10 ms·

I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate c

I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis. - In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it) - Germany went strongly into renewables which is laudable, but CO2 footprint barely changed, because... - Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants. - Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions, and this is the last thing that we want at this time. But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2. Am I missing something or this is total madness?

bulkan 7y ago
> In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants. Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.
- earthnail 7y ago
  We are decommissioning them. The plan was quite badly executed. Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running. This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early. Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least. On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    Some shut downs were motivated by the recent increase of the CO2 certificate prices. Three years ago it was at 5€/ton. Now it is at 25€/ton.
- jakub_g 7y ago
  search for "Datteln 4"
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  The UK is a better example.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The dash for gas, it had big environmental benefits but they weren't the original justification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas
    - C1sc0cat 7y ago
      It was also to punish the NUM (Miners Union)
- xnyan 7y ago
  It's being done by the biggest power utility in Germany: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s-farewell-to-coal-complicated-by-new-uniper-plant https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s... You're not hearing about it because it's very embarrassing to Germans, as it should be in my honest opinion. I get that Germans have a very unique and real perspective on the use of nuclear power. I get that nuclear power has very real and serious risks. It's still done less harm to the planet and the things that live on it than the use of coal. Furthermore, the forced dependence on fossil fuels as a result of shunning nuclear power has all kinds of add on effects. There's no Germany without Russian gas, and Putin knows it. Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel because they are unwilling or unable to confront the cultural stance on use of nuclear power. That's the norm for cultures so I don't blame them for it, but I do think it's leading to the wrong choice here.
  - lispm 7y ago
    > but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel but we don't. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity production is going down.
    - xnyan 7y ago
      I'm sure locals and many others know far more about this than I. I'm very happy with Germany's 2050 renewable plan which is way more than my country would ever think about doing.
    - imtringued 7y ago
      It could go down much faster.
      - lispm 7y ago
        One would wish. In reality it's quite difficult. We are rebuilding the whole electricity landscape for a country with 80+ million people. The time frame for this is 50 years. There are lots of factors which are working against it. For example Germany has heavy coal resources (unlike France for example) and it's the largest domestic source of energy. Thus the country has used it for many many decades and this brought wealth and employment to people. Now to tell them that their coal-related jobs will be replaced is creating massive resistance in certain federal states against changing that.
- redprince 7y ago
  The only ongoing commissioning of a coal fired plant is Datteln 4. Construction was started 13 years ago to replace several ageing coal fired power plants. Due to technical and legal delays it will go online in 2020. Several other power plants will go offline afterwards, roughly with the same generation capacity as Datteln 4. I think it is safe to assume that this will be the last newly built coal fired power plant in Germany.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
There's a lot that can be done with renewables without nuclear or fossils, you can use demand response, batteries, hydro storage, and compressed air storage to store very cheap electricity.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Not everywhere has sites that are good for pumped-hydro storage, typically requiring an existing hydro electric dam. Compressed air is very inefficient. But the general argument is: we need to consider what is happening now, not what could be possible under some idealised hypothetical scenario. And right now more renewables, without more, or maintaining existing, nuclear means more base-load coal and more load-following gas. The problems aren't really technical, they're political. Politics appears to be ill-equipped to deal with these problems.
- throwawaylolx 7y ago
  This is just the typical diversion rhetoric. According to all IPCC reports I've seen, you can't accomplish with renewables without nuclear what you can accomplish with renewables and nuclear, yet all political bodies promote renewables and fossil fuels while pretending it's just renewables.
  - Dumblydorr 7y ago
    How is it diversionary to state examples of how renewables can be stored? That is literally the crux of the issue, we need storage for renewables. Nuclear sounds great on paper but look at new capacity additions. No one except China is adding nuclear. So to bring it up over and over here, Many HN commenters simply can't get over the fact that nuclear is way way way more expensive than renewables. Storage is the clear answer, unless you can point me to recently built nuclear and how cheap it is? How about South Carolina? Oh that was a massive fiasco that cost the ratepayers billions for literally nothing. If they spent those billions on solar, efficiency, and demand response, they'd have far cheaper and cleaner electricity. Instead they wasted billions on a nuclear facility that will never be finished.
archgoon 7y ago
> But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. What? Why?
- jakub_g 7y ago
  https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-French-energy-plans https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies...
- lispm 7y ago
  Because the nuclear power plants are old and new nuclear power plants are more expensive than new renewable.
- Brakenshire 7y ago
