ephbit

I'd guess "huge space heater" would certainly have to exceed 250 MW (that's at least 100,000 kettles).

IIRC that'd equal vaporizing water at 125 kg/s, doable but that's 10,800 m³ water per day.

Aaaand, in order to get the kind of contract from a power utility where they pay you to turn off, you'd probably need to operate a decent fraction of the day, say 25 %.

So you'd first need to build this thing and then you'd need to draw 1.5 GWh of electricity per day.

At 50 USD/MWh, you'd pay USD 27 million a year for the electricity to operate.

Not sure this'll work out financially.

> .. why passwords? What do they do? What do they protect?

They protect data/accounts on other machines. Similar to a piece of paper you'd write a password on but probably with added encryption, which would be difficult on paper.

Want to sign into account XY on the internet connected machine? Just look up the password (which might be a hard to remember sequence of characters) on the air gapped password machine.

Here's an addon for Firefox that also checks websites in regular intervals to detect changes:

https://github.com/WaldiPL/webpageScanner

Not affiliated with it and I don't know if it still works, haven't used it lately. When I used it, it worked to my satisfaction.

> .. after rigorous regulatory discussions that started back in 2019, the government of Oman eventually found bitcoin to be in line with Islamic law, ..

> .. I have to occasionally open the Syncthing app on Android to "bump" it and get it to sync.

Almost the same with me.

Turning WIFI off and on again is easier on my Android, it triggers syncthing to sync. But that might also require you to have set the run conditions of syncthing accordingly.

Your linked site states:

> The harmonised indices shall be annually chain-linked Laspeyres-type indices.

And further down:

> Elementary aggregate indices for the HICPs are computed as the ratio of the geometric average of prices or the ratio of the arithmetic average of prices. The arithmetic mean of price relatives may only be applied in exceptional cases and where it can be shown to be comparable.

I read this as:

- individual indices for countries are calculated using the Laspeyres [1] formula, which is effectively an arithmetic mean of weighted prices of different products, not a geometric mean

- the individual indices of countries are then "aggregated" by calculating the geometric mean

That'd mean that outlier countries would not move the average much so there you'd have underestimation of inflation to a certain degree. But it wouldn't mean that individual products/components of the consumption basket that significantly increased in price would be undererstimated through the geometric mean.

Right?

Just calculating a geometric mean of countries' indices to get an index for EU wouldn't make much sense, though .. they'd have to weigh the indices with population, GDP or total consumption.

So the actual calculation to get the HICP is surely more complicated than that.

But if they really use Laspeyres then the underestimation due to geometric mean shouldn't be an issue here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_index#Paasche_and_Laspey...

Isn't canola hugely more beneficial than olive oil in terms of nutrition anyway?

Wondering how the mediterranean countries succeeded in marketing olive oil as especially valuable/healthy oil.

Guess they refuse to die because in the long-term, when hydrogen and derivatives like ammonia or methanol, will have become an important pillar of the renewable energy system, they will be quite useful.

Fuelcell trucks are now close to mass production.

> It's amazing the lengths the system will go to to pretend they're not using hydrocarbons while they're using hydrocarbons.

So am I right to deduce from your position, that if you were in charge of planning the research/development of some new engine technology, you would do it as follows?

First, you would wait for the specific fuel to be produced 100 % climate neutral and available at worldwide scale sufficient for 20 % of vehicle fleet.

Only then, would you even begin developing the engine which runs on this fuel.

Leading to a lag of probably at least 5 years (likely more, because technology matures slowly), between (a) fuel being available at scale and (b) the actual vehicles being available.

You're aware that energy for EVs (both for driving and producing them) still heavily depends on hydrocarbons?

Should companies that are now selling EVs have waited another 10-15 years (so until the 2030s) for electricity grids to (maybe) be fossil free first, to begin with developing EVs?

The key assumption here is (for me):

> In an ever inflating economy, ...

Inflating the economy has been working over the course of the last century or even longer.

What many people appear to be oblivious of is that this growth has been fundamentally based upon a few factors: (a) very useful innovations in science/technology, (b) population growth and (c) almost limitless and thus cheap fossil energy in combination with ecosystems as basically humanity's landfill for all the waste streams of our ignorant and half-assed make-a-quick-buck-products.

