Poland's clean energy usage overtakes coal for first time
ft.com
ft.com
Initial cost per unit is low and they're faster to build - that's the reason of their proliferation - and in case of personal use, subsidiaries.
Compared to nuclear - which takes many political terms to build - politicians can reap benefits early. Because nuclear is superior by every metric except:
- high initial costs
- longer lead time
Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
Exactly this.
The running costs per produced MW is so high that governments has to promise to effectively pay billions in subsidies to NPP:s both in terms of cheap state-backed loans and contract-for-difference power price because because they would otherwise not be viable.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-proposes-stat...
The reason that NPP operators now require guarantees from governments is to offset the incredibly lopsided benefits offered to intermittent renewables, including subsidies, cheap loans, guaranteed income regardless of demand and priority.
Nobody can effectively compete with the government handing out those kinds of benefits.
Wind or Hydro in Sweden gets no such unique subsidies.
If you take a source that has very low per-MWh price but very intermittent, it gets effectively highly prioritized and everyone else is paying price to match up with this wrecking ball. Except, usually, gas turbines which slot very very nicely into the swings in capacity related to wind and solar and thus benefit from them.
Edit: Spain added one in Feb 2025. Haven't looked up the UK yet.
1: https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/capacity-mechanisms/
Nuclear generally receives other subsidies too -- like cost overrun protection, insurance, and cleanup waivers.
They are vastly undercut by renewables and which is now starting to dig into their capacity factors.
Nuclear power simply is the worst possible fit for modern grids.
https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Do note that these are US renewable prices which are way higher than seen elsewhere both in Europe and the rest of the world.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/large-solar-arrays-batt...
Nuclear also has non-negligible ecological impact outside the power plant due to mining and processing of nuclear fuel.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.
> Because nuclear is superior by every metric
Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?
> Are they?
Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.
[1]: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.
> Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load
And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine.
> And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation"
They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened!
[1]: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYr...
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining.
This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.
At the global scale this would ideally balance out- more equatorial solar is cheaper in the winter since they don't need air conditioning, so you just send it up north. That's the only really feasible solution to seasonal variation in individual countries- it's totally unreasonable to store 3 months worth of power. Its also important to note that even with 2x or 3x oversupply, solar is cheaper than nuclear currently is.
[1]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#PVP [2]: https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/data/polish-power-system-oper...
IMO 99% is a much better target than 100%: almost all of the benefits for a lot less cost. Idle natural gas plants don't emit carbon.
(And by 100% I mean 99.99%. The grid isn't reliable enough to make more than 99.99% worth the cost).
You quote, and I believe, 5x solar irradiation power difference between December, plus a second-order 10% power consumption difference. Doesn't this mean already a 5.5x difference - if X panels are sufficient in July, then 5.5X would be needed in December? And July itself probably already needs overprovisioning anyway - Polish summers are not guaranteed sunshine. If "July" is overprovisioned 1.5x and we add the 5x for December for a combined 7.5x overprovision, plus batteries, is it still cheaper than nuclear?
If nuclear gets dismissed as an expensive fantasy, well, at least it has been built and operated at massive scale. I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
But many countries have large amounts of nuclear- many enough to supply most nighttime power. And in almost all countries, solar is by far the best and cheapest immediate option, and those countries should be building as much solar as possible until the marginal return of nuclear or storage or infrastructure for imports are cheaper than just building more and more solar.
> I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
No country is even close to a solar oversupply, much less a 2x or 5x. If there is no margin, why would those projects exist?
Resource reserves are unextracted and not replenished. They are not the same as storage.
This quotes Poland as having 89 days' worth of gas consumption with storage full, Hungary at 133 and Germany at 108. These are actual storage reserves, not untapped resources, at least for Poland.
The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. For heating, by far the most sensible solution is to use summer PV to heat up a bunch of sand/rock wrapped in a ton of insulation, then use the stored heat in winter.
That depends on the renewable type (e.g. 60% hydro is fine; 60% solar is not, because the sun goes down at night, and there can be extended periods of overcast weather which lower solar production) and what backup sources (like gas peaker plants) are available.
You can get to 100% with either hydro or geothermal, but most countries don't have that option.
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and doesn’t provide anything a modern grid needs.
Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.
Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
Most inverters don't work without grid synchronization. E.g. you lose electricity from your provider and your batteries / stored energy won't work either.
All new projects need to be A++ energy class rated which require you to use renewable energy, which is likely one of the main reasons for these increases.
It's a little complicated to weigh stratospheric emissions- the CO2 has a larger impact, and while the water droplets and contrails left by planes somewhat counteracts it (by reflecting incoming infrared) it's harder to compare intangibles like mercury emissions from coal. If you just say its all a wash, that plant is equivalent to 120 747s running full speed.
Private jets consume more like .9-1.5 tonnes per hour, so that's equivalent to ~900 billionaires. That's a bit less than half of them which is probably a lot more than were at the wedding. They also probably parked them instead of leaving them circling in the air.
If there were 90 billionaires who flew 12 hours each way in their private jets, then they probably released around 2.5 hours worth of Monroe Power Plant time over those 90 days- 8458 tonnes. Fun fact, the pilots and flight attendants probably used ~1000 tonnes of CO2 worth of energy etc and exhaled ~25 tonnes of CO2 in that time. 25 tonnes is small compared to the planes (>.3%), but in those 90 days the planes released just .11% as much as the coal plant.
Coal really truly sucks and it's unfair that I can't eat tuna without getting mad hatter disease.
[0] for instance https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessmen...
The original analysis of renewables in Poland in June 2025: https://www.forum-energii.eu/en/monthly-magazine-1