  Because old nuclear power stations are coming to end of life, and new nuclear power stations appear to be ruinously expensive. See Flamanville which was supposed to be finished about 10 years and €10bn ago. The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive. It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.
- LordHeini 7y ago
  Because there are serious problems with the disposal of highly radioactive waste. As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics. Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage. On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing. And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.
tick_tock_tick 7y ago
The German government and the EU as a whole is often much more focused on optics than data based solutions.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  All governments are like that, it isn't just Germany or the EU.
- ChuckNorris89 7y ago
  x1000 this! Lots of EU and German government decisions seem to be made for PR reasons rather than for the benefit of their citizens.
lispm 7y ago
> Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions. Last year German CO2 emissions were shrinking by 7%. > Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2. When they increase renewables instead?
buzzkillington 7y ago
>Am I missing something or this is total madness? You're not missing anything. This is madness. Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.
- diegocg 7y ago
  It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself. A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do. Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hurricanetc 7y ago
    It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear. The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.
    - number6 7y ago
      And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships
Krasnol 7y ago
Nuclear is and never was a solution for Germany: there is a nice read on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... Here is one for the base load myth: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 Many reasons for the slow fall are based in politics (coal industry is a job machine especially in the troubled eastern parts) and nimbys (hindering wind development) and politicians helping them out (ridiculous policies governing the distance to "settlements").
derefr 7y ago
> you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. Why isn't nuclear the backup? "90% renewable, 10% nuclear" sounds politically-viable; it's still "moving away from nuclear."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anoncake 7y ago
  No, a power source as insanely dangerous as nuclear is fortunately not politically viable at all here in the long term.
  - theredlion 7y ago
    Please do go on
  - TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
    Nuclear is safer than any other power source we have.
    - anoncake 7y ago
      All other power sources, except maybe hydro, are almost perfectly safe. They're a lot more damaging to people's health and the environment, yes, but that is a different thing from danger. I wrote "in the long term" for a reason, by the way. I'd prefer to get rid of coal before nuclear despite the danger.
anoncake 7y ago
> you can never reach 100% renewables Bullshit. You need storage, obviously. > Am I missing something Yes.
- cameronh90 7y ago
  Or alternatively/in combination with dynamic demand, smart grids, wide area transmission and overprovisioning. I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    France shows, how much effort it takes to generate a stable grid with electricity being produced mostly by nuclear power plants. Due to the limitations in regulating the power output, they have to operate the power plants not at the most efficient load but a lower one which gives them more regulation capability. Also, using up the electricity at night becomes a challenge. Belgium for example installed huge streetlights on their highways so they can increase the night load.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    > dynamic demand Which does not actually mean turning off the power grid for hours as a lot of people here claim but things like throttling down energy-intensive industry at peak times and running non-time-critical jobs when there's surplus energy.
woodandsteel 7y ago
>- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. I am not really opposed to nuclear. But on the renewable side, for the intermittency problem, you have overprovisioning, regional transmission, short range storage with batteries, and long term storage with hydro and hydrogen gas produced from renewables. And both batteries and hydrogen gas are steadily getting cheaper. That means when a utility is deciding to spend 10 billion or so on a nuclear plant, and it is trying to figure out future rates for the next 30 years to pay that back, it needs to take into account all these future developments, instead of assuming they will stay the same. I have read a lot of comments from nuclear supporters, but I can't recall one that covers all that. They all seem to assume the situation for storage and interconnection will not improve in the future.
solarkraft 7y ago
> the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables What, why?
_ph_ 7y ago
The German CO2 footprint for electricity production decreased quite a bit in recent years, in 2019 46% of all electricity was produced by renewables. The progress is compensated by the traffic sector increasing fuel consumption at the same time. France has the problem, that they are not able to build enough new reactors (cost, construction time) to replace the aging operating reactors. So ramping up renewables is the logical conclusion and besides having quite a lot of hydro power already installed, France has great potential of wind (very windy coasts at 3 sides of the country) and solar (sunny south).
Aaaaahhhh 7y ago
You are ignoring the nuclear waste. We are just burying it in caves which is not really a solution.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Nuclear wouldn't have been a feasible solution in Germany in the long run, because it is just too expensive. You may argue that the shut down of running plants was premature, but nuclear subsidies eclipsed those of renewables by quite a margin. Building new reactors isn't easy, France is struggling with it for example, although I don't think their strategy is bad. > you can never reach 100% renewables partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear. CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy. The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
imtringued 7y ago
>- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.

