But that leaves out the government and all those interested parties so we're never ever getting that.
Driving through my childhood area up north a few weeks back I was also surprised by the amount of solar going up, for comparison this is an area _north of_ Anchorage/Alaska with less than 3 hours of sun around Christmas, but already by late January (usually the coldest period of the year) there is over 6 hours of sun a day (so with high pressure cold peaks with less wind, the 6 hours probably eases the power bill quite a bit).
An interesting fact about those solar installations was that the panels were mounted almost vertically (probably to avoid being snowed over but also useful in the winter since the sun mostly just shines from the south anyhow).
Northern Germany is much more specialized into wind power, and the south is more solar intensive (though solar is more evenly spread throughout the country than Wind, thanks to ease of installation, and the fact that it still produces tonnes of electricity in the summer).
Solar should be built in Alaska, but wind and hydro is what should be actively subsidized and supported by the government. The market can take care of solar penetration in Alaska if you let it.
Doesn’t Germany now have some of the most costly electricity in the OECD?
For a while there we kept hearing about plug in balcony solar in Germany.
Electricity generation used to be a solved problem, now it’s so bad people want to connect solar on their apartment balcony.
And we’re supposed to believe this is progress?
Some of the deep south get by with electric heat, but they aren't in places where the cold is a typically a legitimate danger to health and safety.
That said most of Europe doesn't heat or cool adequately, Spain and Portugal barely heat their homes in winter and boy it gets cold with 41F/5C nights. Then Germany/Switzerland refuse to use A/C even though the summers get to 95F/35C. Just a few days ago a friend told me he went to the doctor and the doctor passed out during examination from the heat.
ps. Not sure why it's downvoted, I think people read something into my comment that I didn't want to express.
Long-term this is true, and it makes sense to ban gas boilers (potentially with some exceptions): electric heat is significantly more efficient, and can run on renewable energy. But that requires a big investment in infrastructure build-out (heat pumps) which will take decades, and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.
Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.
I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.
Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.
Sure, insulation in ceilings is relatively easy to do, but swapping windows out for double glazed windows with solar thermal reflective film, very expensive.
New homes are much better designed, requiring wall and ceiling insulation and double glazed windows or better.
And yeah, the state of Victoria is still prompting banning new homes even connect to gas. Seems strange when we export around the same volume of LNG as Qatar.
So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.
And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.
Well we’re certifiably not going that.
No need to wait decades to look at the recent data.
London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
The solution is obvious: built nuclear power and refrigeration (heat pumps).
Where it’s too cold either nuclear and heat pumps and / or district heating, or burn gas.
Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
Don't disagree with you there.
> London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.
This seems unrelated. It's not an energy problem: it's a problem with lack of space in the tunnels and lack of places to build ventilation shafts due to the issue not being considered 100 years ago when the tunnels were built.
> Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.
I think this has very little to do with renewables. In particular, solar is perfect for reducing "melt in summer" cases (it's almost always sunny when it's hot) (and I'm not sure where has freeze in winter problems).
The issue seems to be more that weather has gotten hotter, and infrastructure needs to change in response to that (inevitably slow and expensive).
Cold weather kills more people than hot weather. By a huge margin.
People frequently move from cooler areas to areas that have comparatively hotter climates than even the worst (completely fabricated) global warming predictions.
But they rarely do the opposite.
Aircon I need a lot more. If anything I'd invest in more of that and more insulation. But a heating installation is just wasted money really.
My point is I think somehow, to create and foster policy that focuses on the well-being of people, using a long-term plan that includes an abundance of everything, including energy. In an ideal scenario you could have your apartment at 18C if you wanted to, but since energy would be near-free and abundant, you could turn it up to whatever you want, guilt-free.
But I'm not from Spain. I have been to Romania a lot and I really hated how much they heated the office during winter. I'd go outside in the -15C in my shirt just to cool off during meeting breaks.
Honestly I'm super comfortable in Spain most of the year. Just 1 month I need a little extra heating and 3 months I need aircon, and a lot of it. But summer is also peak time for solar so energy wise it's not bad.
But I don't consider it poverty at all, really. It's also important not to have too much of a temperature mismatch with the outside because we spend a lot of time outdoors here. And not in airconditioned cars because I don't have (nor want) a car. I'm a lot happier with the freedom that public transport offers.
