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Comment by kokey | Hacker News Reader

Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc.

This time, however, it looks like it's actually true and that's just for wind and solar. This is incredible, and done through slowly compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way.

View on HN

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.

For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.

You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage.

Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating.

So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies.

______

If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever

Most power plants are less than 50% efficient.

Yeah, 70% is more or less a best-case scenario (unless you count systems for recovering and distributing waste heat, then it goes higher)

A gas-fired CC plant built today will have a LHV efficiency > 60%.

That is true, but I believe that most power plants are not modern combined cycle gas plants.

I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates.

That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%.

> Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use

Does that 26% include the energy that's involved to ship the fuel in tankers?

Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world

> Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world

Note that marine shipping is extraordinarily fuel efficient (from a gCO2/(t*km) basis), so I doubt that it adds a lot on a per ton of fuel basis. We just ship a lot of fossil fuels.

This [1] graph looks to be in the right ballpark from what i remember in school 15 years ago, i didn't verify it in depth but +- an order of magnitude better than the next best method is roughly right

https://image2.slideserve.com/4166134/gco-2-t-km-of-freight-...

Even though petroleum product shipping accounts for almost 40% of shipping, the surprising efficiency of ocean transport still means that it's not that big an energy cost; a single-digit percentage of the energy content of the shipped oil/gasoline.

But even that is still worth saving - it's a few percent more benefit for electrification.

Marine transport is stupidly efficient and probably won’t influence those numbers much. For the same reasons it’s absolutely okay to eat avocados from overseas. I believe the processing of oil to gas is quite energy intense tho.

You also need to extract and refine the oil before you can put it into a car.

Resistive heating is indeed almost 100% efficient, but combustion is only about 90% efficient and that's using modern technology to scrape almost everything we can, which has a cost in terms of the product upfront cost and maintenance. The reason it's not much higher is that we must vent the exhaust gases. If you were OK with the burned gas vapours in your home you could get close to 100%, but they're poisonous and so they must be vented to the atmosphere where they only cause global warming. Venting those gases means losing heat, so that's inefficient.

For the EVs in particular, because motion <=> electrical energy is almost the same either direction (a dynamo and an electric motor are almost identical) we get regenerative braking in most applications. This isn't anywhere close to 100% effective, and of course we net losses from resistance which gets much worse as speed increases - but it's not nothing.

The big win is that global warming problem. Electrifying consumption means fungibility. In my lifetime the UK went from mostly coal electricity, to no coal at all. But few cared because to the end users it's the same electricity regardless of how it was made, and most people probably didn't even notice. So if you move consumption to electricity then the generation problem is de-coupled and can be addressed separately.

Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.

Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.

That's true.

Almost no one lives in a location where heat pumps are never (or even usually) inappropriate. Yes, it might get to -20 F, but how often does that happen over a winter, never mind over a year?

Yeah, over here in Finland we have pretty cold winters, but heat pumps are still very popular and deliver value most of the year.

Modern air-to-air heatpumps heat at over 100% efficiency even at those temperatures, they are very widely deplyoed in the Nordics for heating. And even where it is sometimes that cold, most of the year it is warmer than that. Still yes, you should have another source of heat just in case.

My Vaillant air to water heat pump is "effective" down to -28C, and has a resistive heater element as a backup in case the COP value flatlines (as in if COP is 1, it doesn't matter).

My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed.

https://www.aircon.panasonic.eu/DK_da/product/panasonic-hz25...

The bigger issue may be the heat rate of the heat pump at low temperature, not the efficiency.

While we very rarely have temperatures below -20C in Denmark, i have yet to experience a "drop" in performance from it. Granted, it becomes a lot noisier in very low temperatures, but it "does the job".

I'll add that this being an older house (1970s) we have "other issues" that causes heat loss, so we usually run the log burner for supplementary heat during those few days of -20C. The heat pump can keep the house warm, but you can feel the cold "pushing in" from walls and windows (dual pane).

Sadly the heat pump has also kinda voided all attempts to renovate for saving energy. Our yearly heat cost (heating and warm water) is around €750, and adding insulation would cost around €3500, for a potential saving of around 10-20%, so a total of 20-30 years to earn itself back again.