(a) may very well continue delivering efficiency/productivity gains over decades to come or forever.

(b) and especially (c) are hitting ceilings right now.

I think this "ever inflating economy" has only been possible without much more frequent financial collapses because there was all this extra potential for use/misuse of natural resources available. This is what kept filling in actual consumable value/goods for all the inflated $.

With this extra potential becoming smaller and used up I very much doubt the current economic model can be kept running for more than another 15-20 years.

And with modern monetary theory MMT economists enticing politicians and naive optimists with their "yes, there is free lunch for everyone, don't you all worry about running deficits" message, the whole economic system is set up for hitting the ecological limits with the foot still on the accelerator.

Would you agree that it somewhat makes sense (and is usually efficient) to correlate one's effort in solving some specific problem in some way to the severity of this problem relative to other problems (assuming all these problems are solvable)?

If this were the case, it would have been fitting for you to have written quite a few (maybe a few hundred) texts, discussing the problem "carbon/ecological footprint of exaggerated consumerism" if for the sake of simplicity we take length of text as a measure of effort invested in solving a problem.

Yes, it is possible to solve several problems in parallel. But putting a (hugely) disproportionate amount of effort into different problems when we're dealing with a set of problems of which some are arguably existential due to their order of magnitude, while others are absolutely not existential due to their order of magnitude .. well, doing that doesn't appear to make much sense (to me) and it makes me question whether the goal of solving the existential problems is really a shared goal.

> Again, the argument that 'other things are bad or worse, so this bad thing is ok' is bad one.

There is no consensus for "Bitcoin is bad use of energy" as you're implying.

Energy/electricity use isn't inherently bad. All the different uses of energy cannot be classified in a binary way as either good or bad. But they can be sorted along a spectrum according to their usefulness. Their subjective usefulness to individual people which can then be summed up to some total.

Energy is limited so people/states/businesses prioritize some uses of energy over others in order to optimize their goals. When other people's energy use appears wasteful to you, you're free to point it out and even try to convince them, you might even try to sue them because their use case expels toxic chemicals that you'd rather not inhale. But just calling their use case bad "because it uses energy" sure won't convince them. Because practically everything humans do consumes energy.

At what exact percentage of total energy use the acceptable consumption of Bitcoin lies, no single person can/should decide. As with all purposes it should and will be decided by people collectively (through politics, consumption decisions, cultural discourse, ..) be it 1 % (which I'd say is ok, were Bitcoin to continue functioning for the next 100 years) or 5 % (which I'd personally deem too high for Bitcoin and thus wasteful).

Ferrari, Lamborghini, superyacht and so on.

They're all 9x % proof of waste ... to prove wealth/"social" status.

> How about the one where I agree with you that there are other massively wasteful energy activities out there but that fact is not an argument for tolerating them or allowing for more.

If you care so much about having less harm done to the ecosphere then why are you currently debating about "tiny slice of greenhouse gases" (Bitcoin) that other people arguably find very useful, instead of focusing on the "bigger portion of the emissions pie" (perpetual consumption of unnecessary new stuff in the post-modern consumerist society)?

I have a hard time believing you care more about the environment than about trying to blow the supposed evilness of Bitcoin out of proportion.

> Bitcoin is crazy wasteful compared with other financial tools which can do the same thing.

Good, which are these?

The one financial tool that somewhat comes close is gold, and because the latter implies orders of magnitude slower transfers than Bitcoin and because it's harder to secure and comes with a few more downsides on top it's still far from "same thing".

> The metric to compare bitcoin to is energy per transaction compared with EXISTING forms of digital finance with which it is competing.

False. Bitcoin might have originally been envisioned as "p2p electronic cash" but that's not really what its use/goal is anymore. Even though throughput and cost of transactions is not irrelevant to Bitcoin at this point, it is definitely far down in the list of priorities. The much more important aspects are now security and suitability/reliability as a store-of-value.

> It's like saying, "sure child abuse is bad, but war causes way more suffering and there are still wars so no need to do anything about child abuse, at least until all war everywhere stops first. ..

Wow, that's really just an astonishingly bad comparison.