Modern AC units are heat pumps the same box cools in summer and heats in winter, more efficiently than a gas boiler.
What is your stance on heat pumps? Conservatives here, who use the same talking points as you, are against them and they prefer to use oil and gas.
And is 5c a extreme night temperature? Where are you from? I'm not from Europe I think.
But not much else.
Earth is an incredibly poor heat conductor, as evidenced by the fact that you don’t have to dig very far, maybe a foot or four, and it’s a fairly constant 14 degrees C, and yet the core is molten lava (rock) and has been that way for billions of years predominantly from latent heat from the planets formation.
So you have to be very careful with heat exchange, lest you exceed the ability of the earth to conduct heat through the rock surrounding the boreholes.
Drilling deep boreholes is difficult as the rock becomes more like plasticine as it approaches temperatures where usefully higher temperatures occur.
Artificial in the sense of using solar energy (direct or electric) to heat mass insulated by earth and later extracting that heat to use (directly in district heating, or indirectly via heat -> electric conversion).
It’s not even a good idea. Water has a greater capacity to store heat than rocks and dirt.
I used my searchfoo and Sage Industries lands in more of the top results [1] [2] (may require careful attention to distinguish between natural and artificial geothermal) As well as an interview [youtube]
There's obviously different methods that have been employed / tried by other companies given [3] which outlines different methods of storage also includes some simple graphics ...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/tu...
[2] https://new.abb.com/news/detail/123160/abb-and-sage-geosyste...
[youtube] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt-MiiX0Fg (Transmission 43 mins Geothermal: Turning Oil Wells Into Energy Storage - Sage Geosystems) [podcast]
[3] https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/geothermal/geothermal-energy-sto...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20151208232728/http://ing.dk/art...
from [2015 - now( ... (still operating) for one example.
> Water has a greater capacity to store heat than rocks and dirt.
Weirdly all three fall under the description used ( "mass" ) and yet none of the three you mentioned are molten salt or silicon which perform even better than water.
If the point you're making is that you've made little effort to think this through or look to where this has been used, is being used, or at pilot plants going to longer time scales then congratulations, you've convinced me.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
> Why Sweden nixed new wind farms for fear of missing Russian missiles
> BERLIN — Sweden’s government this month blocked the construction of 13 offshore wind farms over concerns that they would shorten the country’s early-warning window for a Russian missile attack.
> ...
> That is because wind farms can interact with radar signals, reducing the quality of the situational air picture or even outright blocking out parts of the sky.
Other possibilities than radar concerns is that the stopping of the project here hinders corruption, or is corrupt itself, or it moves corruption around (as in both the old project and new project was corrupt). Whatever the case, a way to avoid corruption would be helpful. Perhaps like making it market-driven and contest-driven as much as possible. Solar and wind is already significantly cost-efficient and market-driven despite their significant drawbacks like not producing energy consistently and on demand. If the main challenge is creating domestic production of wind turbines and solar cells instead of being reliant on other countries and without state support ending up being mired in corruption, perhaps some bidding and contract process that moves the financial risk onto private companies, such that the government never pays in advance, could work.
I agree with posts here saying that a mosaic or plethora of energy sources should be used. Wind, solar, fossile, nuclear (for big countries like the USA at least), geothermal, etc. In general, energy companies should not be focused on just one kind, but lots of kinds.
Living here where this happens. They are stopping it for two reasons:
First on a national level they want to concentrate on their renewed push towards building new nuclear power reactors, means wind has to take second fiddle: https://www.government.se/press-releases/2026/06/sweden-take...
Second, on a local level, the far-right party "SD" is voting agaisnt wind power in 96% of the cases.
As presented here, the national government is declining 84% of all requests of requests to build wind power, ad on the local level the right wing parties vetoed wind power at a rate of 64-92%: https://research.chalmers.se/publication/?created=true&id=09...
