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> what? who claims this? A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!". That's one form of this type of argument. There isn't much storage

by hannob 5y ago

> what? who claims this? A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!". That's one form of this type of argument. There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years. (There's some existing amount of storage, but that largely existed before renewables even started). Every time you have a "but storage!!" argument, it's an argument primarily relevant for the step from 80% renewables to 100%. But it's very often brought up in situations where the question is rather how to get from 10% renewables to 30%.

glofish 5y ago
I agree "storage" could be one of the candidates, but the OP does address that at all.
- Retric 5y ago
  He specifically mentions storage in several contexts. “You don't have to make the storage super cheap, you've got cheap power (see Fallacy 3) and you don't have to solve storing the power for weeks or months. All you have to do is suck up enough power at 2pm and sell it at 2am in order to turn power prices positive during the daytime.”
  - glofish 5y ago
    but it is not a one of the fallacies, right? It would have been better if "storage" was one of the main titles instead you get:"Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust" I am not saying that the author does not make valid points, I am saying that the valid points get lost when titled with evident nonsense
    - Retric 5y ago
      Storage alone isn’t a fallacy. Digging into exactly how much storage is excessive would be another, but that’s a perfectly valid debate and not the root issue with the kind of nonsense people regularly bring up. Here’s one that seems to be about storage but is really a #2 example. It arbitrarily picks 50% solar 50% wind 0% hydro and then does a bunch of meaningless calculations as if that’s ever what people would build in the North East: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-renewable-energy-battery-storage-need-worst-case-polar-vortex-wind-solar/?amp https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-rene... The issue with that article isn’t storage it’s the energy mix used and the lack of excess production. As #1 points out you get to 100% not by building that in a day you build more storage, more wind, more hydro, and or more solar and then figure out what else is cost effective to add. Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. It’s really not obvious that that’s going to happen just running some
      - nicoburns 5y ago
        > Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. Yeah, and at least solar is really easy to turn off so you don't actually have to pay the negative price, you can take zero.
blix 5y ago
Germany's renewables are made ~30% up of burning hydrocarbons, which allows them to sneakily work around the baseload problems of wind and solar.
- Dma54rhs 5y ago
  You can always pull from neighbor countries as well to smooth it out.
  - logifail 5y ago
    Germany and Austria decided to split their common bidding zone in 2018 since "Surges of cheap electricity tended to push down prices in the common German-Austrian bidding zone, leading to a rise in demand and exports, something the two countries' grid connections were unable to handle." https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europe-power-couple-break-up/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europ...
- pfdietz 5y ago
  If CO2 taxes were high enough, one could make and then burn hydrogen instead, for long term or rare storage needs. And this is still likely cheaper than going with nuclear. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
  - blix 5y ago
    Nuclear could be cheaper; its high cost is probably more regulatory than instrinsic. There is an obvious tradeoff here, but if you look at the renewable/clean energy programs in many first world countries, the primary trend seems to be replacing EOL nuclear with wind/gas. I think we could be doing better. Hydrogen is promising, but there are technical problems with transportation and storage. I'd like to see carbon taxes push us towards these types of solutions instead of burning 'renewable' carbon.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      If we're allowed to diverge from the actual world to hypothetical worlds, then renewables and storage can also be much cheaper. Hydrogen for load leveling can be stored underground as a pressurized gas, just as natural gas is stored. This is a demonstrated technology. Also, the US already has 1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, so that too is a demonstrated technology.
eloisant 5y ago
Because when you add non dispatchable energy sources to your grid, without storage you have to keep the rest ready to function. Unless you agree to have enough electricity only when the sun shines or the wind blows... Otherwise at best you can adjust the output of your dispatchable energy sources (mostly coal and nuclear) to make up for the unpredictiveness of the solar and wind. But you still need the same capacity. This is why Germany and Spain, 2 countries who invested a lot in solar and wind, continued to grow their use of traditional power plant at the same pace as before they started on renewable. For Germany it's even worse because they decided to stop using nuclear, so they burn even more coal than before.
- pydry 5y ago
  Coal and nuclear are not dispatchable. Their output is constant. They take about a day or more to ramp up and down. This is the reason why electricity was traditionally cheaper at night. Germany also doesnt burn more coal than before. The amount of coal they burn has been falling steadily since about 2010.
  - Krssst 5y ago
    Nuclear can do load following in France. According to this article (French), reactors can adjust power output by 80% in 30 minutes: https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/02/lelectricien-fait-de-plus-en-plus-varier-sa-production-nucleaire-210246 https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/02/lelectricien-fait-de-plus-en... (I am curious about more details since the figure lack context. It is not clear whether the 80% applies to nominal power.) Edit: the English wikipedia article on load following is actually much clearer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N... > Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Load following with nuclear is hideously uneconomical though. Even in France they use non-nuclear for much of that, for example by selling or buying power to/from neighboring countries. In any case, the problem with nuclear is that existing nuclear technology does not decarbonize the world. World primary energy demand is 18 TW. This would require 6000 nuclear power plants (3GW(th) each), if today's reactors are used they'd consume (the 235U in) 1.5 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. Total world uranium resource is a shade over 6 million tonnes, so it would run out in four years. To power the world with nuclear one either needs seawater uranium extraction (scaled up by 12 orders of magnitude from what's been done so far; 170 km^2 of ocean area for each of those reactors; the power/area is much worse than PV) or breeder reactors (which France has given up on.)
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