What would you estimate? What proportion of people in the world would support the statement "child abuse is bad"? 99 %? 99.9 %? 99.999 %? Probably significantly more than 99 %, I'd guess. Why? Because the statement is kind of philosophically fundamentally true. The word "abuse" practically implies "bad". You'd sure have to search a long time to maybe maybe find a single person who'd say "child abuse is not bad" and who'd even be okay with "child abuse" having happened to them individually. And you'll have an even harder time trying to find people who'll publicly go on record stating "child abuse is a useful tool for society".

And you compare that to a technology where many people argue that it'll be a useful tool and society will benefit from it and they can even give arguments for that?

That's just ridiculous.

Now, of all people in the world, how many of those that know Bitcoin will support the statement "Bitcoin is bad"? Maybe 50 % or 70 % or it might even be 90 % (from perpetual campaigning against)? Whatever the number is, you'll find hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on the other side who'd be willing to publicly say "Bitcoin is useful" and give reasons you could then try to debate. You think you'll find even one person on the planet who's going to state "child abuse is useful and thus I'm going to make sure I'll have some for my children"?

Your comparison is so far off, it's completely meaningless.

A better comparison would be ... quite obviously ... gold.

You could say: "Gold isn't useful enough to legitimize the harm that's done through its mining even though many people like it. It is just a small dent in the carbon footprint worldwide but still. Compare that to steel production which is much more important for keeping society running but it also produces orders of magnitude more emissions and environmental destruction than making gold bars."

Now that'd be a somewhat legit comparison I'd be willing to discuss, but your comparison to child abuse, that's just absurd.

> 0.11% or even 0.08% of total worldwide energy consumption is a fucking shit ton of energy.

Completely irrelevant. Because other uses of energy (that me and lots of other people consider wasted or even harmful) are orders of magnitude larger and thus harmful than Bitcoin's.

Either you accept that not every person on the planet agrees upon which uses of energy are useful to them individually. Or you're basically saying "my opinion on which energy uses are legit and which aren't is the only one that matters", at which point we can stop discussing altogether because I don't really care about "discussing" with people who have this standpoint.

Bitcoin currently uses ~ 131 TWh electricty per year. [1]

The world used ~ 176000 TWh of energy in 2021, now it's likely more. [2]

Now let's say all the Bitcoin mining equipment (ASICS, ..) require another 50 % of the continuous electricity consumption of mining to be produced (random guess, no source), that'd be another: 65.5 TWh/a

So according to this, Bitcoin uses less than: 196.5 / 176000 = 0.11 % of total worldwide energy consumption.

According to this graph [3] the energy sector makes up 73 % of global greenhouse gas emissions. The three sectors beneath "energy" there being: a industry (coal/oil/gas), b transport (gasoline/diesel) and c buildings (heating oil/gas). All of these three mostly use fossil fuels as their energy inputs: coal, oil, gas, whereas bitcoin uses an electricity mix which has a non-negligible proportion of renewables in them.

So Bitcoin's climate footprint should be significantly smaller than 0.08 % of global emissions. That's less than 1/1200.

Now compare that to any of the stupid consumerism behavior we have in the rich parts of the world, where someone buys 100s of kgs of useless plastic crap each year, buys a stupidly over motorized pile of metal to drive around the block and show off, boosting their ego blowing exhaust into their fellow citizens' lungs and has a weekly barbecue session at their AC cooled suburban 1000s of sqft home.

These uses of energy add up to 100s more emissions than Bitcoin.

Sure, not everyone thinks Bitcoin is useful.

But do I think all these stupid plastic collectors figures and all other plastic crap is useful? Hell no. And do I think that a Hummer or Landrover Defender or your standard US pickup truck is a useful/reasonable vehicle? Hell no.

While Bitcoin makes just a tiny dent in global emissions, this other useless stuff makes not a tiny but a huge dent in emissions.

You can criticise Bitcoin all you want for this and that, but if you're honestly trying to make a point and suggest where emissions can be reduced to help the climate and you then point to Bitcoin .. then you're obviously either falling for anti Bitcoin narratives or your thinking doesn't work all that well.

[1] https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

> why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy.

Well, why aren't you doing it?

Let me guess. You don't have enough money to waste to just build a "giant tesla coil .. to make some pretty arcs", just for the sake of it.

Let me guess further. If you actually were to build such a coil, you'd want a return on your investment, you'd want to make money. As do many (which is a huge understatement here) people who invest in some material stuff.

Some investments are simply not financially feasible, because not enough people are willing to pay enough money for the resulting product/service.

