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I didn't read the whole thing because it asks for an account. But I want to point something. While I think solar power is great and we should keep working on e

• newsclues 6y ago
  We have solar in Ontario Canada, and while snow has a negative impact on energy production, it doesn’t go to zero.
  • Darmody 6y ago
    No, of course not. But as I said, around 80-85% of the solar energy production was stopped. Wind and hydro are not enough so we're burning coal when we could. France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear because they understand the risks are very, very low and they can produce enough energy to fulfill their needs and to sell to their neighbours.
    • mrpopo 6y ago
      > France is also making a transition to renewable energy but they are not giving up on nuclear Unfortunately there is very strong support on dropping nuclear power in France in favor of renewable energy, across almost all the political spectrum. Nuclear share of electricity production is already planned to be lowered from 70% to 50%.
    • olau 6y ago
      Nuclear is being phased out due to cost. As more things are discovered that could go wrong, it gets more and more expensive to fix all of them. Nuclear is also bad at this kind of thing. You really want either storage (storing heat is easy, by the way), or cheap plants. It doesn't really matter if they are expensive to run as long as they only run a few days a year.
  • nahname 6y ago
    It is worth pointing out that Ontario solar generation is only 1% of the power supply mix. https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-Capacity https://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-C...
• pydry 6y ago
  Wind energy should be producing a lot more these days. Spain can also import power.
  • Darmody 6y ago
    Wind energy is around 19% which is not enough. I think the price increase means we're not ready to rely only on solar as our biggest energy source because it can fail when we need it the most.
    • toomuchtodo 6y ago
      I mean, you don’t build the majority of your infrastructure for black swan events. You can still overbuild renewables, which are effective most of the time, and keep some fossil generators like gas peakers, biomas, and biogas for backup power.
      • simiones 6y ago
        Black swan events are completely unpredictable events. Cloud cover or solar flares are NOT black swan events, they are just the opposite: they are events that we know for sure will happen (just like global pandemics) even if we don't know when they will happen.
        • pydry 6y ago
          It's most intense storm in the last 50 years. Admittedly we should be expecting these with more regularity but it's still a bit of a black Swan. Nonetheless in a system with wind and solar, wind over producing in storms should mitigate the effect of losing solar coverage.
          • toomuchtodo 6y ago
            It also appears Spain has an enormous amount of geothermal potential. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032115013374 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
• Faaak 6y ago
  your generalizing a whole year to some days, which seems a bit dishonest to me.. Yet, even with what you say, spain is actually (right now) quite green: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map
  • Darmody 6y ago
    I'm not generalizing a whole year. But we need to be ready for moments like this. Looking at the data in that website you can see that solar went down to almost 0% yesterday.
    • pfdietz 6y ago
      Rare backup power can be supplied with hydrogen burned in turbines. The capital cost per MW(e) of a simple cycle turbine power plant is just 5% of that of current technology LWR nuclear power plants.
• pjc50 6y ago
  Yeah, achieving 100% is very hard. The interim solution is having gas or even coal plants on standby to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover.
  • mrpopo 6y ago
    > to run for the few percent of the year which the renewables can't cover. Citation needed. Honestly. A graph with power factor -> expected average number of days per year would add to the discussion.
    • fy20 6y ago
      Where I am in Europe, solar panels produce around 15% in December of what they do in June. I'm not even that far north. We don't have that much wind (even on the coast), and the country is very flat so hydro isn't an option. To use 100% green power we would need a combination of long term energy storage, and HVDC transmission across Europe.
      • stdbrouw 6y ago
        Nobody expects wind to cover the majority of our electricity needs, but don't discount it either. There are some positive signs re: winter production, too: https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2020-offshore-wind-energy-in-the-belgian-north-sea-breaks-record/ https://www.belgianoffshoreplatform.be/en/news/winter-2019-2...
      • sveme 6y ago
        Which is being built (e.g. the one between Germany and Norway is currently being finalized. Obviously, we need to connect vastly larger areas.