bulkan 7y ago

> In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants. Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.

earthnail 7y ago
We are decommissioning them. The plan was quite badly executed. Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running. This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early. Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least. On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Some shut downs were motivated by the recent increase of the CO2 certificate prices. Three years ago it was at 5€/ton. Now it is at 25€/ton.
jakub_g 7y ago
search for "Datteln 4"
Brakenshire 7y ago
The UK is a better example.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  The dash for gas, it had big environmental benefits but they weren't the original justification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash_for_Gas
  - C1sc0cat 7y ago
    It was also to punish the NUM (Miners Union)
xnyan 7y ago
It's being done by the biggest power utility in Germany: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s-farewell-to-coal-complicated-by-new-uniper-plant https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s... You're not hearing about it because it's very embarrassing to Germans, as it should be in my honest opinion. I get that Germans have a very unique and real perspective on the use of nuclear power. I get that nuclear power has very real and serious risks. It's still done less harm to the planet and the things that live on it than the use of coal. Furthermore, the forced dependence on fossil fuels as a result of shunning nuclear power has all kinds of add on effects. There's no Germany without Russian gas, and Putin knows it. Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel because they are unwilling or unable to confront the cultural stance on use of nuclear power. That's the norm for cultures so I don't blame them for it, but I do think it's leading to the wrong choice here.
- lispm 7y ago
  > but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel but we don't. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity production is going down.
  - xnyan 7y ago
    I'm sure locals and many others know far more about this than I. I'm very happy with Germany's 2050 renewable plan which is way more than my country would ever think about doing.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    It could go down much faster.
    - lispm 7y ago
      One would wish. In reality it's quite difficult. We are rebuilding the whole electricity landscape for a country with 80+ million people. The time frame for this is 50 years. There are lots of factors which are working against it. For example Germany has heavy coal resources (unlike France for example) and it's the largest domestic source of energy. Thus the country has used it for many many decades and this brought wealth and employment to people. Now to tell them that their coal-related jobs will be replaced is creating massive resistance in certain federal states against changing that.
redprince 7y ago
The only ongoing commissioning of a coal fired plant is Datteln 4. Construction was started 13 years ago to replace several ageing coal fired power plants. Due to technical and legal delays it will go online in 2020. Several other power plants will go offline afterwards, roughly with the same generation capacity as Datteln 4. I think it is safe to assume that this will be the last newly built coal fired power plant in Germany.

Dumblydorr 7y ago

There's a lot that can be done with renewables without nuclear or fossils, you can use demand response, batteries, hydro storage, and compressed air storage to store very cheap electricity.

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Not everywhere has sites that are good for pumped-hydro storage, typically requiring an existing hydro electric dam. Compressed air is very inefficient. But the general argument is: we need to consider what is happening now, not what could be possible under some idealised hypothetical scenario. And right now more renewables, without more, or maintaining existing, nuclear means more base-load coal and more load-following gas. The problems aren't really technical, they're political. Politics appears to be ill-equipped to deal with these problems.
throwawaylolx 7y ago
This is just the typical diversion rhetoric. According to all IPCC reports I've seen, you can't accomplish with renewables without nuclear what you can accomplish with renewables and nuclear, yet all political bodies promote renewables and fossil fuels while pretending it's just renewables.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  How is it diversionary to state examples of how renewables can be stored? That is literally the crux of the issue, we need storage for renewables. Nuclear sounds great on paper but look at new capacity additions. No one except China is adding nuclear. So to bring it up over and over here, Many HN commenters simply can't get over the fact that nuclear is way way way more expensive than renewables. Storage is the clear answer, unless you can point me to recently built nuclear and how cheap it is? How about South Carolina? Oh that was a massive fiasco that cost the ratepayers billions for literally nothing. If they spent those billions on solar, efficiency, and demand response, they'd have far cheaper and cleaner electricity. Instead they wasted billions on a nuclear facility that will never be finished.

archgoon 7y ago

> But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. What? Why?

jakub_g 7y ago
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-French-energy-plans https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies...
lispm 7y ago
Because the nuclear power plants are old and new nuclear power plants are more expensive than new renewable.
Brakenshire 7y ago
Because old nuclear power stations are coming to end of life, and new nuclear power stations appear to be ruinously expensive. See Flamanville which was supposed to be finished about 10 years and €10bn ago. The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive. It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.
LordHeini 7y ago
Because there are serious problems with the disposal of highly radioactive waste. As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics. Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage. On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing. And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago

The German government and the EU as a whole is often much more focused on optics than data based solutions.

