Solar leads EU electricity generation as renewables hit 54% | Hacker News Reader

Solar leads EU electricity generation as renewables hit 54%

electrek.co

280 pointstoomuchtodo306 comments

The growth is still slow compared to China and the evolution of the international order though. Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.

I love exploring these graphs: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

EU is doing just slightly better than US. US has the advantage of its fossil fuels but it's actually China that is doing the revolution. They are accelerating and at some point not too far away will reach abundance and switch off all the fossils.

It's unwise that the new US administration be pushing for the opposite of China. But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.

IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.

> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.

They might've just started the war 4 years earlier, then.

In 2014 Russia decided to attack Ukraine because its political ambitions had been thwarted.

A pro-Russian politician took existing EU integration plans and went "fuck that, we love Russia" instead and Ukrainians particularly in the West of the country turned out on the streets in a huge protest. In the aftermath, with Ukraine now definitively not in Russia's sphere of control, Putin ordered seizure of the eastern parts of Ukraine.

Four years earlier doesn't make sense, Russia has plans that are expected to work out in their favour, and Putin is less secure in 2010 than he is today, invading a neighbour looks very ambitious in 2010.

Moving the more recent part of the invasion - which starts with trying to seize Kyiv - forward by four years maybe makes more sense, but that compresses a lot of timeline.

There were not much disruption though, EU has payed Russia over €214 billions since the start of the war

There were calls to roll out renewables faster when Russia first entered Crimea, mostly focused on wind since it was 2014.

Traitorous climate frauds like Bjørn Lomborg responded by claiming that wind power didn't work and we should instead invest in some new unspecified alternative to wind and solar.

Are we looking at the same numbers? Looking at the graph you linked it looks like the EU is generating slightly more solar energy than the US, while using slightly above half the total electricity. In my book that constitutes doing twice as good as the US, not just slightly better. And while China's growth in renewables is impressive, the same can be said about their coal plants. Their energy mix looks way worse than the EU

From the dropdowns you can filter by source and type. China's fossils increase linearly and clean energy geometrically, which mean the energy mix is quickly becoming renewable heavy.

Also, due to the nature of solar this increase is actually sustainable for quite some time, these panels are manufactured goods and once you have the production lines in place it keeps going until the demand is saturated.

That just means that China started later. Europe is already past 50% and are on the top half of the S-curve where adding additional renewables has diminishing returns.

Look at the absolute values, china added 4X the clean energy as EU. Once the manufacturing of panels is in place they can keep doing it without further investment. That's not diminishing returns, that's actual power every time. Cars don't run on percentages, they run on kWh. There's nothing diminishing

The diminishing return happens when you have so many solar panels that on a sunny day you generate more than 100% of the electricity you can use. Maybe that situation is great if you want to subsidize solar panel factories, but you get less usable kWh for the same cost.

It’s completely expected for Europe’s installation of solar panels to begin tapering off as they get more return on investment by installing battery storage and decarbonizing other parts of the economy.

Then you store that energy or find a way to use it. Melt ore when its abundant, then make metal when it is abundant, then dig holes when it is abundant, then use the metal to turn the hole into a reservoir when it is abundant and eventually use the reservoir to pump in and out water as a way to store the abundant energy for use when its not.

We’re working on it!

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/09/10/new-alliance-aims-to-unl...

All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.

Not saying we should continue using fossil fuels forever, but being unrealistic about how hard the transition to intermittent renewables will be isn't sensible

Having more generation capacity also makes renewables less intermittent though, becuase for example with enough solar capacity then even on a cloudy day they may produce enough energy to cover demand.

It doesn't solve the problem completely, but it surely helps.

> All of these things are an order of magnitude more difficult and annoying than simply storing flammable gas or liquid in a tank and using it whenever you need it.

There’s quite a bit of complexity leading to the “simply storing in a tank” step.

On the other hand, the additional solar capacity during overcast days might still be worth the additional investment.

Electricity might become free on sunny days, but you'll still have to pay serious money for it during cloudy windless days. Even a solar panel operating at 10% capacity becomes worth the effort.

It's a little easier to read if you translate different types of production to CO2 per kWh:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

But as you say, the US is more wasteful with energy, which can make it seem better if you look only at absolute levels of the clean energy, and really bad if you look at absolute levels of the dirtier energy.

Using more energy is not itself "wasteful". For example, the US spends a bunch of extra energy on air conditioning, and as a result less older people die of heat deaths in the summer compared to Europe (and of course the population at large is generally more comfortable).

You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That backup capacity needs to be equal to the entire electricity demand. Renewables need to exceed that by a significant margin. So, either you build gas power plants and keep them idle, or you build nuclear power plants and switch them off when the sun is shining.

There is an interesting in-depth analysis by Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... (see page 25, for example).

Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?

PS: I built a low-energy house, heat it with a heat pump, and have PV on my roof.

Yes, if you want 100% renewable. However, 100% is not the goal right now. Studies have shown that 97% solar coverage can be cheaper than nuclear in sunny areas, for example. Obviously Europe isn't necessarily the sunniest so that number would have to be lower.

What are you going to do at night, or in Germany when it’s cloudy and rainy for a month straight? I can show you my electricity consumption from my heat pump in the winter compared to the electricity my PV system produced. Hint: it doesn’t work. And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day. Take a look at the Fraunhofer study.

One complements batteries with hydrogen (burned in turbines) or long term thermal storage.

Germany has plenty of salt formations for very cheap hydrogen storage, and there are no geographical constraints on thermal storage.

Tell the Fraunhofer about that.

I don't need to -- we can just look in that report you linked earlier (thanks!), on pages 5 and 6. They already know. They knew five years ago.

Yes, they mention hydrogen caverns and thermal storage on pp. 5–6 — but those are more theoretical potentials than real, scalable solutions today. That’s why even in Fraunhofer’s own scenarios we still see 500–750 GW of wind + PV (6–9× average load) and 100–150 GW gas backup on top. In practice, it’s the massive renewable overcapacity that smooths supply, with storage playing only a limited supporting role.

How are they not scalable? And realize that even in the fantasy of an all-nuclear world, electrolyzers are still required: they are needed to make the hydrogen that's the feedstock for synthesis of ammonia, without which world agricultural yield would be much lower.

Given that this all-nuclear world has electrolyzers, what then prevents these from being driven by renewables (perhaps buffered short term by batteries), and the hydrogen then stored (as has been done for decades in underground storage caverns, just like natural gas is stored)? And once that is done, what prevents some of that hydrogen from then being profitably used to drive turbines when electricity prices are high? Gas turbines burning hydrogen are nearly identical to ones burning natural gas (just minor differences in the combustors) and have been available industrially for decades.

Using reasonable projections for cost (some of which have already been superseded by lower figures), we can estimate the cost of providing synthetic baseload from wind/solar/storage in Europe, using historical weather data. It comes in cheaper than nuclear.

https://model.energy/

Gas? Which you then only use 5-10% of the time.

At least that's what I hear people saying.

Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need (read up on Fraunhofer on the thinking: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... ) . But that infrastructure will sit there idle most of the time. That’s not driving down electricity prices. And you’ll still end up with higher carbon emissions than France.

Solar panels are cheap enough that it pays to have gas plants that never run.

> Well, you gonna pay for building gas power plants that never run? Customers will need to pay for gas power plants that cover the entire electricity need

Paying for the plant but not having to pay for it to run most of the time is probably cheaper than having it running most of the time.

Maybe there's opportunities for net metering for customers with backup generators. At the right price per kWH, I would run my generator and feed into the grid... personally, my fuel cost is likely too high for that to make sense very often, but I think there's likely some hidden capacity there with the right incentives.

Take a look at this study: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Germany will require 100-150 GW capacity which cost about 1000 EUR/kW and would require an investment of 100+B EUR.

Electricity prices already skyrocketed in Germany and no end in sight.

Listen: I invested in PV, in low energy houses, in heat pumps - but the PV/wind strategy doesn’t work the way people would like them to in their ideology and Germany has proven that.

I think I'm more or less agreeing with you. You've got to build the gas plants (or something), for the dark and windless days of winter, right? That's going to be expensive, but PV/wind won't solve it, so you have to build it.

Now that you've built those plants, would you rather pay to operate them year round, or only when needed?

PV/wind won't help you reduce capex for winter, but it should reduce opex on gas. And that's something.

Spending capex on interconnections may reduce the total dispatchable capacity needed; if it's done carefully. Having more time zones in one grid helps because peaks correspond with time of day; having more latitude helps because day lengths and cloud cover varies. Having more of both helps because still air tends to be geographically bounded. But long distance transmission is expensive.

I’d rather build nuclear plants and not keep them entirely idle but forego the investment into additional PV and wind. Don’t get me wrong: when the sun shines and the wind blows we cover 100% of our need essentially. That’s great. But we can stop now. Because we produce too much on some days and put our grid at risk and we produce too little to often on others and put our grid at risk

> And batteries aren’t an option either, because I can’t generate any excess electricity during the day

You can't generate excess electricity because you don't have enough land or rooftop (I mean maybe you do, I'm talking about the typical homeowner). Utilities can overbuild panels because they're extremely cheap.