That's the reasons you're not building your tesla coil.

And it's also the reason why we don't see people stacking so many massive batteries at the GWh scale (and try to make profit), so that grid operators can put a check mark on that "balance the grid at all times" task.

It's not happening because it doesn't pay for itself.

"Store the energy" sounds easy but is everything but that.

So when Bitcoin miners come along and set up their gear in some grid where the price of electricity regularly goes low/negative .. which happens because noone else is able to use the amount of electricity available at that moment to do something useful with it .. then they're actually doing something useful.

They're preventing the price from going even lower, they're making the power generation more profitable.

If you can come up with some process to make use of the fluctuating excess electricity and at the same time, make money from it, congrats, you have an excellent business case and only need some investors to throw money at it to get filthy rich.

Until then, you could try to acknowledge that somehow through means of money/prices, (parts of) society has attributed some value to running sha256 perpetually, enough so that the process can use quite a bit of electricity and move money to electriticy producers.

> The solution is more competitors, which requires fiscal policy to move people from producing for consumption to producing for investment.

This generally sounds reasonable.

It implies, that there are some (unnecessary) bottlenecks somewhere in the production chain of highly requested goods that can be alleviated by shifting workforce and capital from somewhere else, where there's overproduction or superfluous capacity to where the bottlenecks are. The allocation of resources isn't optimal. Right?

So which are these obvious misallocations of resources/workforce that ought to be corrected by suitable fiscal policy in your opinion?

> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.

I don't see much hope of such a thing being decided soon, if ever. The incentives for politicians are mostly not aligned in this direction.

The much more realistic path towards having devices/software that can be used for more than 3-5 years is IMO if more people started supporting projects like postmarketOS, fairphone, shiftphones, Librem, (mntreform for laptops) and other such croud-funded and more open/free designs.

Once such devices/OSes work good enough to be usable in day to day life without serious hassle/disappointments, more people will actually use them and a community can grow, allowing the products to mature.

I think a very good example (in software) is the f-droid app store that has reached a sufficient level of maturity that many people now use it exclusively (instead of the Google play store).

The link somehow had a redirect to just the overview.

Here's an actual link to the interesting episode: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/rr01-berman-m...

Agree.

Your thinking appears to align pretty much with the messages of this podcast (not only this episode). In case you don't know it already, you may well find it interesting, never mind the esoteric sounding name:

https://thegreatsimplification.libsyn.com/electric-vehicles-...

Degrowth aka massive reduction of consumption of basically everything would be the only solution, but it's not going to happen.

The sad part is that all the irrational optimism from the renewable energy proponents/lobby is a significant contributor to preventing more people from realizing this. Which in turn will mostly prevent politics from trying to enact the necessary policies.

> But then the nuclear power needs dispatchable power to cover the gaps! Just like renewables do, while also getting undercut by renewables.

Of course it does. But no, not "just like renewables do".

Why? Because unlike with wind (calm) and solar (clouds) where the gaps are not known months ahead, most of the (1.00 - 0.90 = 0.10) outage time of a nuclear plant will be known beforehand and planned for accordingly. Yes, even when the rivers are too warm or carry too little water, that'll be known quite some time beforehand.

If you don't see the difference there, you don't want to see it.

> Which means it is getting priced out of the market, ..

Let's see how long we're going to have to wait until we see France's NPPs being priced out of the market by wind/solar/gas in the winter. Because as long as these NPPs are being needed urgently some time of the year (which is mostly going to be winter), they might well be priced out of the market in summer or whenever there's lots of wind, but they'll still be kept running.

I think we're going to need quite some patience to witness France's NPPs being shut down and decommissioned for reasons other than safety/EOL.

---

> That includes the transmission grid and energy tax, wholesale prices before the pandemic and gas crisis were $0.02-0.04/kWh. The Swedish prices are now back down to $0.04-0.08/kWh, mostly driven by gas prices in continental Europe.

Not sure if we're talking about the same prices here. I was referring to end consumer/household prices [1] (range € 0.17-0.24), not the prices at the commercial market.

---

> Which will get priced out of the market every single time renewables can fill the need, which is easily above 70% of the time, add some hydro and we are easily above 95%.