    • jakewins 6y ago
      Hour-by-hour multi-year simulations show the US grid can be ran with 90% clean power with current technology. "Clean" being the current nuke and hydro fleet plus a massive expansion of wind, solar and storage. The latest such simulation I've seen is the 2035 Report from Berkeley, I wrote a summary of it here: https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ https://climate.davis-hansson.com/p/90percent-grid/ You can read the full report here: https://www.2035report.com/ https://www.2035report.com/
• ffhhj 6y ago
  https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Ftechnology-quarterly%2F2021%2F01%2F07%2Fhow-governments-spurred-the-rise-of-solar-power https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
• lukeschlather 6y ago
  "We shouldn't" is a very strong statement. If solar and wind are 15% of the cost of a nuclear plant then what's the worry? We just build 5x as much as we need (with the obvious benefit that most of the time we have virtually limitless energy.) The problems with solar and wind can be solved with scale and storage. Nuclear has a number of problems which require technology that doesn't exist at an economical price.
  • ohgodplsno 6y ago
    Solar is not controllable. A nuclear power plants scales up or down in less than an hour and works whether it's sunny, rainy, snowing, windy or dry. If you build five times more solar panels, you have five time more panels not running when it's not sunny. We can't store it either, because we would then need to build such large battery farms that it would be both dangerous and impractical. Not to mention that our current batteries have absolutely dreadful efficiencies and lifetimes. Additionally, the current CO2 emissions over the lifetime of a solar panel are absolutely horrendous if you do not live in a place that is sunny most of the time.
    • PietdeVries 6y ago
      I think you over-estimate the CO2 emissions for solar panels and under-estimate the complexity of nuclear installations. A quick google search [1] learns that the CO2 emissions of the solar panel are marginally higher than for a nuclear power plant, but more then 10-fold lower than coal plants. Vattenfall did a study, but it's from 1999, so relies on 20-year old solar technology. In addition, building a nuclear power plant is amazingly complex. In Europe there are hardly any companies that have the technology and risk-appetite to build one without a solid (financial) support from the government. I recall that in the UK they are building one that is over time and way over budget [2] (spoiler: they started in 2008 and as of now still aren't producing any electricity, and the government-promised price of ~100 pounds/MWh was in 2016 already beaten by solar, implying that over the lifetime the nuclear power plant will cost the consumer 50 billion pounds on subsidies and 20 billion on construction) And sure, you can't control the sun or the clouds. But with a bit of effort you can create a grid that evens out the impact of the weather. High-voltage power grids in Europe are increasingly interconnected and help fill the gaps in electrical power cross border. Excess solar energy from Germany can simply be transferred to the UK via the Netherlands. [1]: https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+solar+panels&cat=web&pl=ext-ff&language=english&extVersion=1.3.0 https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?query=co2+emissions+sol... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
• rozab 6y ago
  What's the heating situation like in Spain? All electric? I was about to say something to the effect of: does it really matter if electricity prices spike greatly in response to the supply of renewables? Why shouldn't we discourage people from using electricity at these times? I suppose this doesn't apply to vital things like heating though.
  • aksss 6y ago
    > does it really matter if electricity prices spike? One of the reasons the electricity costs spike is because you’re maintaining two generation facilities in Germany and Spain. Solar takes massive investment but the coal plants still need to be maintained and fed for when the Sun is obscured. And I think I recall that in a place like Germany, electric demand actually goes up, not down, when the sun is obscured - more people indoors. I would also like to add that it matters significantly on an individual/family basis to productive capacity and well-being when electricity costs go up, whether manifested as blackouts or much steeper bills. Not everyone is wealthy enough to absorb that without noticeable pain. There’s a bit of a “let them eat cake” aspect to comments like this.
• wasdfff 6y ago
  I would’t be surprised to hear most of the worlds population lives in an area ideal for solar power. I’m thinking SE Asia and Africa. But also, 18 million people live in greater Los Angeles alone, so a good portion of the US population and certainly a large portion of central and south America would be good candidates as well for solar.
  • aksss 6y ago
    Especially as those areas become more wealthy and new demands come online. The model of using coal and LNG to power air conditioning units is not one to replicate.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  There isn't even enough time to construct nuclear plants within the timeframes needed to mitigate climate change. Nuclear power is also just too expensive. I know the tech crowd is still angry about the safety debate, and that may even be justified. But it just doesn't matter any more. Solar + battery is now cheaper than coal, of all things, for new construction, in fairly typical situations. Solar panels are also fairly productive in winter, more than people realise. That's because we tend to believe their output is proportional to temperatures, which it is not. Solar irradiation varies far less throughout the year than temperatures. Length of daylight in higher latitudes is an issue, but correlates surprisingly well with stronger winds, at least in Europe.