LFP batteries have a self-discharge rate of 2-5% per month. Once they're cheap enough, over-building batteries to move summer sunshine into the winter months also becomes an option*. At $100/kwh, you could power Sweden 6 months a year for about $60bn (EDIT: $6tn, sorry) in batteries (yes labor and everything else will probably double that cost). And that doesn't even account for recent advances in sodium batteries, which reportedly bring that price down to $20/kwh

* (Any battery experts know why this might be wrong? I'm using basic arithmetic, not physics. That tells me a battery charged to 100% in July or August will still have > 70% charge left in December)

Germany would require a ballpark of 100 MILLION tons of Teslas Megapack grade batteries to run on battery for 2 weeks - which is even shorter than what we had to endure due to “Dunkelflauten”.

Why would Germany need to run solely on battery for 2 weeks? Do you expect 2 weeks with 0 sun and wind all over continental Europe?

In any case, at $100/kwh, it would cost $250bn (EDIT: $25tn sorry) in batteries and maybe the same in installation costs to power Germany for 6 months a year. At the lower $20/kwh price tag it would be more like $5tn, compared to Germany's ~$4.5tn GDP. Over 10 years it could be done.

(And 6 months' storage is maybe too much anyway)

I mean not the whole Europe and this is obviously geography-dependent, but those "dark periods" are fairly common for Germany, as in there are weeks-long periods where Germany itself produces basically no electricity from wind or solar. In the most extreme case some years back, that "dark period" lasted almost two months.

This isn't to say they can't import it from elsewhere, they just can't make any of their own. Adding more capacity wouldn't do anything, it would take an incredible amount of batteries to handle the more extreme end of those "dark periods".

But that's my point. It would cost 1 year's worth of German GDP in batteries to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. No one would ever need that much battery backup. And while it's a huge number, it's not an unfathomably huge number.

So, just jack up the debt from 60% of GDP to 160% for battery packs?

That's the absolute most that handling the absolute worst case could cost today. It can only get cheaper from here. And there's no need for government debt.

Because historically we had periods of a couple of days or weeks in a row where wind and solar were essentially non-existent:

https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/

Yes, we had these scenarios of 2+ weeks w/o sufficient renewable energy source MULTIPLE times: Google “Dunkelflaute”.

Batteries are definitely an option for day -> night shifting. If not today, then soon, and without requiring and technological advances.

Seasonal or month-long periods of low-generation are another matter, and as-yet an unsolved problem. It may be that synthesizing fuels ends up being a sensible option here.

There is another under discussed alternative UHV power transmission, e.g. south to north: Morocco has great conditions for solar. Or East to West, the sun rises and sets at different times.

We still need more storage and generation, but a better grid would help a lot.

Solar , wind and batteries are easier to add piecemeal though. Nuclear for countries that don't already have it is a huge investment.

No need to obsess with solar if it doesn't work for you, its just that solar is so good. It uses manufactured devices that you just point to the sky and makes your machine run. For stability of course you need something like nuclear or storage.

Industrialized countries generally need stability when it comes to electricity. People also want to watch TV whenever they like and take a hot shower whenever they feel like it.

Storage helps even out spikes.

In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.

We’ll, I’ll take that back - we probably solved all that by running our economy into the ground

> In Germany: probably not so much when wind and PV aren’t busy for a month straight and we still need to keep our industry up and running.

Please do go ahead and show some data on when we had a month long solar eclipse without wind.

https://www.tech-for-future.de/dunkelflaute/

A couple of weeks happen from time to time

Pursuing an industrial strategy predicated on eternal cheap Russian gas (a strategy no doubt encouraged by Russian influence post-GDR) left Germany vulnerable to this situation. It is indeed admirable that they are willing to give it up now for principals, unlike Orban and Hungary.

Yeah, well, it was also very much “get rid of nuclear” that accelerated this path.

Allegedly the Russians also heavily encouraged the German Green movement to go hard against nuclear energy.

Yes that's what nuclear and storage helps with

Some things need reliable, dispatchable, energy. But a lot of demand could (and probably should) be shifted to when energy is abundant.

In an industrialized country like Germany - not really. You’d be surprised how little day/night affect our electricity consumption…

The hot shower thing is an interesting example, since the tanked ones generally have a lot of flexibility in when they heat the water.

> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

I'm not aware of that, because it's a lie. Storage is another alternative.

Read up the Fraunhofer study on how Germany can become renewable: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

Hint: we’ll still end up producing more carbon emissions than France. Storage doesn’t exist in the magnitude needed.

Now lets understand how the French grid works.

France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

That report is from 2020. Costs have fallen greatly since then, particularly for battery storage. And even so, that report doesn't say fossil fuels are needed (although the "net zero" solution still is allowed to burn some, I'm guessing because CO2 absorbed into the oceans isn't being counted?) It even says explicitly that hydrogen would be used for long term storage! See pages 5 and 6.

With hydrogen available renewables can straightforwardly get to 100%. Germany has plenty of geology for hydrogen storage. As I mentioned elsewhere, long term thermal storage is also a possibility, with recent developments there suggesting very competitive capex.

Thats like available technology at German industry-need scale?

If not, grow that industry. Just like one would have to do with nuclear if one were to adopt that technology. You do realize that existing burner reactors cannot power the world for more than a few decades, right? The available cheap uranium runs out. Breeder reactors are not commercially available, or available at a cost competitive even with existing commercial burner reactors.

(The French have given up on their breeder development program, cancelling Astrid, the proposed next project, until at least 2050.)

Renewables and storage seem much more quickly scalable than nuclear, as demonstrated by the yearly percentage rate of increase in their deployment.

> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?

Because solar is ~5x cheaper and 1000x more deployable

It mystifies me that more people dont get this.

5x cheaper means you can add the cost of storage on top and it's still cheaper than nuclear power.

Because it’s not correct.

You need either nuclear or gas (like 100% capacity, idle most of the time) in addition to massive investments into the grid to make it work (at least in Germany).

I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up as a backup and what the cost of that is. It’s not me making that up but the Fraunhofer: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

There is no storage in existence that would allow us to run an industrialized country from battery backup. We are talking ballpark 20 TWh of storage which would require 100 MILLION ton Tesla Megapack gear.

>You need either nuclear or gas

This is straight up misinformation. Nuclear power is not a peaker.

Gas is, batteries are. Nuclear power provides baseload and must be paired with a peaker too - almost always gas (France uses epic amounts of gas when its nuke plants are down for maintenance).

The reason why we have gas as a peaker instead of batteries? Gas is cheaper, and batteries dont get lavished with subsidies like nuclear power does.

>I don’t understand how people seem to NOT understand that you need the ENTIRE capacity when wind and solar act up

We look at real models based upon real data, for example:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

FUD and misinformation is a bad way to approach any scientific topic, whether vaccines or energy policy. Id recommend not doing that.

Dude, France has a fraction of our carbon emissions even of we continue to expand our renewable energy strategy - take a look at

https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

I’m not saying “no gas”. I’ saying: no more PV or wind because we already stress our grid with too much electricity on some days and we have periods of days or week where we need to essentially generate 100% without any PV or wind.

You linked the same study for 5 times in this thread - you still misrepresent it's focus. The study concerns itself with the influence of social acceptance and how that reflects on the cost and efficiency of 'going green'.

I accept Fraunhofer’s technical modeling: they explicitly size ~500–750 GW of PV+wind by 2050 (≈6–9× average load) and still keep ~100–150 GW of flexible gas turbines plus sizable batteries for reliability (pp. 5–7). They target ≥95% cuts in energy-related CO₂ vs. 1990, but that still leaves a non-zero footprint—nowhere near France’s nuclear-heavy intensity (p. 11). Where I part ways is economics: today’s ~40 ct/kWh retail reality makes their rosy cost outlook look detached from how this overbuild-plus-backup approach plays out on the ground. I can appreciate Fraunhofer’s technical simulations—they’re excellent at that—but I’m street-smart enough to separate modeling optimism from economic reality, and that’s a distinction worth keeping in mind.

Maybe some street smart and “nuanced” thinking is something to consider? :-)

Is solar, in terms of pure amortized cost, given the actual solar power collected, really 5x cheaper?

I'm not doubting you, but we know that in some countries solar will have a power ceiling (cloud cover, etc)

If solar or wind are cheaper than the fuel for gas plants you can save money by deploying them.

Here a blog with an interactive website to explore that:

https://electrotechrevolution.substack.com/p/renewables-allo...

> This means renewables are economically worthwhile based solely on the fuel savings they provide. Even if they would never fully replace fossil power plants, but only reduce how much fuel those plants consume, they would be worth it. Simply reducing fossil fuel use during sunny or windy periods—or when batteries charged from these periods are available—saves more money than the entire investment in renewables. That's how remarkably cheap solar, wind, and batteries have become—and precisely why they're winning around the world today.

You factored in a new grid and backup nuclear plants/gas power plants requiring >100B investments in Germany or Tesla Megapacks in excess of 100 metric tons? Take a look at what is needed to make Germany “green” by a reputable and independent institute: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...