The criterion for keeping a NPP ready to run likely isn't if the NPP is being priced out of the market for x < 100 % of time/year but rather 100 % plus safety margin. If officials can't guarantee enough electricity 100 % of time when they shut down a NPP, they won't do it (unless they're reckless).

As to "add some hydro" .. yeah, it's so easy. You just need to say the magic words and "poof", here's your dam and hydro powerplant.

---

> It is extra telling that you use marginal costs of paid off plants. Of course we should run those as long as possible!

Agree. So maybe we were indeed writing past eachother.

---

> The costs for new built nuclear are $0.12 - 0.2/kWh. Do me a favor and compare that to the current whole sale prices in Sweden at the tail end of an energy crisis. Does that look favorably?

It might not look favorable right now. I would not bet on electricity prices staying where they are. I'd rather bet on them catching up (at least to some degree) with nuclear over the next few years.

---

---

From your linked article:

> Solar capacity is growing by leaps and bounds, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon.

That remains to be seen. One can already observe that in some cases fixed installations (on buildings) are prioritized to be mounted vertically (instead of at an optimum angle for noon), and facing not south but rather east and west to generate less electricity at noon and more in the morning/evening.

We'll be seeing more of that I guess.

---

> if you have an easily accessible surplus of a highly useful resource (energy), can you find any use for it that can generate a profit? There is absolutely no doubt that the answer is yes. Storage and hydrogen are just the simplest, most centralized answers, but I have no doubt that entrepreneurs will find zillions of ways to use energy available, even if for short periods, to make something valuable of it.

The author doesn't seem to be versed with the hydrogen/electrolysis tech. If the "duck" at noon lasts for 5 hours that's 5/24 = 0.21, not a capacity factor to run almost any kind of industrial process economically where you need quite some capex to set it up.

Storing electricity is just difficult. Otherwise it'd have been solved in a cheap way for ages.

And just using gigantic amounts of energy when it's available isn't easy either. It means partially sacrificing other goals a person/business might want to achieve.

When there are more EVs, those might charge mostly during "duck" time. But that means you can't drive during that time. We'll see to what degree people are willing to plan their day around charging their EVs when they have lots of other plans and things to do.

---

In case you didn't read the comments below the article by "Dan G", they contain good counter arguments to the author's points, thankfully the latter even admits this.

---

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/418124/electricity-price...

> .. but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect.

How about said hook being? "absence of dark patterns" .. which is possible because of stable funding, so there's no enshittification dynamic needed to make money.

Seriously? This comparison of cost to a NPP is obviously flawed.

Why?

Because a NPP wouldn't be run just for backup but continuously. Let's assume the 1 GW fossil plant runs a mere 3 weeks per year. That's a capacity factor of 0.058 and it'd generate 504 GWh per year.

The NPP would run with a capacity factor of say 0.90 so at 1 GW it'd deliver 7.9 TWh.

That's a factor of 15.5 more electricity delivered than the fossil plant.

Consequently, to have the same cost/KWh, the NPP could cost 15.5 x $5M = $77.5M per year. Electricity cost would be: $0.01/KWh

I don't know your source for the operating costs of the oil plant, but I assume it's in USD.

According to [1] in the US, the NPPs generated electricity at a cost of (note how I didn't even pick the much lower number of 21 USD/MWh in recent years): 37 USD/MWh = 0.037 USD/KWh

Comparison

Fossil: $0.01/KWh

Nuclear: $0.037/KWh (or more recently $0.021/KWh)

So the cost wouldn't be dramatically higher with the nuclear plant and it'd still leave a huge margin to Swedish household electricity prices of > $0.20/KWh.

Also the nuclear plant would emit much less CO2 per KWh than the oil plant, and who knows how long we'll wait to see efuels be used for this purpose.

The point I wanted to make is not: "Backup plants have to be nuclear plants."

But rather: "As long as there is a certain base load on the grid, that's requested by consumers all year round (which will always be the case), it is a viable option to partially provide this with nuclear power plants."

And to me it makes more sense than what Germany is doing right now, basically replacing nuclear generation with a little bit of wind and lots of coal in the winter. Even if Germany had had double the wind generation in 2022, from Jan-Mar & Oct-Dec, renewables would only have delivered ~ 100 % of demand during 2 weeks. 2 weeks out of 26. They'll have to continue burning gas/coal for some time to come. Especially with progressing electrification and increasing demand.