> While we very rarely have temperatures below -20C in Denmark, i have yet to experience a "drop" in performance from it.

This is also my experience in upstate New York at such temperatures.

My area doesn't get that cold, but the insulation is so good that last year we accidentally turned the heat off for a week without noticing despite it snowing outside; our "backup" was our own body heat plus the waste heat from our normal electricity consumption (which also isn't high).

I've seen a demo house in Canada that had a bucket standing in the middle of a room with -20 outside. The bucket had been there all winter and it never froze, a single, huge candle warmed the house. It was most impressive. I never did figure out how enough oxygen made it in to keep that candle burning!

But it really made me realize that even though I'm used to brick houses and stone everywhere that that is a terrible thing efficiency wise. A properly insulated wooden house can indeed be heated almost by body heat and waste heat alone. The big loss is windows so triple insulated and properly mounted windows are a must for such a setup.

This is not true in all circumstances.

Where you need process heat for industrial applications, you’re almost always better off with resistive heat or fossil fuels, typically gas.

Depends, industrial heat is a rather large category. The vast majority of industrial heat in e.g. food production or textiles needs modest temperatures that can easily be handled with heat pumps.

For the rest, there are many ways to heat electrically. Including resistive, plasma, arc, induction, etc. Mostly, gas based heating is convenient because it is rather simple technology that is easy to use and we know how to do it at scale. But there is a lot of wasted heat in industry. Mostly that just blows out the chimneys or is radiated to the universe.

Cooling is as big of a problem as heating is in industry. Cooling is the process of expending more energy in order to get rid of the already wasted energy you can't use. Very little of that energy is recovered. Though some places run e.g. district heating on this type of energy.

There are examples of steel producers that are using electric heat now. Still a bit niche. But it works. A lot of this stuff is inertia. Building and designing new factories from scratch is expensive and disruptive. Gas isn't expensive/wasteful enough to consider that for a lot of existing industries. However, new companies would be well advised to see if they can undercut the competition by going electric. Especially in places where gas now has to be imported in LNG form at great cost.

> But few cared

Few cared that electricity price increases out passed general inflation.

I don’t think so.

While I'm sure that it suits some people to connect "Electricity got more expensive" with "The primary generation sources changed" as a primitive post hoc ergo propter hoc argument that doesn't really work out.

If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.

If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine.

Name one place where renewables penetration is worth talking about and electricity became less expensive.

in cold weather an ice is not close to 30%, that's an achievable warm weather figure when everything's working efficiently. Many ice journeys are so short in cold weather that efficiency never peaks above 10%

Well, EVs also lose a lot of efficiency in cold weather as well. You'll also note that the 70% figure I gave for power plants is more or less a best case scenario for modern, well designed plants. A lot of currently existing power plants do much worse than 70%

True, system thermal efficiency for the UK's CCGT generation is about 50%. Obviously that's with a varying throttle (the UK goes from say 5GW of CCGT to 25GW of CCGT in an hour if the wind drops just as everybody wakes up) and you'd do better than 50% if you were baseload running 24/7 at peak performance - but that's not a realistic place for CCGT to be when nuclear fuel is basically free and the two new big sources (solar and wind) aren't even running on actual fuel anyway.

Without disagreeing, I think it's worth acknowledging that vehicle weight will be a confounding issue for long range EVs.

Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.

Yeah, in combined cycle plants you burn the natural gas first in a gas turbine first, use the waste heat from that to boil water and run steam turbine. Then condense the steam using your district heating circuit.

You can say this is 100% efficient as you make some electricity and the rest does house heating.

Definitely not 100% efficient, but it can still hit a much higher efficiency than without the heat recovery

100% efficient assuming a perfectly spherical combined cycle gas turbine with district heating circuit operating in a vacuum.

Let say all the loses provide heating for the power plant building itself. ;-)

The thing is that your home's heatpump has an efficiency of 300%-500%. So even if your power plant and power delivery only has say 50% gas-to-electricity-at-home, you are still looking at 150%-250% gas-to-heat-your-house efficiency.

> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation).

Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables. E.g. when making iron, you heat the ore (iron oxides) with coke (refined sulfurless coal). The coke will provide extra heat and act as a reduction agent, separating the oxygen atoms from the iron oxides. Now you can do the same thing with hydrogen as the reduction agent to avoid producing CO2 and to avoid using fossil fuels. However, creating renewable hydrogen is atm only 30% efficient, storing and transporting it has losses. Even with possible improvements, that hydrogen will be a very inefficient and costly use of electricity, and at least half of it will always be wasted.

So in terms of total energy usage, making those kinds of industrial processes use hydrogen, we will have to at least double our electricity output. And a lot of that doubling will be wasted because of the inefficiency of electrolysis, as opposed to directly using coal or natural gas.

Uh, can you provide any scientific papers that H2 can be used for Iron smelting? CO2 is very stable, even at high temperatures. Its hard to strip O2 from it (except photosintesis). Now, H2 itself is very violatile gas. When burn, it creates water. Water is not stable high temperatures. It become vapor and when temperature rise it can even break bond between H2 and O.

So, papers or are you hallucinating?

They are already building such plants. So I would assume they have a plan

But here is a paper - only the title is German the main part is English https://pure.unileoben.ac.at/files/1851525/AC06514880n01vt.p...

Are you suggesting burning H2 will create water and enough energy to split the water in H2 and oxygen again, afterwards? That would be amazing news!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelmaking#Hydrogen_direct_re...

No, not at all. Coke or hydrogen always only provide additional heat, they are never the main source of heat. The main heat source can either be coal or an electric arc furnace. The coke or hydrogen are just necessary for the chemical reaction, and providing some heat is a side-effect.

Sorry, in face of OP’s tone I allowed myself some sarcasm. Obviously there needs to be additional energy. You’d have some equilibrium with those reactions and OP didn’t make any argument why that can’t be controlled in favor of reducing Fe2O3.

It’s also borderline unbelievable OP never heard of hydrogen in future steelmaking, if they are at all invested in the topic. You’d need a special kind of ignorance to think people are hugely throwing money at this, when the basic chemistry is infeasible.

Yeah, I did not thats why I asked. Water and Steel doesnt like each other. But thanks for the info.. It seems it can be done in controlled way.

Now I wonder how cost effective it is :)

Well, actually, thermolysis for water occurs at 2200°C. Thermolysis of CO₂ starts at 1400°C, of CO at 3700°C. The melting point of iron is around 1500°C, similarly its oxides.

So water as a product is actually more stable than CO₂, and doesn't undergo thermolysis at the relevant temperatures for smelting iron. Whereas when going the CO₂ route, there is the risk of producing relevant amounts of CO, which is not as desirable and less efficient because it only absorbs half the oxygen.

Cost is a big question, but it will for sure be more expensive to use hydrogen. Back of the envelop calculation (250$/t coal price, need 1/3t of H_2 for the same effect, so H₂ may cost up to 750$/t, need 40kWh/kg for H₂ electrolysis at 100% efficiency) gives a breakeven electricity price of 1.875ct/kWh. While this happens from time to time due to overproduction, those prices will even out as soon as there is a market for that excess electricity through batteries, storage and electrolysis. Which means that cost-wise, the H₂ route will never be more effective than coal. To make it viable, coal use needs to be made more expensive through taxes and tariffs.

Can you provide some citation about CO2 themolysis? I found just one paper from China....

That stuff is ages old, I doubt you will find current papers on it. Pick a chem textbook or table book, you should find it somewhere in there.

> Now I wonder how cost effective it is :)

I believe right now, it's expected to cost about 30% more. But we don't have an hydrogen economy yet, or 1000 years of experimentation as with carbon as reducing agent. There is probably still some room for innovation in material science for every part of the process.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steelmaking#Hydrogen_direct_re... and linked sources.

The interesting bit about using H2 in industrial processes is that, while inefficient, it's also the school book example of variable loads. Solar and wind produces power extremely cheap but intermittent, so in a grid the push down prices when they produce the most. Variable loads can, at least in theory, be run when prices are the cheapest.

There are quite good explanation published at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions and https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe.

Yes, the _!ONLY!_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change.

Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit.

No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.

