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I’m Danish and I’m surprised this is a study. It’s well known that a lot of our technical advantages in green energy comes from public investment (and not just

by moksly 6y ago

I’m Danish and I’m surprised this is a study. It’s well known that a lot of our technical advantages in green energy comes from public investment (and not just money, policy) into making the change. It’s kind of how Americans put people on the moon isn’t it? Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that.

rightbyte 6y ago
I guess geography is a bigger reason than both tech and policy. Denmark probably have more coast per km2 than any other country in Europe.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  I would say this is somewhat misleading. It's not like other countries ran out of coast to put wind turbines on and that's the reason Denmark is ahead.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Ye well the turbines doesn't build them self ofcourse. I just mean that Denmark probably has the best locations to put them in the whole of Europe. Flat land and alot of see dunes. The article didn't touch that. Obvoiusly bad policies could have had them stuck at burning oil ...
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Denmark has much more very low populated coast though. In NL we have plenty of turbines, curiously hardly on the coast.
- capableweb 6y ago
  Not sure about that, there are plenty of island-states in Europe that would surely have more coast per km2. Cyprus, Malta, Faroe Islands and more comes to mind.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Ye sure that is correct. "A lot of coast per km2 compared to other countries", then.
  - Someone 6y ago
    Would they? Denmark isn’t a single land mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark: “Denmark proper, which is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries, consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands” Also, the Faroe Islands are part of the kingdom of Denmark (but if you go that way, you’ll also have to include Greenland, which has a low coastline/land area fraction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of_coastline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of... puts Denmark at ≈150 m/km², Cyprus at ≈70, Malta at ≈700 (where does that come from? It’s only 3 islands. I would guess that’s using a different step size to measure coast length)
    - capableweb 6y ago
      Hehe, yeah, true about Faroe Islands, my mistake. Although, I'd still guess that full islands probably have more coast per km2 than half-islands (as Jutland has a tiny bit that is not coast) Worth adding is that we probably never will get a precise answer to this question, as measuring coasts is a famously hard problem where the more detailed the measuring, the longer the coast gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
      - BlueTemplar 6y ago
        So, how is it measured in practice ?
        Someone 6y ago
        One option is to pick a yardstick size and keep that for all measurements. Disadvantage is that the size picked affects not only the coast lengths, but also relative differences and even rankings. It also means scaling an area by a factor of N (typically) won’t scale its boundary length by N. That’s counterintuitive. That brings us to option 2: vary yardstick length with the size of the object being measured. Question then is: how exactly? Alternatively, estimate the fractal dimension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension) of the area and use that as the measure of coast length/area.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Scotland and Uk in general has vastly more potential wind energy than it could ever need, especially offshore wind in the north. It is being rapidly developed only now, as the cost of wind power in UK has plummeted
blablabla123 6y ago
It's like in Germany, Solar got the greatest boost at a time when it was still really inefficient to use but it received government subsidies. After they stopped the subsidies growth stopped despite technical advances. The good news about this is probably that whether to use regenerative energy is an actual choice and mature enough building blocks to make the switch probably already exist.
- danaos 6y ago
  But in the end it was the Chinese solar companies that reaped the money from the subsidies as they dominated the industry. This is true for all of the EU, not just Germany.
  - svara 6y ago
    Yeah, but maybe if in the end you get a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) over time curve for solar that falls off like a cliff [0] it was kind of worth it? [0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-electricity-in-every-chinese-city-study-finds https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-elec... (that's for China specifically, but the shape is the same everywhere.)
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Interesting, how much does the on-grid solar cost compared to off-grid ? Also, they seem to be mostly talking about cities... which already have an electrical grid !
GuB-42 6y ago
That's also how France got its nuclear power. It is actually a similar story. The oil crisis in the late 70s and the limited availability of coal prompted both countries to invest into solutions to limit reliance on other, potentially unstable nations. Denmark went for wind power and France went for nuclear power. Originally, is was a question of national sovereignty more than it was about the environment. But now that we consider CO2 emission a little more seriously, it is a lead worth keeping, and policies are made to help.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  FYI France doesn't have any plan for fission nuclear in its future – (even reduced to 50% of current production, which seems to be the currently professed plan^W wishful thinking) – unless of course it's being for now kept as a complete secret from the general population. But we've pretty much reached the moment when new reactors have to start to be MASSIVELY built to start replacing the aging ones in a decade or so (it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor !), so again, I doubt that there actually IS a plan out there. (A third possibility is that they are planning to keep the current reactors working waaay past their expected life duration, which is extremely reckless, and is certain to one day blow up in an international scandal, hopefully only metaphorically.)
  - rjsw 6y ago
    EDF is building the new reactors in the UK so it is retaining experience in how to do it.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      The clusterfuck that is Le Creusot (and in parallel Kobe Steel !) begs to differ…
    - epistasis 6y ago
      There's also Flamanville in France, which has been a complete disaster when it comes to construction. As well as one project in Finland. Did EDF learn anything from the two EPR that were built in China? Or was that just a pure sale of the design?
landemva 6y ago
I was also surprised a study was done to write about government policy incentives. Seems obvious. USA has a policy to subsidize corn production. This has led to a huge chemical-doused monocrop, corn syrup in most packaged food, and blending it in to gasoline fuel as "E85". None of these outcomes are particularly good.
- vangelis 6y ago
  Corn has a lot of political power in the US, especially in the Senate.
epistasis 6y ago
I'm not surprised a study was done at all. We need formal reports like this to catalog informal knowledge as formal knowledge, to make sure that such informal knowledge actually has basis in fact, and to quantify effects where possible. A lot of the things we believe, we believe out of tradition or hearsay. So having someone check them is a very useful function, and necessary for good decision making at the executive level.
- apexalpha 6y ago
  In what sense is this informal knowdledge? Government has always steered society in the way it wants to go. That's what a government is.
  - epistasis 6y ago
    Many government policies are completely ineffective. Some are effective. Sometimes technology change and business activities are far more important than policy. So cataloging what has happened is important.
wombatmobile 6y ago
> Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that. Are you sure? How about Intel, Apple, Spotify, TikTok, Veuve Cliquot and Tesla, for example?