In optimal weather, wind power already produce more or less all current demand in the grid if we include wind energy produced in nearby countries. The nordpool price (electricity market in the northern Europe) already goes below zero several times over the year. Shortages in production do not occur during periods of windy weather, which is especially true for the south part of Sweden where the energy price is highest and which is connected to the wind farms of Denmark and Germany. The reason that south of Sweden, Denmark and northern Germany has so expensive energy prices is that when the wind is not blowing there is nothing else to really support it beyond solar, and solar is neither reliable nor effective enough during the winter months where output of solar on average reaches around 10% of capacity in Sweden. The only other producer of energy in that region is thermal power plants that mostly burns fossil fuels, like natural gas (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/ore...) and oil (https://www.uniper.energy/sv/sverige/kraftverk-i-sverige/kar...). Those two are naturally the single largest sources of carbon emissions in those regions.
They may be talking about building nuclear power, but what local government in south of Sweden is actually building right now is more thermal power plants (https://hallbartbyggande.com/bygget-av-kraftringens-nya-kraf...). That one is supposed to be burning wood but time will tell what happens if they can't find wood to burn.
But at the scale of a city or state one home uses close enough to zero power that it being a net user or net producer of electricity is irrelevant.
Scale up to tens of thousands of homes and suddenly you need an organising body approximating government to manage those homes being net users or net producers from moment to moment.
Additionally most cities tend to want to have commercial and industrial users of electricity, and energy more broadly. Your home solar & battery does approximately nothing to help them, and if any of the data is to be believed has resulted in electricity prices increasing for everyone.
First it was the fish ladders. Then it was a bunch of whining about how reducing the water level variation on the river is bad (particularly illustrative because this is the exact opposite logic your ilk uses when talking stormwater). Lord knows what the complaint is these days.
Why don't you just be honest and say "no"
Even if they could operate 24/7 it would still not be enough power to satisfy current demand. Then there's the waste they create once parts need to be replaced, which is much more frequent than non renewables.
It's all very messy and there is no silver bullet.
Even in Texas/California photovoltaic output in the winter is measly, anywhere more to the north and it's effectively inexistent. Solar+storage requires massive overprovisioning, to the level that it's cheaper to burn literal money.
Windmill farm outputs tend to dip during summer and peak over winter. With a given minimum power output windmills + photovoltaics + storage is massively cheaper per unit of yearly energy. Of course, if you value any semblance of network stability.
Solar+storage is clear path towards either guaranteeing reliance on fossils or brownouts. The smart energy meter you got that encourages running the washing machine during cheap hours will ensure that you voluntarily go dark during undersupply as the cost will skyrocket.
The northernmost point in Texas would be at the extreme southern edge of Europe. The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
If Europe can make solar work, so can the states (assuming a similar level of investment)
Can you cite a region in Europe that physically independently covers its energy needs with solar+storage alone? </snark>
Stress on physical. Even if some regions claim renewables fully covering energy needs, that's at best on accounting level, those regions are still fully dependent on power import/export and simply could not function in an island mode for any extended period of time without at the very least brownouts. Quite importantly, it's always renewables, not solar.
The dispatchability problem is a real pain. Pool together wind + solar + hydro and the variability in power (!) output drops to levels possible to tame with realistic grid-scale storage sizes.
I am not talking about intra-day balancing here. It's the yearly cycle that comes to bite you. In my corner of Europe, if I wanted to go completely off-grid with solar+storage I would need storage well into the mid single-digit MEGA watt-hours, for the house needs (HVAC and DHW taking the lion's share) alone. That's laughably unrealistic.
> The northernmost point of California is level with the sunny French Riviera. Hell, even frozen Minnesota has about the same solar potential as northern Spain...
Yes, the southern states could probably make do with something like 3-4x overprovisioning, but that's still massive. So massive that any sort of windmill capability will outcompete any sort of COTS storage.
I wonder how it would fare with just 100 kWh of storage, something you can still easily put together.
Plus stored power, plus biomass, plus nuclear, plus gas.
90% renewables is better than 80% renewables. Throwing up our hands and saying "we'll never reach 100%, lets pack the whole thing in" isn't a sensible approach.
That is substantially moving the goalposts - nowhere in the world has built out sufficient solar to make that claim yet. The question is whether they can get there.
If you look at the table[1] for installed solar per capita, 9 of the top 10 countries are in Europe (the odd one out is Australia), so they are definitely giving it the old college try
Thats with all my appliances being electric and superfluous crap running like a 24/7 file server running. Because my power is so cheap I don't have any problems running that kind of stuff.
Citation needed