Lithium ion batteries, or a solid state alternative aren’t it. Not without being some orders of magnitude more energy dense and lighter. And you still need to electrify those sectors to be able to charge the batteries.

Confident talk, but that's not at all the reality that I'm seeing.

Public transport is almost completely electric powered where I live (ferries still haven't changed to electric, but it's coming.)

Trucking is electrified, as in, the operators have realzed that they're cheaper to run, so they are changing over when possible. (Sidenote: with some of the heaviest loads worldwide)

Very many agricultural buildings in active use either have, or are installing solar. Their energy usage is so high, that any offset to it is "free" money. Many have installed batteries also, so if there is an interruption in power delivery, there isn't an immediate need to start up a generator.

Electric tractors are also something I've heard them want. Less maintenance means less time spent not being able to work.

Sure, fertilizer and animal husbandry have other emissions which aren't tackled by this, but why exclude improvement just because some other area isn't affected.

> not at all the reality that I'm seeing.

You’re not looking hard enough, past the greenwash.

What was listed by the poster you replied to are genuine real facts, so the one who should look harder is you, in this case.

> No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions.

That's weird. In europe trains, trucks, light trucks busses and cars are bascially solved with EVs. There are even some early beginnings for heavy construction and agriculture machinery but it doesn't seem to be mass market yet. Electric ferries also start to pop up for smaller distances.

The biggest issues seem to be ships and planes. Not sure there are any good solutions there.

Overall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement.

Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.

And nuclear fuel is also imported (but refined locally), so not sure it should be counted as 'local' in this case.

Nuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.

Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun.

The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply.

Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blockade or embargo.

There is so much uranium in the ground (in the west too) that it doesn’t make sense to ”keep it” for yourself. Why would Russia wanna keep a supply for the next one million years instead of selling it and get money today? Same with all other countries with uranium.

Regarding known and exploited or rapidly exploitable deposits, we are very, very far from millions of years: "As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply"

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium

You're forgetting about the supply chain. Who manufactures all the solar panels and wind turbines? Honest question - are we increasing the risks of becoming energy dependent on China? Or does Europe have the ability to manufacture its own?

AFAIK all the raw materials (maybe not all top-notch, especially from the get go, but usable) and all the know-how exist in Europe (at worst currently working abroad), where many nations want to reindustrialize and gain autonomy.

In France numerous projects appear. Some may be too ambitious, some with a Chinese partner. In any case we will re-learn, and it will be less difficult than creating usable uranium without any adequate ore here!

Nuclear power resurgence is bullshit and it will always remain a drop in the bucket, especially for large countries. US has too much natural gas, China too much renewables, Russia well, it's of virtually no economic impact worldwide and whatever they might do is irrelevant (unless they nuke us).

Any country that starts a new nuclear power plant construction today won't finish it before electricity will be comprehensively solved by renewables. It pertains even to dictatorship where public opinion does not exist and there's no red tape (Belarus: 14 years from decision to first reactor start) let alone not in free countries. It puts them into 2040+. In EU let's say there will be certainly no fossil fuel electricity at all, maybe apart from few percents of natgas for prolonged quiet periods in winter, and whatever nuclear power remains will be easy to replace. China? go figure, they have a problem of removing coal generation and that's essentially same as nuclear from standpoint of its behaviour on the grid, and there is so much more coal, nuclear will be squashed simply as a byproduct of whatever solution (which will likely be solar+batteries) they come up with.

> Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU

I'm probably misunderstanding because:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-source-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...

That's the consumption numbers. 55% of total final consumption of energy in EU comes from imported sources.

Nice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked.

Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at ~15,700TWh.

I'd guess that demand for Oil is so inflexible mostly due to its use in transportation? If that's the case, we should see this value drop as the adoption of EVs progresses, but clearly so far they haven't made a dent.

Edit: after clicking around a bit more, it seems that the EU energy use reduction might be mostly due to off-shoring energy intensive industries... ayayay. XD

Do not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.

Or the EU's push for more energy efficient appliances

Just transitioning from coal to gas for electricity production has a big impact.

The graph is adjusted to compensate for the efficiency of the power plants, but it's an average and one they need to update every so often as plants get more efficient.