by moksly 6y ago

rightbyte 6y ago

I guess geography is a bigger reason than both tech and policy. Denmark probably have more coast per km2 than any other country in Europe.

Etheryte 6y ago
I would say this is somewhat misleading. It's not like other countries ran out of coast to put wind turbines on and that's the reason Denmark is ahead.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Ye well the turbines doesn't build them self ofcourse. I just mean that Denmark probably has the best locations to put them in the whole of Europe. Flat land and alot of see dunes. The article didn't touch that. Obvoiusly bad policies could have had them stuck at burning oil ...
- the-dude 6y ago
  Denmark has much more very low populated coast though. In NL we have plenty of turbines, curiously hardly on the coast.
capableweb 6y ago
Not sure about that, there are plenty of island-states in Europe that would surely have more coast per km2. Cyprus, Malta, Faroe Islands and more comes to mind.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Ye sure that is correct. "A lot of coast per km2 compared to other countries", then.
- Someone 6y ago
  Would they? Denmark isn’t a single land mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark: “Denmark proper, which is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries, consists of a peninsula, Jutland, and an archipelago of 443 named islands” Also, the Faroe Islands are part of the kingdom of Denmark (but if you go that way, you’ll also have to include Greenland, which has a low coastline/land area fraction) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of_coastline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_length_of... puts Denmark at ≈150 m/km², Cyprus at ≈70, Malta at ≈700 (where does that come from? It’s only 3 islands. I would guess that’s using a different step size to measure coast length)
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Hehe, yeah, true about Faroe Islands, my mistake. Although, I'd still guess that full islands probably have more coast per km2 than half-islands (as Jutland has a tiny bit that is not coast) Worth adding is that we probably never will get a precise answer to this question, as measuring coasts is a famously hard problem where the more detailed the measuring, the longer the coast gets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      So, how is it measured in practice ?
      - Someone 6y ago
        One option is to pick a yardstick size and keep that for all measurements. Disadvantage is that the size picked affects not only the coast lengths, but also relative differences and even rankings. It also means scaling an area by a factor of N (typically) won’t scale its boundary length by N. That’s counterintuitive. That brings us to option 2: vary yardstick length with the size of the object being measured. Question then is: how exactly? Alternatively, estimate the fractal dimension (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_dimension) of the area and use that as the measure of coast length/area.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
Scotland and Uk in general has vastly more potential wind energy than it could ever need, especially offshore wind in the north. It is being rapidly developed only now, as the cost of wind power in UK has plummeted

