/7

Why? All modern nuclear reactors do load following. I believe it’s even an EU requirement. And certainly the practice in France.

Nuclear costs the same thing whether you use it or not. If you meet the peak energy demand with nuclear you might as well save the construction of intermittent renewables.

Meeting peak demand with Nuclear (including the maintenance time) increases the cost of nuclear to even higher levels than it currently is.

Yeah nuclear costs the same, that’s the point. If you overbuild by two or three x to meet peak demand then per kWh you pay two to three times as much.

Honestly a big issue in my view is that we don't have more dynamic sinks.

Let's overbuild a mix of renewables and nuclear, then use the excess power to do things like green hydrogen.

Or maybe we will find other uses when electricity becomes too cheap to meter.

Doing that is part of the plan for the switch to renewables, and people are actively working on it. A friend of mine at Siemens energy for example is involved in such projects.

Yes, there are people working on that.

Unfortunately they aren't the people who drive energy policy in practice or who fund new generation (most of the time, at least).

From capitalist point of view, it's always easier to turn profit by market speculation[1], with providing gas turbine backup second.

[1] I work for considerably big wind power company building off shore wind turbines. Our main revenue source is market speculation :<

Nuclear doesn't scale quickly. It already adapts from 4GW to 7GW in Spain, but it does it slowly and ahead of weather conditions. What is needed is more co-located battery storage, and more gravity (solid or water) storage.

Nuclear is never meant to scale, you want to run the plant at 100% as much as possible to recoup costs. It is baseload power and you deal with peaks using peaker plants and batteries.

Maybe I don’t understand the requirement, but can’t a constant-rate supply provide stored power for peak demand and support baseline consumption off-peak?

If you build all the storage and peak capacity anyway you might as well use renewable power to fill the storage, it’s cheaper than nuclear.

Nuclear bomb can produce peaks of energy, while nuclear stations are good for base load only due to safety reasons.

A nuclear power plant does not suddenly give you the capacity to create a nuclear bomb.

security e.g. massive sandstorm from Sahara blocking a lot of solar

Not until 2035 at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Spain

That's 10 years to build alternatives assuming no further extensions or new nuclear.

If they approved a replacement nuclear project today it wouldn't be live in 10 years though.

> If they approved a replacement nuclear project today it wouldn't be live in 10 years though.

Why not? Japan was building nuclear plants in 4-5 years (sort by "Begin building"):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

Standardize on one design and you can churn them out like widgets: France built 56 reactors in 15 years.

Want reliable power 24/7 without fossil fuels? Will it: make a policy decision and follow through.

They will import from the French grid like all French neighbours that abandoned their nuclear programs.

Which is good for both France and those countries.

Only until something brings down the French grid. Power generation should not be too centralised since that creates too many opportunities for failure, accidental (storm, fire) or intentional (sabotage, war).

Same old, same old. In an interconnected grid, everyone is importing and exporting from and to everyone. Germany (which you are referring to), is still an exporter of electricity.

Not since 2023.

https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/239393/germany-becom...

Additional article highlighting the role of electricity exporter of France: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-07/france-is...

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