But we're phasing out the oldest and least efficient coal plants and replacing them with gas plants that are twice as efficient (33% vs 64%).

The graph under discussion assumes 40% as discussed here:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

Where heating is needed, and where heating is done by electricity, changing to LED lighting indoors don't make any difference whatsoever. Unless your main heating source is a heat pump. In my home there's a heat pump upstairs, but not downstairs. All the lights downstairs are now LED, but the only effect that has is monetary - LED lights are way more expensive, and contrary to claims, don't last longer either. But these days LED is the only option available when buying.

Heat pumps though.. they really save a lot of electricity. Very visible on my electricity bill.

Is this really a lot of people that use resistive heating?

Also at least it saves electricity during summer when you don't want to dump even more heat into the room.

As a side, from my experience LEDs last significantly longer than incadescant LEDs. Maybe it's something to do with the power grid fluctuating more in certain areas?

I haven't been able to find reliable LED lighting, except when compared to particularly low-quality incadecent lights. Cost-wise it's a no-brainer, LEDs are more expensive. They are, however, getting better. They used to be totally terrible, at least that's changing. However, they're still advertising "N hours", where the "N" counts only 3 or 4 hours (typically) per day, so (and get this) the calculation is something like this: "20000 hours = 833 days, if you use them 3 hours only, of those days". Whereas the incadecent light bulbs "1200 hours" is 1200 hours of actual use.

As for your question, living in a country where 100% of domestic power is electric (save the occasional wood heater which is more for decoration but can be useful in certain very cold areas during winter), yes there's indeed a ton of resistive heating. All the heating in my home is resistive, except for the heat pump in the living room. And the living room is upstairs. The house is very well insulated though, even for a house many decades old, so it's not that expensive to heat.

In the summer? Well, this far north it doesn't get that hot, and we don't actually need to use electric lighting at all during the better part of summer, unless the room is windowless. 24 hour daylight.

Yes, the EU offshored almost all the important parts of their manufacturing, which definitely contributed. There is an interesting series of graphs on the subject from the same website: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring

> compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way.

I’ve read multiple stories of European manufacturers saying they are struggling with high operating costs, with energy being a major factor making it difficult to compete with China who has invested in every sort of energy broadly. China doesn’t just compete on labour costs like people think, they figured out ways to make every part of operating there cheaper.

Just keeping the prices baseline to something else that’s already relatively expensive shouldn’t be the only goal. But it’s progress I guess.

This is an important observation. For years these headlines came with asterisks - one sunny/windy day, excludes gas, new capacity only, etc. This being actual annual generation for wind+solar combined vs all fossil fuels is genuinely significant. The compounding nature of it is key too - solar capacity is now large enough that even modest percentage growth adds enormous absolute capacity each year.

The “but” this time is that we are talking about electricity demand, not total energy demand. Electrification of heating is the next big milestone.

It’s still a great trend.

If you take a look at the All Time view on https://grid.iamkate.com you'll see wind overtook gas a few years ago in the UK

In my opinion, the "but" is still the "hellbrise" considerations brought up in the Decouple podcast. Renewable energy is fantastic but, at grid scale, has to be coupled with sufficient storage: https://www.decouple.media/p/hellbrise

You can get pretty far with negligible storage. There is a cost tradeoff between storage, peaker plants (those could burn hydrogen, not just natgas) and grid size. 70% renewable with no storage is rather easy.

Not sure if you read the podcast but the whole point is that over-reliance on renewables without a sufficient means to handle oversupply can cause grid instability specific to the Spain/Portugal grid outage.

The reports on the Iberian outage point out that, if solar/wind had been allowed to help, the outage could have been prevented.

The outage was never about renewables, it was caused by bad dispatch of reactive power.

The largest "but" is that they only look at electricity generation, not energy in general. There's a lot of heating with natural gas and of course most cars still have internal combustion engines which burn petrol or diesel.

Heating with gas is difficult to phase out since it's a major investment. It would require large-scale build out of remote heating.

Replacing IC engines is a whole different story, and it's not clear whether electric cars are a complete replacement yet.

How much did Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine and nat gas price and supply changes accelerate things?

Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)

We must take into account the public money spent to build and maintain the electricity system. In France, for example, electricity is cheaper than in most similar countries, but nuclear power costs taxpayers a huge amount of money.

Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response.

Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose.

It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice.

And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread.

This is just a conspiracy theory of mine, but how credible is the notion that in Germany, the Greens who campaigned (successfully) for nuclear shutdown were in fact funded by Russia?

Whether true or not, it is almost entirely Greenpeace, and your local Greens party, who are to blame for us being in this mess.

Without them raising panic about nuclear we could all be paying something closer to $40 - $80 a month for all the electricity we could reasonably consume, much like mobile phone plans / prepaid service.

That would still leave transport and agriculture emissions to deal with, but they’d be easier to solve if we had virtually unlimited process heat to generate hydrogen > synth fuels.

> if we had virtually unlimited

That's outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

It was the conservative CDU with the economic liberal FDP which decided in 2011 to stop using nuclear power in Germany.

At the time when the Greens were in power a decade later, it was already way to late to build out nuclear infrastructure again (not to mention the lack of fuel).

So yes, you've metioned a conspiracy theory without any substance.

The Greens continually pushed for renewables, which the (conservative) government largely ignored in favour of building gas pipelines to Russia.

Very unlikely.

- The greens opposed the Nord Stream pipelines for years. And have been opposed to relying on natural gas for a long time.

-Nuclear power is generally a contentious subject in German society. Probably because of Chernobyl and how a lot of the radioactive cloud blew into Germany. Whoever lived through this will have some dramatic memories of those weeks (kids not allowed to playgrounds/outside etc.). It was actually the CDU and FDP that finally decided the phase out of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster. (The Greens also voted for it)

- The Greens are very strong supporters of Ukraine.

I personally believe the nuclear phase out was a mistake, but it had broad support in the German parliament and society. The phase out would have happened even if the greens hadn’t voted for it.

In Germany, it's worth mentioning that being against nuclear power is (unfortunately) part of the identity and founding myth of the Greens. One of the precursors of the party is the anti-nuclear movement of the late 70s / early 80s.

You are giving them too much credit.

In 2010 A. Merkel decreed a 12-year delay of the nuclear phase-out schedule ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Chang... ), then the Fukushima accident happened (2011), then public opinion did demand a quick nuclear phase-out and no government could resist.

Hanno Klausmeier wrote what follows: CDU / CSU : Center right parties, Christian democrats FDP: Right wing liberals, moving to libertarians (Koch line) SPD: Social democrats, oldest party in Germany, old fashioned, a certain proximity to Unions. Greens: Rather left wing liberals, ecologic positions.

Who is in the government right now?

SPD the Greens and the FDP. Do they like each other? No they hate each other but they are forced to work together.

In the current political discussion the CDU/CSU (especially the CSU from Bavaria) are complaining the current government switched off the last remaining nuclear plants in Germany. The FDP which is part of the government is also criticizing the switch off of the last nuclear plants albeit being in the same government.

Now lets take a look which parties switched most of the nuclear plants off since Fukushima?

CDU/CSU: 14 FDP: 11 SPD: 9 Greens: 3

The question does not make sense because it does not describe what happened. It was the conservatives who took the decision to phase out nuclear power in Germany.

It is unlikely that the greens had much control over that, even if someone would have claimed it their victory at the time. That the greens would wield secret power over their political opponents would require a special kind of conspiracy.

It was done for economic reasons, like so many other political decisions are. The connections to Russian oil and gas companies on both sides of politics probably helped, but it would have happened anyway. Of course it was spun as a great thing for the environment, which it wasn't, but spin doesn't have to make sense.

Ex-politicians riding the Russian oligarch gravy train should be chastised, and rightfully so. That does not require any anti-green sentiment or conspiracies, just common sense.

The problem is that it lead to investment on the expectation of high electricity prices in the future. Oil companies went and overspent on offshore wind concessions. When the prices dropped they were back to relying on strike prices that didn't offer enough profit and cancelled schemes. At least in the UK offshore wind has been somewhat stalled by that and by delay to grid connections.

This of what Germany needed to do and not go nuclear… on nuclear.

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