I skimmed the study you linked. It has a focus on the social aspects of renewable energy, namely would the population react with acceptance or resistance (or varying degrees thereof ) and is divided into the corresponding scenarios which influence the outcome. That said, the summary clearly states that it is both technically feasible and more cost efficient if suffiency with renewable is realized if you can build on wide social acceptance.

I think this paints your statements in a different light. You omitted the studies focus on social aspects.

Well, 5 years later past publication and with “the highest electricity prices, a high carbon footprint compared to neighboring countries, challenges with network stability and 3 years in a recession with major mass layoffs in the news every week” I can reassure you that the math of cost efficiency was certainly off and the population has serious concerns about the feasibility.

I do trust their math on carbon emissions and capacity calculations wrt to renewable energy and gas power plants though.

So, you take the results on their calculations, divorcing them completely from the preconditions and all variables;not to mentioned outdated data - and we should take this as the base of our future argument?

Fraunhofer’s own math says 2050 electricity demand is ~700–750 TWh (≈80 GW average load), yet they assume 500–750 GW PV + wind — that’s 6–9× average demand and 5–7× today’s installed base (p. 15). On top of that, they still need 100–150 GW gas turbine backup plus major battery storage (p. 17), i.e. almost the whole peak load duplicated in flexible backup. In their model this cuts CO₂ by >95 % vs. 1990 (p. 11), which I accept technically. But given we already see close-call outages in Germany during “Dunkelflauten,” and given that today’s reality is ~40 ct/kWh for households instead of the 7–9 ct/kWh Fraunhofer projects (p. 65 ff.), I find their economic modeling divorced from the trajectory we’re actually on.

Can you follow?

> You are aware that the EU must choose between nuclear or gas to produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

Which does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.

Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.

You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.

> Considering that the EU classifies nuclear as equally renewable as solar, why should we rely solely on solar?

Why waste money on horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power? Who looks at Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C and friends and draw the conclusion that they want some more?!?

> Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.

The regime can just make it illegal to do rooftop solar or home batteries. In a functioning country this is easy enough to push through as a safety measure (lithium battery fires are legit scary, at least in videos). In the U.S. you can just start a campaign to get people fired for endangering their neighbors with dangerous woke energy, no legislation needed at all.

> either you build gas power plants and keep them idle

Given that we already have a bunch of Gas plants, do we need to build new ones, or could we just maintain the ones we have?

Not all gas plants are made equally. There's a huge difference operation-wise between "able to scale at any moment from 0% to 100% within 15 minutes" and "can start going online within 30 days".

Most current plants are either designed to run basically all the time, or only run a couple of hours multiple times a day.

A renewable grid needs generation which is fully shut down for months, but can scale up to 100% within days when weather forecasts predict it'll be needed. The current plants might work as a stop-gap measure, but long-term we'll need to build something designed specifically for this application.

The problem is that nuclear had a fixed cost per year, not per unit produced. A reactor sitting idle costs about the same as a reactor running at 100% capacity.

This makes them fundamentally flawed as backup generation. Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity when operating at full capacity, having it run only 5% of the time makes it completely unaffordable as it'll cost 20x as much.

When used traditionally, nuclear costs about $175/MWh. Solar and wind costs about $50/MWh. Use nuclear as backup and it'll cost $3500/MWh. Orrr, you've suddenly got a $3450/MWh budget to spend on storage for renewable energy...

> Nuclear is already the most expensive source of electricity

Lmao, meanwhile France had the cheapest clean electricity of the developed world for the past 70 years, while Germany paid 2-5x more depending on the period

It's only expensive for new built reactors in Europe because we've given up on the technology a long time ago, countries which made it a national priority and kept the know how are still enjoying cheap nuclear energy. If Germany didn't spend decades and billions on green lobbyists in Bruxels the story would have been very different

Why do you think China is building 30 new reactors right now and have planned for dozen more? They have all the coal and manufacture the vast majority of solar panels and windmills worldwide but they still go for nuclear.

Almost as if having a diversified energy mix is desirable...

This is only about electricity generation not overall energy usage (transportation, heating, etc) from given source. This is always misleading and gives impression that renewables cover 50% of needs already. Its so much worse - it's only around 20% in EU:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

They are also very fast at electrifying everything. Especially for transportation, they built large high speed train network(runs on electricity) and are far ahead in electrifying the public transport like busses which also resulted in Chinese electric cars dominance. Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable. US, EU should just drop everything and go electric or in a few years will look like backward civilizations because China is exporting that all over the world.

How much of total transportation is trains?

Not great. 7.0% of person-kilometers travelled.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

That's in the EU, though. China?

China is probably doing it for geo-political purposes (ie: if there is no oil, I can still move people with trains). They are ready to take a financial hit for that safety net. Europe is in a similar predicament but even the Russian war didn’t seem to teach them a lesson?

There already more people in EVs than in trains

Trains also enjoy great economies of scale, so once you have high ridership and an extensive network, you aren't taking a financial hit anymore. For medium distances, like 300–3000km, trains also provide speeds that passengers can't get any other way, because they avoid the huge overhead of going through an airport. It's an investment, not an expense.

But China has also electrified a lot of its cars and trucks, and continues to do so rapidly.

>Future is electric, USA can't give up its fossils and EU not happy about ICE cars being phased out(or more precisely someone else winning the phase out) but that's really inevitable

Claims like this would need to be quantified further in order to make any real predictions, but I think these sorts of predictions about future electrification may turn out to be shockingly wrong.

For example, many predict we have or will soon hit peak oil. Whereas I would wager it will continue to grow. You didn't mention global oil production, but I want to get specific. 50 years from now I think global oil production will be higher than it is today.

There is a strong desire by many for oil production to decrease and to electrify, but the incentive structure just isnt there. It's too cheap and useful and the energy demand is effectively unlimited. Im not even saying we shouldnt move away from it. Just that we wont.

Oil isn't a binary for energy though. There's a growing need for it in other industries, from plastics to pharma to fertilizers. Moreover, oil production is currently staying high because the OPEC cartel can't simply afford to shut down well production - only scale it down very gradually and pray that no one finds out (which is impossible given that oil is sold on the spot market). On the other hand, American Big Oil is dependent on global prices - too low and drilling deep or fracking becomes infeasible for them, while high prices mean economic slowdown (due to domino effects on other industries) until OPEC bandies together to stabilize prices to reasonable levels (which is $65-75 per barrel).

Currently we're in a situation where OPEC, remembering 2014 and hell bent on diversification, is offloading record quantities of crude into the market, to ensure that American production stays infeasible.

Yes, hence more demand for oil

less d3mand for oil, more demand for energy, much more to the point is the endless potential of abundent solar energy and the comming crisis caused by the end of scarcity your grandkids will dealing meems of archiologists finding fossil fossil fuel cars

Anything that needs oil can be produced from coal. There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.

The catch is that making coal liquid requires a lot of energy. If that energy comes from coal itself it is a very dirty process. But if energy comes from renewables or nuclear, it is not an issue.

In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.

Why would you extract those things from coal, when right now there's plenty of oil?

Coal is enormously more abundant.

Yet more costly and injurious to extract.

That's highly variable - a significantly large volume of coal mined globally is via bucket-wheel excavators / mobile strip mining machines.

That's overburden removal followed by near surface bed extraction with machines - no underground mining, underground being the mining domain that sees high injury and death rates.

Regardless, fuel from oil or fuel from coal is still fuel from dead and buried organics, from resurfaced long buried carbon products, and still introducing more CO2 into the atmosphere which is counter productive toward any goal of reducing the insulation factor of the atmosphere.

Long term if people would really like to do something with CO2 emissions then CO2 captured from atmosphere can be used for chemical processes instead of coal/oil.

Got a link to a Technical Economical Feasibility Report on this?

As in, what can practically be achieved in the real world at large within the next 25 years that can be immediately funded with a forward capital loan to break ground on a plant within 12 to 18 months and start operating within five years?

How does actual atmospheric carbon capture scale out within a useful time frame?

We've taken 150 years to emit all this carbon. Why do you think that a solution that takes more than 5 years isn't practical? I don't think the real world is actually where you're living.

> Why do you think that a solution that takes more than 5 years isn't practical?

A better question would be why do you think that is what I said or implied?

I'm well aware that in the future we will all be flying jet-ski's and teleporting to Mars, today I'm more interested in near and mid term policy, for one of many examples the recent CSIRO cost and benefits report on nuclear vs renewable strategies in Australia (what did that conclude, and will it swap policy decisions).

Given you've apparently taken the mantle of one who lives in the real world rather than the dull fantasy world I inhabit perhaps you could expand on the existing abilities and plans for carbon storage and fuel from air and contrast the achievable volumes within time frames that matter against the current and projected volumes of carbon emissions.

We're mostly all looking for a path forward in my neighborhood, a little less interested in wishful thinking about distant futures, so any pragmatic detail you can provide about next steps would be constructive.

> I don't think the real world is actually where you're living.

Cheap swipe kragen, I've previously thought you could do better.

Hmm, you're right about the tone. I'm sorry about that.

CO2 is an incredible stable molecule. Carbon capture is a hoax under our current economics.

But then you'd have now a gigantic capital outlay to convert your supply chain of chemical from using oil and gas to start using coal as a feedstock. Again, why?