> There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. That's categorically false, and the article alludes to this somewhat. The biggest problem with renewables (primarily solar) right now is the "duck curve" [1]. That is, there is plenty of energy available mid-day, but then right when available solar starts to subside is also when you get a sizable demand increase in the early evening (e.g. people getting home from work, cooking, watching TV, doing dishes and laundry, etc.) The slope of that rise means that you not only need as much dispatchable energy sources as before, but you need to ramp them up and down much more frequently, which takes a higher toll on equipment. Thus, there is a real immediate need for the type of "time shifting" storage the article talks about right now. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
- pydry 5y ago
  It's categorically true. If your energy production is, say, 60% carbon based pretty much every watt generated by wind energy or solar is a watt that doesnt have to be generated by coal or natural gas. "This is the problem with renewables..." - this amusingly sounds a little like an instance of fallacy #1. It becomes "the" problem only when youve got way more renewables capacity than almost everyone has right now.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Please take a look at the linked Wikipedia article. The problem with solar is that peak energy demand occurs right when solar output is 0. So it means you still need to have the same power capacity from non-solar sources regardless of whether solar can serve 100% of need at midday (without storage).
    - pydry 5y ago
      The graph above shows that on non windy days where battery capacity and pumped storage is low you'll have to turn on the gas generators at 5pm. It doesnt exactly render the solar panels pointless.
    - 5y ago
SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
> A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!". This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article. When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs. I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Yes, until we have vastly more renewables and sufficient storage, there will be always the requirement for backup in the form of coal and especially gas. The near term aim just needs to be to run them as little as possible. While the end goal has to be to get to 100% renewable, short term the most important impact can be made by going 80-90% renewable this way.
radu_floricica 5y ago
I thought Germany is buying a lot of energy from its neighbors to offset lack of storage, most of it dirty from what I remember. There were some numbers saying that by closing their nuclear plants they're actually doing quite a bit of harm if you see things at a larger scale. Anyways, things may or may not work if other countries go into renewables. They may have different spike times - but I kinda doubt it. Most Europe wakes up and plugs its kettles at about the same time. And it's small enough that being windy or cloudy will happen in most of it, at least some of the time.
- iso1631 5y ago
  Looks like Germany is a net exporter of electricity, and that has been increasing for some time https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.html https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h... https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/Electricity-exports https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/E...
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    If I put solar panels on my home, say I have an oversized system: produces 10kW on average when I only use 8kW on average. It would appear as I am a net energy exporter to the grid. This alone doesn't tell the story that I use the grid as a big battery which I can use when there is no sun.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  Germany buys power occasionally but is a net exporter. Main import country is France which is mainly nuclear, maybe you heard someone quote partial results for this year where most have been from the Netherlands that mainly burn various sorts of fossil fuels? In any case it seems like an unreliable source. Example of German power imports: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=grouped&dataBase=trade_imp_twh&year=2020 https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Like with car traffic, Germany is a transit country for energy. While Germany is importing a lot of French nucler power, most of the time, it is exporting to other countries at the same time. This might exaggerate now much French electricity Germany gets. And while they might be in the same time zone, there is already about an hour of solar distance between the center of Germany and France and more if you look further eastwards. This smears out the power peaks at least. Definitely, there is about 1 day of time differential between Germany and France when you look at moving weather systems. If I (in Munich) want to know about the weather development, it is often a good guess just to ask a friend in Paris.
JamesBarney 5y ago
I think Germany proves that if you have neighbors with high base loads and you double electricity costs you can achieve a pretty significant use of renewables without sacrificing grid stability in a normal year. I don't think the but storage is used to argue we shouldn't build renewable resources. I see three parties to this argument in the states. 1. Climate change deniers - These people don't ever really ever argue about storage in good faith. Because they don't believe climate change is a problem. 2. Pro-Nuclear climate change believers - People who believe climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed and believe nuclear is probably our best bet. This is the group that brings up "but storage" all the time. 3. Anti-Nuclear climate change believers - These people believe that storage isn't really an issue or will be fixed shortly. They believe solar and wind is the solution to our climate change problem. Group 2 is believes in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. But when it comes to finite amounts of attention, and funding they believe nuclear is a better option.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  My groups would be 1. People who don't or won't believe that renewables work 2. People who believe they do. So whether you like nuclear is irrelevant. If you like nuclear but hate renewables you're in group 1 with the climate change deniers, if you like nuclear but believe the general reality based consensus on renewables costs and viability you're in group 2 along with the people who don't like nuclear.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    In the end, global warming or not, fossil fuels are pretty bad on their own: - air quality, radiation from burning stuff - noise, pollution - accidents(mines, oil rigs etc.) - with every gallon/liter of oil you buy, you send at least 50% of those money to a foreign despot. Being a climate change "denier" is mostly irrelevant for this discussion.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Doesn't affect my groups though. If you (correctly) think coal causes lots of pollution and fossil fuels have issues and need replaced then whether you end up in group 1 or 2 still depends on whether you agree with the general consensus that renewables are better/cheaper than nuclear or not.
LorenPechtel 5y ago
Look at his very first "fallacy". He's acting like putting in some storage to move power from 2pm to 2am is not a big deal. Store it how? Storage systems are either very inefficient or cost more per kwh than simply generating the power would. Utilities only build storage systems for dealing with rapidly changing demand--you can draw from a battery or pumped hydro faster than you can spin up another generator.
liotier 5y ago
> Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years Because they have French nuclear power to back them up. And fucking German coal.
- kergonath 5y ago
  They have lignite. Actual proper coal would be cleaner (!).