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
All governments are like that, it isn't just Germany or the EU.
ChuckNorris89 7y ago
x1000 this! Lots of EU and German government decisions seem to be made for PR reasons rather than for the benefit of their citizens.

lispm 7y ago

> Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions. Last year German CO2 emissions were shrinking by 7%. > Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2. When they increase renewables instead?

buzzkillington 7y ago

>Am I missing something or this is total madness? You're not missing anything. This is madness. Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

diegocg 7y ago
It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself. A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do. Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- hurricanetc 7y ago
  It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear. The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.
  - number6 7y ago
    And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships

Krasnol 7y ago

Nuclear is and never was a solution for Germany: there is a nice read on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_frankreich_verzichtet_vorerst/fdoxtt3/ https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_... Here is one for the base load myth: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374 Many reasons for the slow fall are based in politics (coal industry is a job machine especially in the troubled eastern parts) and nimbys (hindering wind development) and politicians helping them out (ridiculous policies governing the distance to "settlements").

derefr 7y ago

> you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. Why isn't nuclear the backup? "90% renewable, 10% nuclear" sounds politically-viable; it's still "moving away from nuclear."

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anoncake 7y ago
No, a power source as insanely dangerous as nuclear is fortunately not politically viable at all here in the long term.
- theredlion 7y ago
  Please do go on
- TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
  Nuclear is safer than any other power source we have.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    All other power sources, except maybe hydro, are almost perfectly safe. They're a lot more damaging to people's health and the environment, yes, but that is a different thing from danger. I wrote "in the long term" for a reason, by the way. I'd prefer to get rid of coal before nuclear despite the danger.

anoncake 7y ago

> you can never reach 100% renewables Bullshit. You need storage, obviously. > Am I missing something Yes.

cameronh90 7y ago
Or alternatively/in combination with dynamic demand, smart grids, wide area transmission and overprovisioning. I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  France shows, how much effort it takes to generate a stable grid with electricity being produced mostly by nuclear power plants. Due to the limitations in regulating the power output, they have to operate the power plants not at the most efficient load but a lower one which gives them more regulation capability. Also, using up the electricity at night becomes a challenge. Belgium for example installed huge streetlights on their highways so they can increase the night load.
- anoncake 7y ago
  > dynamic demand Which does not actually mean turning off the power grid for hours as a lot of people here claim but things like throttling down energy-intensive industry at peak times and running non-time-critical jobs when there's surplus energy.

woodandsteel 7y ago

>- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. I am not really opposed to nuclear. But on the renewable side, for the intermittency problem, you have overprovisioning, regional transmission, short range storage with batteries, and long term storage with hydro and hydrogen gas produced from renewables. And both batteries and hydrogen gas are steadily getting cheaper. That means when a utility is deciding to spend 10 billion or so on a nuclear plant, and it is trying to figure out future rates for the next 30 years to pay that back, it needs to take into account all these future developments, instead of assuming they will stay the same. I have read a lot of comments from nuclear supporters, but I can't recall one that covers all that. They all seem to assume the situation for storage and interconnection will not improve in the future.

solarkraft 7y ago

> the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables What, why?

_ph_ 7y ago

The German CO2 footprint for electricity production decreased quite a bit in recent years, in 2019 46% of all electricity was produced by renewables. The progress is compensated by the traffic sector increasing fuel consumption at the same time. France has the problem, that they are not able to build enough new reactors (cost, construction time) to replace the aging operating reactors. So ramping up renewables is the logical conclusion and besides having quite a lot of hydro power already installed, France has great potential of wind (very windy coasts at 3 sides of the country) and solar (sunny south).

Aaaaahhhh 7y ago

You are ignoring the nuclear waste. We are just burying it in caves which is not really a solution.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Nuclear wouldn't have been a feasible solution in Germany in the long run, because it is just too expensive. You may argue that the shut down of running plants was premature, but nuclear subsidies eclipsed those of renewables by quite a margin. Building new reactors isn't easy, France is struggling with it for example, although I don't think their strategy is bad. > you can never reach 100% renewables partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear. CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy. The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

imtringued 7y ago

>- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.