Because solar energy is free, while oil and gas are scarce and expensive. This will make your oil-fueled products economically uncompetitive against Chinese products made with solar energy. Not this year, but two to five years from now.

I was under the impression that we were discussing crude as feedstock for chemicals versus coal. I was not discussing what we would be using as the energy source.

Oil-based petrochemical chains are shorter, cleaner, and more energy-efficient. Coal-based chains substitute chemical routes via synthetic gas and methanol, with higher cost and more energy usage.

It makes sense for a country like China that is not rich in oil and has vast coal reserves, but not in the environmental sense, only in the strategical, geopolitical sense.

So many wrong points here. The coal to liquid (CTL) process looks good on paper up until it isn't. Like you mentioned, it requires a lot of energy, energy which most countries cannot afford to divert. There's no point in using nuclear or renewables for CTL when SABIC can simply undercut you on price by 10x or more.

> There are estimates that liquid fuel produced from coal can compete with oil when oil cost is 80-100 USD/barrel.

Oil is currently at 61-65 USD per barrel, with OPEC ensuring it stays that way because even they know it's only going to fall from there. Even the 61-65 USD price point leaves a bad taste in their mouths.

> In fact with renewables and storage leading to cheaper electricity, the price competitiveness of coal-based liquid fuels will only get better.

No, with renewables and storage offering cheap electricity, oil also gets cheaper!

In fact, I'd argue that CTL is something only countries with extremely abundant domestic reserves of coal can do - China, South Africa and Australia. In fact, nearly every planned CTL plant has been delayed or scrapped in the US as infeasible.

Europe hit its peak oil some time ago and the peak wasn't that high. Anyway, electricity is inherently more efficient and less problematic than the chemical alternatives. I guess you can bet on chemical energy if you have plenty of it. Its just that electricity is superior in every way.

Also fossil reserves have other uses too, I also don't expect oil production going to 0 anytime soon.

Yeah that's why you have to use GLOBAL oil numbers. They increased imports of oil when the production went down.

Global oil numbers went horribly wrong when Russia invaded Ukraine. Prices multiplied and EU was left paying for an invasive force because it was still not %100 renewable. Considering the damage done by the oil supplier war machine, fossils are just outrageously expensive. Biggest mistake ever was to rely on fossils.

I dont understand what you are saying with this comment. They were importing before the war now they are still importing. That just shows how durable the demand is for oil.

Its not durable demand for oil, its a demand for energy and shows how bad idea is to rely on suppliers you don't control. Build enough renewable energy infrastructure and the demand for oil goes away.

Yeah that's great. But solar/wind wont meet unbounded energy demands. It doesnt meet current energy demands.

> But solar/wind wont meet unbounded energy demands.

Solar: 23,000 TW-years/year, every year until cosmological time passes and the sun's luminosity noticably changes

Fossil: 900 coal + 240 petroleum + 215 natural gas = 1,355 TW-years total, and then it's gone forever

https://www.iea-shc.org/data/sites/1/publications/2015-11-A-...

The only source that could ever beat a genuinely unbounded demand, is if we somehow figure out how to tap the dark energy which is causing the universe to expand.

In the meantime however, photovoltaics would get us all of the way to a Kardashev type three civilisation; humanity is currently 0.73 on that scale, it's an exponential scale with a factor of 1e10 between each integer.

> It doesnt meet current energy demands.

Tomorrow is not today.

I wouldn't bet against your 50 year prediction but that's because there will always be more infrastructure to extract oil, even as the oil left to extract dwindles. My own prediction is that rates of oil extraction will continue to increase with minor fluctuations until about 2160 and then fail off a cliff.

Conventional oil peaked around 2008. Shale oil (and others that need fracking)'s peak should be somewhere between 2019 and now IIRC

It's not that there's is less and less oil, it's just that harder and harder to get it

Energy demand is unlimited, but oil isn't cheap anymore. Synfuel will eventually replace petroleum as PV gets cheaper, but also an engine to convert oil into electricity (or, almost equivalently, mechanical work) is too expensive to compete with PV when you have grid access.

Trumpism is clearly spreading… The reason China solar is booming is because of structural incentives. Solar is “dirt cheap” compared to oil/gas. That’s why Africa is importing records of it and breaking that record every next year. It’s not because it’s eco-friendly (people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what that means), it’s because it’s more affordable.

In Tunisia, the pay-off time for a solar installation is around 4-5 years (granted we still have net-metering, so free storage). You are either ignorant or too poor to not install solar.

Exactly! Few people may care about climate or whether energy is clean, but I'd argue that for most people, the cost is more important. My friend in Shanghai owns a BYD EV. The electricity cost is equivalent to around 2 Liters of gasoline per 100 km. That’s more than 100 MPG. If he charges during the night hours when electricity costs only half, he gets 200 MPG!

"people in Africa or Pakistan don’t know what [eco-friendly] means".

My word. I can't speak for Pakistan, but the good folk in Africa know damned well the value of their environment.

For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.

No only do they understand ecology, they seem to have a firm grasp of law as well.

Why you would imagine that a billion people don't know that they depend on the environment is something for the mirror.

> but the good folk in Africa know damned well the value of their environment.

I guess I was just exaggerating for effect.

> For example the objections to Shell's planned seismic oil exploration of the coast of South Africa is vehemently opposed - on largely environmental reasons - by local residents. They have obtained an injunction and are now opposing it in their constitutional court.

Same thing in central Tunisia, though without courts; people just scared off the multi-nationals into leaving. Shale gas is very dangerous in populated areas and Tunisia has a quite a bit of it. But it's not really worth to extract expect for the people doing the extracting.

It must be considerably easy for China to do all this since a lot of this stuff is made in China.

However, electrical solutions are often more efficient, so this can be misleading because a transition means you're getting a large amount "for free" as a result of the improved efficiency.

Instead of moving your car from oil to solar, you're moving the car from oil to electricity, and then electricity is fungible so you don't care that it was made with a solar array - but the efficiency win was from going to electricity.

You have to distinguish between transportation (electricity and oil) and source of energy (only oil).

To have electricity you would need to invest at once in both generation, transport (the grids are not enough), storage and change in use (replace cars with electric ones). Your return will depend as well on the technology developed and none of the above fields is stable yet.

I am a fan of going electric, even if only for more sovereignty, but it is not as simple as "electricity is more efficient".

You have to be especially careful when comparing oil/gasoline vs solar/electric through. Oil has an especially well developed infrastructure for it being drilled, refined, delivered and stored. Electricity on the scale to power all transportation does not, so there are large short-term costs.

In terms of effeciency, you don't replace a billion BTU's of oil with the same amount of electricity, what you want is locomation. Only about 25% of oil's energy ends up spinning the wheels, compared to 85% of energy using an electric powertrain.

In rich countries the electrical grid only needs to roughly double to power all transportation. The US did that in the 01960s, and China did it in the 02010s and probably will have done it again this decade.

This is why I genuinely suggest PV cells mounted into the bodywork of EVs. They'll "only" add 10-20 miles per (good weather) day depending on the specifics, but this is a significant fraction of the (mean) miles driven per day per vehicle, which means the necessary grid upgrades are much smaller.

Almost all those cars still need to be charged, the weather won't always be good, people don't generally choose to leave their cars parked in direct sun if they can help it, etc. — but as a systematic reduction in impact over the entire power grid, it's non-trivial.

The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission. Even if you assume it’s split 24/7 each car only uses roughly 500 watts averaged throughout a year.

More importantly if 100% of new cars went electric it’d still take 25 years to finish so it’s a rounding error to grid operators outside of a trivial number of substations for fast chargers. As crazy as it sounds when you include training LLM’s are using more electricity than every EV combined.

> The grids is minimally impacted by EV’s. A great deal of charging happens at night when there’s vast excess capacity in generation and transmission.

In this context, solar power, charging at night is the exact opposite of a good idea; if anything, you want the power to leave the cars at night to run everything else.

Electricity is already beating oil for lots of low temperature applications (e.g. home heating and cooling) because heat pumps are so much more efficient than burning fuel.

So 20% from renewbles, 10% from nuclear, and roughly 25% from fossil fuels and 45% lost as waste heat when using fossil fuels.

So we're more than half way there.

Yes, because you can't just increase capacity with solar. It has to be backed up by base power. Add 10% solar? OK now you need 10% from natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc. You need to add both solar and something durable then you can just use the solar until you cant.

Look what happened in Portugal when it got cloudy.

This comment is always so strange to me - do you really, seriously believe that the people setting up the grids never thought about dunkelflaute? And I don't mean that in an attacking way, I'm genuinely curious about your thoughts there.

Like, yes, we're aware. At least in the german south we have the opposite problem right now. We are getting negative electricity prices (you get paid for taking some) more often because we have more electricity than we can use due to solar, at least during the day. Proper power storage is being built at this very moment all over the country.