by hannob 5y ago

glofish 5y ago

I agree "storage" could be one of the candidates, but the OP does address that at all.

Retric 5y ago
He specifically mentions storage in several contexts. “You don't have to make the storage super cheap, you've got cheap power (see Fallacy 3) and you don't have to solve storing the power for weeks or months. All you have to do is suck up enough power at 2pm and sell it at 2am in order to turn power prices positive during the daytime.”
- glofish 5y ago
  but it is not a one of the fallacies, right? It would have been better if "storage" was one of the main titles instead you get:"Fallacy 2 - 100% Lemon or 100% Lime or Bust" I am not saying that the author does not make valid points, I am saying that the valid points get lost when titled with evident nonsense
  - Retric 5y ago
    Storage alone isn’t a fallacy. Digging into exactly how much storage is excessive would be another, but that’s a perfectly valid debate and not the root issue with the kind of nonsense people regularly bring up. Here’s one that seems to be about storage but is really a #2 example. It arbitrarily picks 50% solar 50% wind 0% hydro and then does a bunch of meaningless calculations as if that’s ever what people would build in the North East: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-renewable-energy-battery-storage-need-worst-case-polar-vortex-wind-solar/?amp https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20022019/100-percent-rene... The issue with that article isn’t storage it’s the energy mix used and the lack of excess production. As #1 points out you get to 100% not by building that in a day you build more storage, more wind, more hydro, and or more solar and then figure out what else is cost effective to add. Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. It’s really not obvious that that’s going to happen just running some
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      > Currently there is seemingly excess solar in California with prices going negative except unlike what’s mentioned people are actually still building solar because it’s cheap enough that even without selling in the middle of sunny days it’s still profitable. Yeah, and at least solar is really easy to turn off so you don't actually have to pay the negative price, you can take zero.

blix 5y ago

Germany's renewables are made ~30% up of burning hydrocarbons, which allows them to sneakily work around the baseload problems of wind and solar.

Dma54rhs 5y ago
You can always pull from neighbor countries as well to smooth it out.
- logifail 5y ago
  Germany and Austria decided to split their common bidding zone in 2018 since "Surges of cheap electricity tended to push down prices in the common German-Austrian bidding zone, leading to a rise in demand and exports, something the two countries' grid connections were unable to handle." https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europe-power-couple-break-up/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-austria-energy-europ...
pfdietz 5y ago
If CO2 taxes were high enough, one could make and then burn hydrogen instead, for long term or rare storage needs. And this is still likely cheaper than going with nuclear. https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
- blix 5y ago
  Nuclear could be cheaper; its high cost is probably more regulatory than instrinsic. There is an obvious tradeoff here, but if you look at the renewable/clean energy programs in many first world countries, the primary trend seems to be replacing EOL nuclear with wind/gas. I think we could be doing better. Hydrogen is promising, but there are technical problems with transportation and storage. I'd like to see carbon taxes push us towards these types of solutions instead of burning 'renewable' carbon.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    If we're allowed to diverge from the actual world to hypothetical worlds, then renewables and storage can also be much cheaper. Hydrogen for load leveling can be stored underground as a pressurized gas, just as natural gas is stored. This is a demonstrated technology. Also, the US already has 1000 miles of hydrogen pipelines, so that too is a demonstrated technology.