---

As to:

> .. if carbon prices ever becomes prohibitive:

CO2 prices are laughable and even the planned progression is. And with all the exceptions for big industry even more so.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184754/cost-of-nuclear-e...

> Yes, in for example Sweden these extra costs borne by all consumers for reserves and balancing markets are in the range of $0.0X cents/kWh delivered. You are not financing a nuclear plant with that.

Whatever the ascribed fee/kWh for financing backup power plants that's written on some electric power bill might be, (whether it's 0.05 $/kWh or 0.20 $/kWh) it's completely irrelevant. If there's a backup plant being maintained and run somewhere in your country (or the neighbouring), the people are somehow paying for it. If the fee on the electricity bill is too low to actually cover all the costs, then it's still payed for by the people, through taxes or other fees or whatever. Doesn't matter at all. The backup plant, be it nuclear or fossil, is being financed. Why is that? Because people don't want rolling blackouts and politicians know that.

> Why would a consumer that decided to sidestep the grid care? They care about the average price of all their consumed energy, not the fluctuations. Peak shaving is already a market. Although mostly to sidestep infrastructure costs related to upgrading grid size.

If by sidestepping the grid you mean an almost/entirely self-sufficient household (all year, not just summer), then we're talking about which percentage of households of the northern hemisphere? Is it 1 % or 0.1 % or 0.01 %? These aren't the people who'd care, true. But the issue is obviously not with them but with the other ~ 99.x %.

My impression is, you're failing to see, just how high spot prices and thus peaks in a flexibly priced contract would jump, if your grid were underpowered by let's say 30 % of actual demand. The only reason you're not seeing such high prices, is because those fossil/nuclear plants are somewhere (either in your country or in some neighbouring) ready to run. Nobody knows just how high the price/kWh would spike, were there a few days with just 70 % of electricity available compared to the usual demand curve (in some country where heating is electricity based). But it would either need to settle damn high, so that only consumers who're willing to pay a lot, still actually consume while enough others are effectively deterred from consuming by the high price so that reduced demand=generation. Either that, or you'll have rolling blackouts or some other intervention to reduce demand, which effectively violates the way that people/businesses in prospering countries are used to operating, i.e. drawing as much power as they see fit, whenever they see fit.

I'm happy to learn about other ways of meeting consumers needs, when dealing with a "significantly less renewable electricity available than urgent demand and regrettably no backup power plants" situation.

I very much doubt people would settle with regularly being in the situation of either (A) being priced out of using electricity or (B) having to turn off their heat pumps or aircon and not use their kitchen stoves during certain hours. No, they'd tell their politicians to (C) bring those fossil/nuclear plants online "chop-chop".

---

> Consumers choose a mixture of A and B, because the grid is not only renewables.

No. Noone is actually choosing or would choose A, not even partially. Or can you name an instance when someone did not do XY (drive their EV, go by train, heat/AC their home, cook some food, ..) which they really wanted to do, because there wasn't enough electricity available in that moment? And no, when someone chooses to charge their EV a little less or accepts a waiting time for their EV to be charged to then make their trip doesn't count, because they were obviously flexible enough. Sure, many industries now closely watch electricity prices and sometimes throttle/halt production. Doesn't count either, when choosing operating times according to electricity prices is part of the business model.

> We will likely need gas backup for another decade or so.

Absolutely. It simply wouldn't work without them, or rather: people will vote whoever would get enough such plants running again, were there any shortage and they wouldn't care about their state spending billions to get it done.

> Your view of the grid is from the 70s, when "baseload" was the god. That is not the case anymore.

Not really, I think. Baseload is not the god, it never was. Stability is, and always was. My view of the grid is about stability and the simple fact, that people just wouldn't accept if the gaps that renewable sources leave (until they're overbuilt 3x .. 4x ..? and there's enough storage) weren't filled in by fossil/nuclear generation.

---

> With the marginal pricing model we have today, nuclear requires the whole sale average prices over a year to be ~$120-200/MWh, I and everyone except people advocating for nuclear find such prices unacceptable. That is Ukrainian war gas crisis prices locked in until the plant is paid off, who wants that?

I doubt we'll see electricity prices fall in the next 10 years.

Looks like in Germany people won't be able to blame it on "nuclear generation clogging the net" then.