Aside from dunkelflaute, the wind is statistically stronger when solar power generation is low, so at night and when it's super cloudy. And dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year. (german perspective, don't know enough about the other countries' grids)

Regarding that problem in portugal, you misunderstood something there. The big 2025 power outage wasn't caused by clouds, it was an combination of localized blackouts and a sudden power _surge_ which caused a cascading failure which couldn't be stabilized by the conventional power plants even though on paper they had the capacity. How did you get the idea it had anything to do with "cloudy" weather?

RE "... dunkelflaute is a couple days to weeks per year..." My guess is its VERY expensive to build the needed storage so the supply reliability matches the current reliability 99.99%? ? ( in my area there has never been any unintended power outages for several years ) Which is why its never been done? Then again maybe people will be more tolerant of the situation. I've always though smart meters could always have a "mode" to reduce everyone's max demand to a small amount ...like a few hundred watts ...too help handle extended periods of dunkelflaute

Open cycle gas turbines are the perfect low CAPEX high OPEX backup. They are what we currently use to manage the once a year winter storm.

Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.

People setting up the grids answer to politicians. They do what they can within the constraints given by public policy. If public policy is completely idiotic, like the one in germany, there's no much they can do other than try to duct tape whatever they can.

Electricity demand is elastic, and electricity is dynamically priced. Plenty of industries are able and willing to reduce their consumption to avoid paying 100x more than usual, or even get paid to reduce their consumption.

A data center with backup generators can easily switch from grid power to generator power. If you're installing those generators for redundancy reasons anyway, why not make some extra bucks by signing a first-load-to-shed contract with the power company?

> Electricity demand is elastic,

This is complete bullshit for the vast majority of industrial use cases.

Yes, but not for the vast majority of industrial energy consumption, because of the outsized consumption of electric arc furnaces and a few other things like that.

That are most efficient in capital terms when running continuously.

Yes, that is certainly true of aluminum smelters, but precisely because they are so energy-intensive, their capital cost is a smaller contributor to the cost of their product than, say, a pharmaceuticals plant or a machine shop.

Steel EAFs cannot be run continuously, no matter how much capital efficiency you might hope to gain by doing so. It's inherently a batch process.

Continuous flow process plants like oil refineries are also very energy-intensive, but on the other extreme from things like an EAF, are very tricky to ramp up and down. But most of their energy usage is thermal at relatively moderate temperatures, which is much easier to store than the high-exergy energy needed for things like EAFs, aluminum pots, and data centers.

.... and is that the maximum percentage of renewables 54% ? what is the minimum daily percentage? There should be a measure what is the maximum percentage over a month? to see how renewable system handles outages of renewables ( ie no solor or wind ? and storage is the sole supply? How long can storage supply the needed power is the next question ? The needed storage and transmission changes are hard and expensive.

That chart is misleading in the other direction, it’s comparing energy released by burning fossil fuels not useful work preformed.

A solar powered EV goes a lot further per unit energy working with electricity than per unit energy of gasoline. Heat pumps are vastly efficient using electricity than even the most efficient natural gas furnace. It’s actually more efficient to use natural gas to make electricity to then use a heat pump than it is to run natural gas to people’s homes.

I'm also loving projects like these [1] popping up all over the place. Looks like they are installing Tesla Megapacks with LFP cells. [2]

[1] https://vcrenewables.com/medway-grid-energy-storage-system/

[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-greenli...

> But what's actually beyond me is the existence of Europeans that demand more fossil fuels. It is double ridiculous because EU doesn't even have these fossil resources at any viable scale. It is largely imported, they must be on the payroll of US and Russia or very stupid.

> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.

If I find myself finding obvious "errors" in other people's plans and easy solutions they "just" have to implement then I'm usually missing something.

Europe's strategy to tie themselves economically to Russia for the purpose of peace didn't work out but a lot of the infrastructure and energy investments were made when that was the strategy. The other thing is that you're talking about electricity, fossil fuels have thousands of uses so you can't "drop everything".

Europe didn't tie themselves to Russian fossil fuels for the purpose of peace. They bought the cheapest energy available to them, and this was the basis of their economy. You can't just compete with oil and gas coming out of a pipeline, regardless what a computer programmer may believe about energy policy and electrical grids.

As someone that grew up in Europe it was clear to me and as far as I could tell every one around me that the economic, cultural, etc integration after the cold war was to develop a rules based relationship with Russia to reduce the risk of another war.

To a lesser extend but similar to how European countries tightly integrated with each other on all levels making an armed conflict less likely than otherwise.

Ugh, can we stop with the negativity every time anything environmental or energy related comes up.

Regardless of how fast anything was progressing there will always be someone saying NOT FAST ENOUGH, you're not adding anything here.

If you're not the fastest, it means that you're not doing good enough.

You must have some other sources than that site. Downloaded the CSV, and at the risk of misinterpreting the columns here is some simple filtering:

% of total energy generation

  EU Coal   9.64%
  US Coal  14.88%  
  CH Coal  57.77%

  EU Solar 11.19%
  US Solar  6.91%
  CH Solar  8.32%

Largest generation source

  EU Nuclear 23.57%
  US Gas     42.51%
  CH Coal    57.77%

This ofc only says something about generation and not consumption

Look at the absolute values, your kettle doesn't run of fractions it runs on absolute power and EU&US are about the same. USA has fractionally lower renewables because they have very large fossil production. EU is making up for its lack of fossils through high efficiency policies.

One of the biggest thing a lot of people are missing is that from this year Solar + battery became cheaper than coal in China. And avg annual price decline for solar and battery is still around 8-10% ie if you don't go to solar and electric machinery you will not be able to compete with China as they are about to reach the point in the next 10 year where electricity/energy is practically free.

It is weird to me that nobody wants to import Chinese electric cars. If Chinese investors and politicians are really subsidizing the production of electric cars, importing them would be basically having the new grid subsidized by a foreign government!

The usual argument is that this kills the domestic car industry, leaving us fully dependant on Chinese cars: what's going to happen when they hike their prices by 1000%, or threaten to stop all exports?

Then at least all the rare earths inside the cars we've already imported are inside or borders ;-)

Pretty sure it's because a domestic auto industry is considered strategically important to maintain in case of war. Also, the supply chain employs a lot of people and maintains industrially important skills.

But EU + US's total power generation only added up to 70% of CN's total in 2024 according to this graph.

CH? I don't think Switzerland is majority coal. Maybe you meant ZH or CN?

> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.

If this is not happening without government's help then it's not profitable. Which means a forced transition to solar requires to "drop everything" quite literally.

AFAIK its more complex than that. It requires high capEx at first, it needs the grid to match it and affects previous investments. The solar got cheap fast, wind didn't as much but it has its own advantages like it works when solar doesn't etc. A lot of government coordination is needed to work.

The governments can be very effective with that through providing long term visibility and reducing the risks.

If they hadn't shut down most nuclear reactors, some even after the war had already started, this wouldn't have happened.

EU did not shut down most of their reactors, Germany shut down a few.

Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.

Europe has plenty of coal that can be used as a good backup for renewable energy production.

I heard a few years ago that China was building up to two new coal power plants every week causing huge amounts of pollution. Looks like they still do. Yes they scale up renewable energy but what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate. At least with the EU and the US you can see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.

> what good is that if fossil fuel power generation scales at the same rate

It doesn't scale at the same rate though. Renewables are accelerating which means in China especially you see a trend of moving from fossil fuels to renewable.

The fossil thing about China is kind of understandable because don't forget that pretty much everything we all consume is made in China.

They were building new coal plants that were far more efficient, while also closing down extremely old inefficient and dirty coal plants. So overall it was a net gain.

China claims to be doing the revolution. If you look at the planned coal powerplants, they themselves posted, you would very much doubt that Photo OP.

In absolute units the coal usage in China has started to drop now in 2025.

> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.

The funny part is that we dropped our home grown nuclear power in favor of renewables, which are mostly provided by China since all the biggest manufacturers of solar panels and windmills are Chinese.

Why should we "drop everything" to pursue renewables when no one else is doing it? It's obviously not the right choice, we should be consolidating our nuclear power reactors AND developing renewable

Look into the history of pro renewable in Europe, the foreign ties, the whole german/france nuclear scandal, the common European electric market abomination, were not fighting China or the US, we're fighting ourselves

> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.

There are plenty of things you cannot do with electricity, try to make fertilizer or medicine with electricity instead of petroleum derivates

We dropped new built nuclear power because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy.

In the early 2000s we invested both in the nascent renewable industry and the nuclear industry.

Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver.

Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end nuclear subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???

> We dropped nuclear because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy.

Look at France again... It gave them unlimited cheap, clean energy and nuclear weapons, all at once. And then again, Germany, even if they went full renewables right now it would take hundreds of years to make up for the past pollution

> Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver.

Hm weird, we had 0 problem delivering back in the days when we really cared and had politicians with long term visions about their countries...

> Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???

Look at renewable subsidies lol... https://www.mr-sustainability.com/stories/2020/the-sky-is-th...

Let's understand how the French grid works.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

Have you heard of the Baumol effect?

Construction haven’t gotten meaningfully more efficient while salaries have increased to keep up with productive industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Looking at the actual data renewable subsidies are being phased out in the EU. Down to €61B in 2024 from peaking at €89B in 2020. They just aren’t needed anymore.

https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/api/fil...