blablabla123 6y ago

It's like in Germany, Solar got the greatest boost at a time when it was still really inefficient to use but it received government subsidies. After they stopped the subsidies growth stopped despite technical advances. The good news about this is probably that whether to use regenerative energy is an actual choice and mature enough building blocks to make the switch probably already exist.

danaos 6y ago
But in the end it was the Chinese solar companies that reaped the money from the subsidies as they dominated the industry. This is true for all of the EU, not just Germany.
- svara 6y ago
  Yeah, but maybe if in the end you get a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) over time curve for solar that falls off like a cliff [0] it was kind of worth it? [0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-electricity-in-every-chinese-city-study-finds https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-now-cheaper-than-grid-elec... (that's for China specifically, but the shape is the same everywhere.)
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Interesting, how much does the on-grid solar cost compared to off-grid ? Also, they seem to be mostly talking about cities... which already have an electrical grid !

GuB-42 6y ago

That's also how France got its nuclear power. It is actually a similar story. The oil crisis in the late 70s and the limited availability of coal prompted both countries to invest into solutions to limit reliance on other, potentially unstable nations. Denmark went for wind power and France went for nuclear power. Originally, is was a question of national sovereignty more than it was about the environment. But now that we consider CO2 emission a little more seriously, it is a lead worth keeping, and policies are made to help.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
FYI France doesn't have any plan for fission nuclear in its future – (even reduced to 50% of current production, which seems to be the currently professed plan^W wishful thinking) – unless of course it's being for now kept as a complete secret from the general population. But we've pretty much reached the moment when new reactors have to start to be MASSIVELY built to start replacing the aging ones in a decade or so (it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor !), so again, I doubt that there actually IS a plan out there. (A third possibility is that they are planning to keep the current reactors working waaay past their expected life duration, which is extremely reckless, and is certain to one day blow up in an international scandal, hopefully only metaphorically.)
- rjsw 6y ago
  EDF is building the new reactors in the UK so it is retaining experience in how to do it.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    The clusterfuck that is Le Creusot (and in parallel Kobe Steel !) begs to differ…
  - epistasis 6y ago
    There's also Flamanville in France, which has been a complete disaster when it comes to construction. As well as one project in Finland. Did EDF learn anything from the two EPR that were built in China? Or was that just a pure sale of the design?

landemva 6y ago

I was also surprised a study was done to write about government policy incentives. Seems obvious. USA has a policy to subsidize corn production. This has led to a huge chemical-doused monocrop, corn syrup in most packaged food, and blending it in to gasoline fuel as "E85". None of these outcomes are particularly good.

vangelis 6y ago
Corn has a lot of political power in the US, especially in the Senate.

epistasis 6y ago

I'm not surprised a study was done at all. We need formal reports like this to catalog informal knowledge as formal knowledge, to make sure that such informal knowledge actually has basis in fact, and to quantify effects where possible. A lot of the things we believe, we believe out of tradition or hearsay. So having someone check them is a very useful function, and necessary for good decision making at the executive level.

apexalpha 6y ago
In what sense is this informal knowdledge? Government has always steered society in the way it wants to go. That's what a government is.
- epistasis 6y ago
  Many government policies are completely ineffective. Some are effective. Sometimes technology change and business activities are far more important than policy. So cataloging what has happened is important.

wombatmobile 6y ago

> Sure the private sector is important, but they’re not necessarily going to move society in the direction you want, only government can do that. Are you sure? How about Intel, Apple, Spotify, TikTok, Veuve Cliquot and Tesla, for example?