> Thus the discussion inevitably spirals into "grid costs", "backups" and what else. Because lets through government actions force nuclear to exist to get a better number on your pet metric of "actual price". All while the world moves on.

As to "world moves on". Well, you wrote it yourself: "We will likely need gas backup for another decade or so."

I think our grids will cling to gas powered plants for quite a bit longer than that.

Interestingly, according to some institute, "researchers found that new gas-fired power plants with an installed capacity of 23 GW must be built by 2030."

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-new-energy-tar...

Newly built gas plants ... I don't think they'll only be run for ten years.

> Read and come back, stop thinking we live in the 70s.

> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910

Thanks for reminding me. Quite a few pages there. Did you read them all?

I like this nicely cushioned quote from the chapter "D. RAW MATERIAL DEMAND FOR 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEMS" (p. 78191):

> All in all, there appears to be reason for moderate optimism that material criticalities will not represent an unsurmountable roadblock towards the transition to 100% RE systems. However, it is also clear that it will be a formidable challenge to ensure the timely availability of resources while simultaneously minimizing the negative impacts of extraction on humans and the environment. This needs to be a focus of upcoming research.

Reminds me of all the stubborn renewable optimists who IMO do the world a disservice by neglecting the inevitability of degrowth.

> Power grids operate like marginal cost markets. Why would I as a consumer buy more expensive nuclear power when abundant renewables are available?

I think this is an incomplete description of the system.

The missing element here is the fact that independently of what an individual electricity customer (private/commercial/..) chooses to do, the government/burocracy still ultimately mandates for grid operators, utilities and power companies to operate their technology in such a way that the grid can remain stable and deliver enough electricity to power (practically) all uses, whatever they might be at a certain point in time, even when renewable generation is at only say 15 % of max capacity.

This makes companies build/maintain (and get paid for) backup powerplants. They're needed and maintained for stability reasons, (pretty much) regardless of their cost of electricity generation per kWh. The market price is not really relevant, since grid stability is hugely more important to everyone (individual persons, businesses, political parties) than spot market price.

> Given the possibility of cheap distributed generation today what will happen if you force nuclear costs on consumers is that they will build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization.

Applauding cheap distributed generation of fluctuating renewables (note: I'm in favour of their deployment) without mentioning that there are times when they simply don't deliver, so that other (flexible, reliable) sources have to fill in paints an incomplete picture. Without the fossil/nuclear backup plants the spot price would skyrocket to a degree such that everyone in posession of a smart meter and flexible price contract (and withouts state subsidized electricity) would just stop consuming because a kWh might suddenly cost a few $/€.

The market might be the market. But the grid is a technical system and its stability is a parameter which most prioritize higher than cost/kWh, which is why it's a hidden cost, that's not directly attributable to renewables and so as long as the grid cannot deliver 100 % renewables at _all_ times, "cheap renewable electricity", that's cheaper than fossil/nuclear is a somewhat naive take.

Imagine customers getting to choose between 2 different electricity contracts:

A) 100 % renewable electricity; subject to availability; gets delivered according to current generation; if demand exceeds generation, every customer gets curtailed to a fraction of their actual demand, according to their usual consumption so that demand=generation

B) 24/7 electricity; varying percentage of renewables; some nuclear/gas/coal in the mix

How low would you have to set the price/kWh of A relative to B for getting say even just 1 % of customers? 1/5? 1/10?

Now would any company running such a 100 % renewable fleet and offering A contracts have an easy time running their business with economic success, because "renewable generation is so much cheaper than fossil/nuclear"?

Yes, marginal cost/kWh of nuclear/fossil might be higher than wind/solar. The reason is obvious: they provide stability/reliability for the grid, so until the grid is 100 % renewable, 1 nuclear/fossil kWh is simply more valuable than 1 renewable kWh.

What do people do who "build local renewable generation and lower their grid utilization", when their own generation doesn't meet their demand because it's winter? Right, they draw power from the grid, from some gas/coal/nuclear plant.

> For nuclear this inflexibility comes from pure economics. It is economic suicide to build a new plant and operate it at 100%, now try operating it at less than 50% on average. Or even worse only nights without wind like you propose.

Agree, this mode of operating NPPs wouldn't be economically feasible.