Also truly love the link to a 2020 article from oilprice.com. Hiding your bias isn’t your thing?

Not true It's possible to make nitrogen fertilizer from air and water using electricity there are multiple European startups with working prototype systems. It is expensive comparatively to current systems as electricity is expensive but solar + battery is changing that rapidly. This is why I say most governments and the world at large are not ready for the change that is going to come with cheap electricity. Many countries will not need purchase from outside energy and fertilizer. Also the new fertilizer production systems are small enough that they can easily be transported to the area requiring fertilizer instead of moving 1000s of tons of fertilizer.

> Not true It's possible to make nitrogen fertilizer from air and water using electricity there are multiple European startups with working prototype systems.

At what price ? Who's doing it in any meaningful way ?

> but solar + battery is changing that rapidly.

Who's building your panels and batteries ? Are you just trading dependency from Russia to China ? Is it desirable ?

Nuclear is expensive AF and takes decades to commission. You put outrageous amount of money in for 10 years then you have free electricity for 40 years. With renewables you get the free electricity much more quickly at lower price.

There's nothing inherently Chinese in renewables, there are European companies who build PV from scratch.

Also, the more renewable you use the more fossils you have for other things like fertilizers or medicine.

> With renewables you get the free electricity much more quickly at lower price.

Daily reminder that we have still not solved the problem of energy storage for renewables at scale (i.e. the duck curve).

Nuclear is a greenish way to complement solar and/or wind.

Nuclear power does not complement renewables at all. Why should someone buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available?

Which means we have to factor in the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh.

That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

The duck curve talking point is years out of date due to storage buildout in California.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/

Yeah but not all places are California (constant sunshine) and even there the battery storage solutions so far are what, not even 20% of demand or something ?

Energy policy is very much locale dependent. The solutions that work for California do not work for most other places. In Germany we have periods where there are two weeks with no sunlight. Sucks, I know.

Of which about all storage has been built in the last 2 years.

Grids tend to operate on the timescale of decades. Do you realize what a complete disruption of the grid storage is now?

Storage does now work as long as you can cycle it every couple of days.

Then we of course also have the backup of open cycle gas turbines. Low CAPEX and high OPEX. A good solution for backups.

Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.

You know, the exact same thing we use today to manage the yearly peak.

So you're saying that cloudy countries should burn gas, or that decarbonised fuels will be cheaper than nuclear ? I don't believe that.

Cloudy countries should keep burning gas displacing as much as possible by installing renewables.

Then step up to storage and finally whatever solution we settle on for seasonal storage in the 2030s.

You don’t seem to comprehend how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is.

"just wait for the magic solution of the now+10 years" is what Germany has been doing for 70 years while France invested in nuclear. They're paying their electricity about 2x more than France while producing almost 10x the co2. Of course now that everyone fucked up for the best part of a century nuclear seems like a bad option... Nuclear didn't have to be expensive

Based on https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... France wasn't shielded from the increase gas prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

OTOH Finland has benefited from it's mix of mostly nuclear, hydro, wind.

The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.

The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.

Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.

Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.

A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!

At this point I have stopped caring about the renewables ideologues. We are very clearly funding a massive industry in China and becoming even more dependent on a single country than we ever were with fossil fuels.

It's not even clear that renewables are actually that much less carbon intensive because I believe there are some massive accounting shenanigans happening around emissions for building/recycling and we can't clearly check that out because it's all happening in China. They increased their coal consumption even more than their renewables consumptions by the way, that should be a clue.

And what the report failed to mention is that electricity consumption has fallen in the EU, precisely because the renewables has made it much more expensive, so people try to use less of it or go for alternatives (wood heating is making a comeback in rural areas for example).

And the EU keeps hemorrhaging industries left and right, so there is that. But I guess we will have "green" intermittent electricity sponsored by China, and that's supposed to be good somehow...

When people talk about countries having "energy independence", isn't moving to renewables the right move? (Since you reduce your demand for fuel inputs to 0, assuming a 100% transition)

For many countries, pure renewables plus batteries only works with an international grid. In a different thread here, Germany was coming up quite a bit during the dunkelflaute, and the only way to go pure renewable is to import energy from, say, Morocco.

It does achieve potential independence from current adversaries, but only by introducing dependence on other nations instead.

Countries like the US have it a little better independence-wise, except we need (a) significant buildouts of batteries that don't rely on rare earths, because we can't mine them here for environmental reasons, and (b) massive buildouts of solar panels in regions across the country.

The upper midwest has something similar to Germany's dunkelflaute- it gets cold enough windmills may even be net negative to keep their turbines ice free, and we can go weeks under total cloud coverage.

Supporting all of that is possible, but requires overbuilding the grid to such an extent that the carbon cost of the cement and metals added to the grid would extend the payoff period quite a bit. It's definitely not a free lunch, though probably better to start now than hope for miracle cold fusion or something equally silly.

I had to look up "dunkelflaute":

"A period of time in which little to no energy can be generated with the use of wind and solar power."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

Australia's reticence in embracing renewables has always seemed obviously corrupt to me given the abundant natural sunlight resources Australia is blessed with, combined with the 100% reliance on importing of oil-based fossil fuels.

Australia is self-sufficient in keeping the lights on, due to large coal reserves, but wouldn't be able to transport anything if petrol dried up (and I think Australia only has twelve days of petrol reserve storage). Just imagine the chaos... To the point I would think it would be a National Security priority to electrify transport and build whatever is needed to support that electrification.

There was a Turnbull era report that suggested they could have energy security AND water security, long term, by building 70 - 120 pumped hydro dams. Pumped Hydro would give them heaps of energy storage, and the dams could be tapped in severe droughts.

We got Snowy 2.0 out of that process, and a few state governments have some fast tracked private pumped hydro dams, but ultimately there isnt enough political spine in the whole country to tackle it.

We cant really scale renewables without storage, and battery storage at scale would probably suck up the worlds supply of lithium. The big battery in SA is great for market arbitration, and smoothing out the frequency, but if it was tapped to supply baseload, would not give you very long. The demand for these batteries would be huge if its left to them.

As it is we will move slowly in kinda the right direction, and probably get very lucky. Thats how Australia works usually, just a country of people gambling constantly on remaining relatively lucky.

> Australia’s NEM will see a massive increase in grid-scale battery energy storage capacity in the next three years. There are 16.8 GW of battery projects that could come online in the National Electricity Market (NEM) by the end of 2027. This would result in a ninefold increase in battery energy storage capacity in just three years - with 2 GW operational today.

https://modoenergy.com/research/australia-nem-big-battery-en...

https://reneweconomy.com.au/graph-of-the-day-the-stunning-ri...

Compare to ~22.5GW of total coal generation capacity and ~30GW of utility scale solar in Australia. This does not include behind the meter solar and batteries.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU/72h/hourly

> Just imagine the chaos.

The oil shortage in australia in the 70s inspired Mad Max.

We could do coal liquefaction if it came to it. But I'm unsure on how fast we could get it up and running, and how much fuel we could get. Might be just enough to allow for just enough transportation for food so no one starves.

Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.

Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )

https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks/european-...

Six-fold increase in battery capacity in Europe predicted by 2029.

not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.

Plenty of people are heating their homes with electricity already, that's what heat pumps are for.

North of the Alps, using solar to heat your home in the winter is unrealistic.

In Czechia, winter is already dark enough to make solar in the coldest months a rounding error.

Further north, uh.

I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.

This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.

"it can be generated in one place and used in another."

It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.

For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.

Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.

Yes, there are and will be issues. We should have started much sooner. But we absolutely have to do this.

"But we absolutely have to do this."

This = what precisely?

If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).

2055, if we manage to replace most of heating, transport and industrial use, the rest is manageable. But it's still lots of work for 30 years.

I think >95% of global electricity will be renewables or nuclear by 2032[0], >85% road vehicles green by 2035[1]; for everything else, limits are *at a minimum* 50% of the MTBF for the equipment but may be even harder, e.g. hydrogen jet fuel is theoretically possible but there's no obvious path to it.

[0] just extrapolate growth curves for PV and wind and you get 100% by then even without nuclear, but in practice last 5% of anything is hard

[1] needs new electricity not yet on the various grids, but not as much as the thermal power of the fuel burned as EVs are more efficient; mainly limited by production of batteries, and that itself is accelerating

Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1]. Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.

The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.

[1] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gas...

You forgot to mention the subsidies on Heat pumps

Those are primarily needed for retrofitting existing poorly-insulated housing. They say nothing about the suitability of heat pumps in general.

Neubauförderung KfW 297/298. And Gemeinden and Bundesländer also offer subsidies.

I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.

If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/...

I hope not. More times when electricity prices go negative is hopefully going to open up new market opportunities (outside crypto mining).

Generating chemical feedstocks from CO2, intermittent desalination, whatever process which is predicated on cheap energy.

The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.

The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.

Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.

Pray tell, why is the monetary union braindead? Asking for a friend stockpiling lire for collection value

It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.

Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.

> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members

AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.

>Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left

Don't worry, you'll join again eventually.

I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.

I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).

Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.

Wouldn't leaving the EU be far worse economically than any of these penalties you mentioned?

Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.

That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.

