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It is completely obvious that renewables require significantly more storage capacity than other power sources. However, a lot of experts seem to believe that th
by fsh 7y ago
It is completely obvious that renewables require significantly more storage capacity than other power sources. However, a lot of experts seem to believe that this is not nearly as big of an issue as you are implying.
As for wind energy, you are completely wrong. In 2019 25% of Germany's electricity was generated by wind (compared to 13% nuclear). This has significantly reduced the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions.
The main reason for halting construction is that conservative politicians have passed idiotic NIMBY regulations that now make it very difficult to build new on-shore wind farms. Somehow they even managed to convince a signify fraction of the population that wind turbines are somehow dangerous (probably the same fraction that believes in electro-smog).
- wazoox 7y agoIf Germany had invested 300 billions in nuclear instead of wind, they would have 0 emissions electric power right now. It makes relative sense in Germany because they still rely a lot on coal for power generation. If they hadn't stopped nuclear power in its tracks, they would have achieved a much bigger reduction of their emissions, too. If you take the example of Spain you can easily see that they fired up 1GW of gas plant for every GW of wind farm. Because some days there isn't any wind. You can't lower your emissions to zero with wind and solar. Europe has very little room left for hydro storage. Most dams that could be built have been built long ago. That drastically limit the efficiency of more wind and more solar power. Nuclear, on the other hand, doesn't need much backup. In fact in France it needs less than 2% of backup (EDF has the know-how to modulate power very accurately to match consumption entirely on nuclear power) so it would already be possible to do 0 emission with 95% nuclear and 5% hydro and nothing else. Oh, look what I've found: https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-powerand-deadly-emissions-spiked/#intcid=recommendations_wired-homepage-right-rail-popular_94bea38e-f8f2-4d71-9871-01f2a8f97481_popular4-1 https://www.wired.com/story/germany-rejected-nuclear-poweran...
- fsh 7y agoI don't see any credible source for the "300 billion" claim. The official statistics list 168 billion since 2000 for all renewables combined: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage/entwicklung-der-verguetung-nach-dem-eeg-seit-2000/ https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36306/umfrage... On the other hand, nuclear power has been subsidized with about 200 billion as well without ever producing more than one third of the electricity output: https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-2010.pdf https://foes.de/pdf/2010_FOES_Foerderungen_Atomenergie_1950-... The other elephant in the room is that nuclear energy relies on having cheap sources of Uranium available. This works fine for the almost negligible amount of nuclear energy being generated today. Scaling this up to a significant fraction of the world energy consumption would require usage of breeder reactors which nobody has been able to get to work at the required industrial scales.
- wazoox 7y agoNuclear energy is capital-intensive, but not resource intensive. The cost of the plant dwarves the cost of uranium to run it. In this way, it's similar to wind. France had 2 working breeders reactors, Phénix and SuperPhénix, and they worked at industrial scale. They were cut off for purely political reasons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superph%C3%A9nix