Also, IIRC, running a NPP with load following would generally lead to significantly more wear and tear and thus maintenance costs. Which is why it wouldn't be done this way.

So why not run the NPP as baseload (say instead of coal powerplants) and then renewables like wind/solar (on top of that flat line of generation), which can easily be turned off/on according to current demand? Whenever high renewables generation coincides with a peak in demand, it's a win. Whenever renewable generation diverges from demand it's either turned off or as much of it as possible is stored. Having storage capacity for electricity, to compensate just the day/night demand fluctuation during a 24h day with stored renewable energy is far more easily done than trying to get to 100 % renewable generation. Especially since solar generation is ~ 1/20 in winter vs summer in some regions.

Seems like the obvious way to do it (to me at least), unless one is completely against nuclear power generation.

This mode would obviously make it somewhat more economically challenging for the renewable operators, since their capacity factors would be reduced.

It all comes down to the fundamental challenge that renewables introduce additional fluctuation which has to be compensated somehow. Ways to do this are: throwing away excess generation, following load via flexible demand, modulating fossil plants, adding more storage capacity.

The thing is: storage capacity for seasonal fluctuation which is going to significantly increase (due to heating and other processes becoming more electrified) is nowhere near. Even storage capacity for just 2 weeks of electricity is huge.

Let's say Germany quadruples it's 2022 wind generation capacity, then in the three Dunkelflaute weeks 48-50 of 2022 [1] (when they had ~ 22 % renewable share, mostly wind) there'd now be 100 % renewables. But in the meantime demand in winter might well go up 20-30 GW due to electrification of heating and other uses. Now there's still a gap between demand and renewable generation of say 30 GW that needs to be filled. Let's say the Dunkelflaute lasts not three weeks but 10 days.

30 GW x 10 days = 7.2 x 10^9 kWh

That's the equivalent of ~ 103,000,000 EV batteries with 70 kWh each. And each one of them would need to be 100 % charged before the 10 days Dunkelflaute and it couldn't be used for anything else during the 10 days and it'd be empty afterwards.

This amount of storiage isn't going to happen in the next 15 years.

I assume the actual way situations like this will be dealt with in Germany is: high electricity demand industries will be shut down during such times, home heating will be turned down, coal fired plants will be brought back online, less trains will run, and so on.

So it'd maybe look like a "80 % renewable grid". But in reality it could better be described as "electricity demand reduced to match renewable generation".

[1] https://energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?...

There's a key difference between the current - mostly chemicals (coal, oil, uranium) based - system of providing people/machines/devices all over the world with energy and some proposed system where most energy is delivered in the form of electricity, generated from renewable sources.

Using chemicals to transport energy immediately leads to greater resilience because these chemicals always have a buffering effect, so they can buffer shorter and longer disruptions.

Many people appear to not have this in mind, when they propose a global electrical grid to power almost everything. An electrical grid is much more fragile than a chemicals based transportation system.

As soon as we see the first big tankers transporting green ammonia all over the world, say from Namibia or Australia or wherever, each one of these will contain weeks worth of ammonia (for some industrial site or whatever), which will mean added resilience since there's no one pipeline that can be damaged. Ships can flexibly go from any one to any other port.

But not only that. Due to the high energy density of chemicals, the chemical transportation system also has a much higher capacity than HVDC. Several ships can go from one place to another at the same time, and queue up at the point of arrival, while electricity from two sources to one destination would add up at some point in the grid.

Example:

> .. the vessels could carry about 58,000 tonnes of ammonia .. [1]

58,000 tonnes x 22.5 MJ/kg = 362.500.000 kWh = 362.5 GWh

Assuming a power generation efficiency of 0.4 (-> 145 GWh electricity), this is roughly equivalent to a 1 GW powerplant delivering power for 6 days.

Imagine trying to transport 145 GWh from Australia to Europe, or even just from windy Greece to Germany with HVDC. You'd need the 100 % capacity of a 2 GW HVDC line (1500 km long) over 3 days to transmit it all, during which this line could not be used for any other transmission purpose.

[1] https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/08/10/10672...

I can literally see it in the linked graph.

Generation from coal has been decreasing continuously since 2013. Until 2020, since then it _increased_ while nuclear generation decreased.

Generation from coal might have just kept on decreasing past 2020, hadn't nuclear plants been shut down.