>Better ruined than a colony.

Not sure what you're referring to here?

It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.

> Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.

1. It is widely recognised, and irritates the poorer countries, that Germany and France benefit from the relatively weak Euro for their exports.

2. If you left the EU and obviously the Euro and devalued your currency, you end up with wild inflation. If there is anything a population hates, it is high inflation. Given your political situation in France currently, no government would last a year in that scenario.

3. Devaluing obviously causes bond rates to rocket, which means rolling over your current debt because extremely serious.

4. On top of that, mortgage rates rocket, people hate that too.

There is a reason countries don't just print money and devalue all the time. If it was that easy, everyone would do it.

> That would help with both the debt situation and our exports.

But the debt is denominated in euro. If you leave euro and create a new currency, the bonds will still be in euro, while your new currency will be worth much less. It's basically easier and less painful to default on the spot than to go through this.

I honestly can't understand the urge to get bankrupt. France is already famous for the revolution and eagerness to protest but this looks like you want to cause chaos just for the sake of it.

Entirely depends how on we leave. We could convert the debt when we exit. That's unlikely to please our debtors hence the gamble but "c'est la vie".

Anyway, independently of the debt, the euro is a huge weight to drag for the French economy, technically for pretty much all the economies of the eurozone part for Germany.

Yes, converting the debt more or less equals a default.

I don't see French economy being very dynamic without the euro. If the thought is to take on lot of debt denominated in local currency and then inflate it away (faster than what happens with euro), that only makes things volatile, not dynamic.

> Yes, converting the debt more or less equals a default.

It's not technically a default but it would definitely have a negative impact on France ability to borrow after so I get your point.

> I don't see French economy being very dynamic without the euro.

The French economy dynamism was doing mostly ok before the current wave of political instability. France still has great infrastructures, a highly educated population and cheap energy if we exit the european energy market which is artificially tying our energy price to gaz thanks to the shortsightedness of our neighboors. Plenty of advantages we could leverage.

Devaluation would solve the issue of the population being politicaly unready to lower its standard of living to lower labour costs on top of helping with the debt burden.

Then, there is the obvious political benefit of untying us from people we share neither the culture nor the vision. The argument that pulling sovereignity to gain power is a charade. The utter failure of the commission negotiation with the US revealed what should have been apparent from the start: the emperor has no cloth. Why agree to be in an union which only apparently serves to prop up Germany?

> which is artificially tying our energy price to gaz thanks to the shortsightedness of our neighboors.

There were plenty of opportunities to reform the price-setting mechanism of EU energy market, wonder why that never happened. There are several - frankly probably most - countries that are unhappy about it. I don't really understand why nobody makes it a top priority agenda.

> Devaluation would solve the issue of the population being politicaly unready to lower its standard of living to lower labour costs on top of helping with the debt burden.

Ah yes, make people poor in addition to making the state poor. How could that go wrong.

Funny you would mention the Greek debt crisis, because the next debt crisis looks to be in France.

Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.

The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.

I frequently see this sentiment but it's not really very informed or informative. Greek creditors took huge haircuts on the debt - that never gets mentioned.

Then, Greece had a choice, just like every other country always has a choice when faced with a debt crisis: Accept the terms of people who will bail you out, or default. It is always like this, because no-one is going to bail you out if it is apparent that the situation will just repeat. The Greek people voted to reject the terms of the bailouts, which meant leaving the Euro, printing their own currency, and accepting that the global capital markets would not be buying their bonds for the foreseeable future. The Greek government saw the choice and ignored the people, because they knew the alternative to the bailout was far, far worse. The only reason they ran that referendum was to try use it to bargain for better terms, they never had any intention of defaulting.

That's not me being misinformed. That's you intentionaly misrepresenting the situation.

The question is not if the Greek could refuse. The question is was the terms put forward by "the Greek creditors", that is to say Germany, were fair and in the interest of the union as a whole. If I put a gun to your head, no one will listen if I tell them I gave you a choice you could have refused. You just had to take the bullet.

Germany basically refused to Greece what they themselves got in 1953 despite the situation being in part caused by their own complete mismanagement of the economy, a situation they have yet to fix by the way.

I don't know what is more repugnant: what they did or that there is people defending it and having so little shame they pretend others are misinformed.

> I don't know what is more repugnant

This is an argument from fallacy. Not worth discussing further when you give replies like this.

> I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.

My understanding is that this was mostly a problem for eurozone countries and with the shared use of the Euro as a currency, rather than with the EU.

Even Flamanville is basically German industrial sabotage by the way of Siemens. Without their stupid bureaucratic "security" requirements the project would have been completed much faster and cheaper.

It seems insane to me that we agreed on partnering with a country that was aggressively against nuclear for a nuclear project.

It has been a long time since the last war now and everybody seems to have forgotten how Germans can be dangerous arrogant ideologues. The influence they yield on the EU is crazy and I don't think there is a way to properly balance it now. They are actively committing acts of war by the way of their political institutions but we do nothing. Inevitably the past will repeat itself...

Some numbers:

During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer. And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.

If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.

Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.

For the latter, see standard-thermal.com

> Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology

I've heard this before but can you explain why? A cursory web search tells me batteries hold charge pretty well for 6 months. And the new sodium batteries from CATL are certainly cheap enough.

The problem with batteries for long-term storage is the capacity. You would need an ENORMOUS amount of them to store months worth of energy.

For long term storage, capex is king, not round trip efficiency. The capex of batteries ($ per kWh of storage) is much too high. There aren't enough charge/discharge cycles to amortize that capex. This is unlike with diurnal storage, where there are many thousands of cycles over which to spread that cost.

Thank you that makes a lot of sense.

To go into more detail: you want to really aggressively minimize capex, even at the expense of round trip efficiency, for long duration (like, seasonal) storage. The interesting example from Standard Thermal is something that could reach a capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity (yielding heat at 600 C). This is three orders of magnitude better than batteries. Even tossing in 40% round trip efficiency from converting this back to electricity using steam turbines it would be vastly superior to batteries for seasonal grid storage.

There are varieties of batteries with somewhat lower capex and lower charge/discharge rates. Form Energy's iron batteries are of this kind. They would occupy an intermediate timescale, perhaps ~1 week, which could be good for leveling wind output.

France has 70% of their power provided by Nuclear.

> France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer

So, it's ~15 years away at current growth rates?

But they'll probably just get months-long storage at some point.

> in order to be fully solar based

I don't think anyone is suggesting that.

> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.

This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.

Or just balance the mix with some on-shore and off-shore wind which is anti-cyclical with solar.

Just solar without wind is a terrible idea. Which is why no one's doing it.

It's quite feasible in some places, like India.

If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.

This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.

Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.

So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.

Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.

We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.

We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.

> Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.

Why or when wouldn't one consider hydropower a renewable energy source?

Look at the Hoover dam

You mean low water levels? Isn’t it caused by agriculture water use? A dam allows to use more water (for agriculture) but one can choose not to use more.

Ex worked in an NGO that fights the expansion of hydro in Portugal.

There are several reasons. It's destructive, has very high emissions, and doesn't actually generate that much power because we have long-ish drought seasons. Hydro was fueled or fueling corrupt construction deals while destroying natural reserves and wildlife. In some cases, night-time hydro was much more expensive than any other power source.

Given the development of battery prices (and especially LFP and sodium ion) most new solar capacity will he solar+battery.

With some software tweaks, these are not only base load compatible, but can even take on grid frequency stabilisation.

Check out recent episodes of Tue Volts podcast. It's actually a bit crazy.

The better way to think about the grids energy mix is some matrix of reliability, predictability, and rotational mass.

Solar and wind have no rotational mass, are unreliable and unpredictable

Solar and wind are extremely reliable, because they are distributed. Unlike large-scalec fossil or nuclear, a single plant going offline isn't a big deal.

Solar and wind are quite predictable - it's just weather forecasting. We have a pretty good idea what it is going to produce 7 days from now - we just can't control it.

Solar and wind can provide rotational mass. Existing installations just aren't engineered for it, because grid following makes more sense in a fossil-heavy grid. If extra inertia is needed, batteries are the perfect source for it, as it can instantly scale from -100 to +100 to soak up excess or fill in shortages. Or we can just install a bunch of flywheels, no big deal.

>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.

You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.

Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2025/06/Ember-24-Hour-S...

Is that why electricity in EU is so expensive? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...

Yes, its because it is still short of %100 renewables and EU is importing its fossil fuels. When Russia invaded Ukraine it caused a spike in prices, now its coming down. Prices will go down as renewables proliferate, probably we will pay some fixed amount as equipment maintenance fee once its %100.

Our electricity was a lot cheaper when we had more nuclear.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that dismantling functional nuclear power plants, like they did in Germany and Sweden, has been detrimental for Europe.

Now the same people who were opposing nuclear are saying we should pursue wind and solar. Give me a break.

It's just Germany that shut down a few reactors, their internal politics and has nothing to do with EU or people who want renewables due to climate, ecology or political reasons.

No, Sweden did the same mistake. We shut down ~50% of our reactors and are now paying high prices. Completely unnecessary.

Still domestic politics. You should resolve your grievances with these countries really, I have nothing else to say.

Spain is on the same path: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energ%C3%ADa_nuclear_en_Espa%C...

Only when it’s dark, overcast, winter or really cold. Otherwise it’s mainly due to the extreme overcapacity required to handle distributed unreliable energy sources as well as an increasing fleet of electric cars, stressing every last kilometer of the grid. And windmills, a reliance on methane gas as gap-filling and a few other issues. (Sorry, I know snarking is frowned upon on HN - but we choose this collective delusion over the hellish, yet stable, Cherenkov light of nuclear)

How will you make the electricity cheaper when nuclear power requires above 20 cents/kWh excluding transmission costs and everything else to get built in 2025?

You also do know that said nuclear plants won't deliver a new kWh to the grid until the 2040s?

What problem are you even solving?

Yes, large scale infrastructure projects takes time. 15 years is not really that long.

I would rather we started rebuilding our energy infrastructure today than later…

Probably more to do with taxes etc. Better would be to look at cost of production and not cost to consumer with taxes and fees. Then you arent comparing the production but rather different models of socity

It's not taxes; German electricity costs increased over 3x since pre-covid, and taxes certainly didn't go up that much.

That's the reliance on gas turbines....

And you think that is due to too much solar power in germany?

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Countries that rely on selling fossil fuels (e.g Russia) are doomed.

Fucking Germany though with insistence on coal, Russian gas and no nuclear. I'm so suck of literally paying for their mistakes. I wish we could just disconnect them from our grid until they take some responsibility. Also stop dragging your feet sending weapons to Ukraine.

It's because of stupid tribalism and hysterical non-thinking. When I was there 10 years ago it was really common to see the 'Atomkraft? - Nein Danke' stickers in public places. I guess when the position is held by a majority, that created an environment where people, especially policy makers, did not want to challenge it for they'll get excluded for wrong-think.

It is only changing because an even stronger fear (Putin) took hold.

Not sure which country's perspective you are taking but you may wish to consider that the largest part of the subsidies building renewables are EU subsidies which to the largest chunk are financed by Germany which makes a contribution to the EU budget far above any other. So if you look at Spanish solar or Danish wind (not to mention anything in the East where the % contributions of EU funding are very high), a good chunk of these are actually subsidised by the EU and thus to large degree by Germany.

for an entire year?

Literally the first sentence: More than half of the European Union’s (EU) electricity came from renewables in the second quarter of 2025, and solar is leading from the front.

during the night

without going full conspiracy, how much of the AI hype is driven by entities highly invested in the emerging surplus power from gas and coal, or who think they can make bank on a small nuke SMR play if they get the correct contracts with a Datacenter?

If we stopped doing insane things with GPUs then what's left is a viable business with CDNs and cloud computing for purposeful activity.

Burning coal 24/7 to make dali-m images is silly. But, if I was long on SMR I would totally play up how much power they need and if need be, co-fund the GPU farm to buy my power.

Is that not just the electricity version of the GPU maker taking a position in the AI sector as long as the money comes back to buy GPU (which btw, just happened bigly)

I really hate this kind of article. Because they do twist numbers to serve a narrative (on renewable energy) instead of showing the complete picture fairly.

> June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time ever.

Yes June was a record for Solar power production due to an amazing weather.... But it was a pure disaster for Solar power profitability with an all time low.

The peak was too large for the grid to consume and the price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours.

That should bring serious questions on the ROI of any future investment in solar capacity and about Europe electricity storage capacity.

The article ignores that entirely.

https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche#

> Some countries are already nearly 100% renewable. Denmark led with an impressive 94.7% share of renewables in net electricity generated

This is also miss-leading. Production does not mean Consumption.

Denmark is very far from 94% consumption based on renewable. It rely heavily on import from German grid (Coal and Gaz powered) almost every night and this is a disaster in term of CO2 emission.

That leads to emissions over ~140CO2g/kwh in average, meaning way over what other Scandinavians countries are able to do (e.g Sweden < 15gCO2/kwh)

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/3mo/daily

> In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year.

Yes but that does not mean CO2 emissions are falling (which should be the only thing that matter).

Belgium is closing perfectly working nuclear powerplants recently that are providing around 30% of the country consumption.

Meaning the country CO2 emission are expected to increase significantly this year due to that and this is just plain stupid. Spain might follow a similar track and this is disastrous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Belgium

In short, please stop this kind of article.

- Renewable are good but what Europe need is massive investment in energy storage through battery and/or pump hydro. And this is nowhere here. Blind praise in solar capacity is counterproductive.

- If we do not carefully control our current capacity of non-controllable renewable in Europe, we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come. And this is the taxpayer will have to sponge all this mess financially speaking.

- What matters is CO2 emission and CO2 reduction, not renewable capacity. This kind of article favors wrong political decisions by putting first and foremost renewable capacity as the only metric that matters. The Belgian nuclear situation is one of these terrible decisions.

gold comment

Not everybody seems to think so when I see the number of downvotes on this post.

Sadly, any criticism on renewables, even constructive, is often straight downvoted without any comments nor justifications on Hackernews.

Yeah, and you can even consider yourself lucky if it's just downvotes, sometimes your messages just get flagged, like when I called renewables being a major reason for the Iberian blackout with citations from the official report.

TBH your first phrase is how every bad comment starts so I can understand reflex downvotes, BUT, your actual content after that is fantastic, and it took me a while to mentally go to "oh wait they make sense here"

Voting on every site is an emotional response, and bad news + convincing arguments against currently held beliefs produces a strong negative one.

I appreciate that you gave more insight into electricity markets today.

To provide some numbers on the storage side of things. On European battery storage [1]:

* 2024 - 21.9 GWh installed.

* 2025 - 29.7 GWh predicted to be installed.

* 2029 - Between 66.6 GWh and 183 GWh to be installed for 2029. Total capacity estimated to be 400 GWh.

The UK also recently received applications for 52.6 GW of storage Long Duration Energy Storage cap and floor scheme [2]. LDES in this context is classed as 8hrs or greater. Seasonal storage is not included.

I don't know if this sufficiently plugs the gaps, but it does show a large increase in installed battery storage, which appears to be accelerating.

Edit: Include total capacity in 2029 figure.

1. https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...

2. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20...

Solar capacity is over 400GW now in Europe and projected to be over 700GW in Europe in 2028.

So, considering that. The battery storage estimate you give is still one order of magnitude under of what would be needed. Even considering the optimistic numbers.

Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".

From the page[1]:

> By 2029, the report anticipates a sixfold increase to nearly 120 GWh, driving total capacity to 400 GWh (EU-27: 334 GWh). However, this remains far below the levels required to meet flexibility needs in a renewable-driven energy system. According to our Mission Solar 2040 study, EU-27 BESS capacity must reach 780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition.

This is also only up to 2029. Battery prices are dropping and the amount of batteries being manufactured is increasing, so I don't agree the continued installation of solar is a big problem.

1. https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-e...

> Apologies, the 2029 figure was the annual install amount. Total estimated installed amount is 400 GWh. Solar Power Europe says "780 GWh by 2030 to fully support the transition".

It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.

Most of the solar production will go wasted.

That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period.

And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.

> It is still nowhere enough. It is barely the capacity to support few hours of consumption of the European grid.

You just need to move the excess to times of high demand.

> Most of the solar production will go wasted.

Germany saw renewable curtailments (including wind) of 3.5% in 2024. I can only find reports it will reach 10% by 2030 in Germany and 10% in the EU. I would define "Most" as 50%+.

> That means that the price of the solar production will tank and go negative during most of the spring-summer period. And that is terrible as far as ROI on the production systems are concerned.

This depends on the market. The UK guarantees a price for renewables that have a Contract for Difference (CfD), so they're unaffected. I don't know much about the other European markets, so this might happen.

Any developer will account for this though, so money will flow out of renewables and into storage if there are serious issues around over capacity - unless you have schemes like the UK's CfD.

Finally, I disagree with your prediction

> we might doom the ROI of an entire industry for the decades to come

You have plenty of price signals in energy markets so I can't see a scenario where there's a complete misallocation of resources into renewablews and not storage. In addition investment predictions for renewables and storage are healthy and not of an industry in distress.

Add to that cost of electricity routinely rising in EU. The practice shows that with the current technology intermittent renewable generation above a certain threshold in the total generation mix results in a sharply higher cost of electricity for consumers when accounted for all additional expenses (storage, more robust grids, "smart" grid controls, etc.). And we got this with massive EU subsidies on top of dirt cheap solar panels subsidized by the Chinese government.

> during the solar hours.

My understanding is that most new solar being built today is being paired with batteries for this reason. Then they can sell the energy at night when the price is better.

> price went negative (or null) for the entire month during the solar hours

Sounds like a great investment opportunity for storage providers?

Isn't this how it's going to work itself out just due to pure economics? Solar panels become so cheap to build and install that people keep doing it just to eke out more power during the more expensive duck curve hours/cloudy days. This causes even more overproduction during the daylight hours, which makes storage more attractive to build

OK and did they increase not renewables by 54%? You can't really increase overall capacity from solar, wind etc. Look at what happened in Portugal when it gets cloudy.

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