eloisant 5y ago

Because when you add non dispatchable energy sources to your grid, without storage you have to keep the rest ready to function. Unless you agree to have enough electricity only when the sun shines or the wind blows... Otherwise at best you can adjust the output of your dispatchable energy sources (mostly coal and nuclear) to make up for the unpredictiveness of the solar and wind. But you still need the same capacity. This is why Germany and Spain, 2 countries who invested a lot in solar and wind, continued to grow their use of traditional power plant at the same pace as before they started on renewable. For Germany it's even worse because they decided to stop using nuclear, so they burn even more coal than before.

pydry 5y ago
Coal and nuclear are not dispatchable. Their output is constant. They take about a day or more to ramp up and down. This is the reason why electricity was traditionally cheaper at night. Germany also doesnt burn more coal than before. The amount of coal they burn has been falling steadily since about 2010.
- Krssst 5y ago
  Nuclear can do load following in France. According to this article (French), reactors can adjust power output by 80% in 30 minutes: https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/02/lelectricien-fait-de-plus-en-plus-varier-sa-production-nucleaire-210246 https://www.lesechos.fr/2016/02/lelectricien-fait-de-plus-en... (I am curious about more details since the figure lack context. It is not clear whether the 80% applies to nominal power.) Edit: the English wikipedia article on load following is actually much clearer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#Nuclear_power_plants https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_following_power_plant#N... > Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Load following with nuclear is hideously uneconomical though. Even in France they use non-nuclear for much of that, for example by selling or buying power to/from neighboring countries. In any case, the problem with nuclear is that existing nuclear technology does not decarbonize the world. World primary energy demand is 18 TW. This would require 6000 nuclear power plants (3GW(th) each), if today's reactors are used they'd consume (the 235U in) 1.5 million tonnes of natural uranium per year. Total world uranium resource is a shade over 6 million tonnes, so it would run out in four years. To power the world with nuclear one either needs seawater uranium extraction (scaled up by 12 orders of magnitude from what's been done so far; 170 km^2 of ocean area for each of those reactors; the power/area is much worse than PV) or breeder reactors (which France has given up on.)

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

> There isn't much storage needed for renewables unless you get to very large numbers. That's categorically false, and the article alludes to this somewhat. The biggest problem with renewables (primarily solar) right now is the "duck curve" [1]. That is, there is plenty of energy available mid-day, but then right when available solar starts to subside is also when you get a sizable demand increase in the early evening (e.g. people getting home from work, cooking, watching TV, doing dishes and laundry, etc.) The slope of that rise means that you not only need as much dispatchable energy sources as before, but you need to ramp them up and down much more frequently, which takes a higher toll on equipment. Thus, there is a real immediate need for the type of "time shifting" storage the article talks about right now. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

pydry 5y ago
It's categorically true. If your energy production is, say, 60% carbon based pretty much every watt generated by wind energy or solar is a watt that doesnt have to be generated by coal or natural gas. "This is the problem with renewables..." - this amusingly sounds a little like an instance of fallacy #1. It becomes "the" problem only when youve got way more renewables capacity than almost everyone has right now.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Please take a look at the linked Wikipedia article. The problem with solar is that peak energy demand occurs right when solar output is 0. So it means you still need to have the same power capacity from non-solar sources regardless of whether solar can serve 100% of need at midday (without storage).
  - pydry 5y ago
    The graph above shows that on non windy days where battery capacity and pumped storage is low you'll have to turn on the gas generators at 5pm. It doesnt exactly render the solar panels pointless.
  - 5y ago

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

> A very pervasive argument against renewables is "but storage!!!". This goes with my issue, emergencies. I expected to see that in the article. When you absolutely MUST have power absolutely right now, renewables don’t cut it with current storage options. Think disaster or pop-up energy needs. I’m just really skeptical that the hard pushes for renewables are taking into account we should have excess production options in coal and NG going forward.

_ph_ 5y ago
Yes, until we have vastly more renewables and sufficient storage, there will be always the requirement for backup in the form of coal and especially gas. The near term aim just needs to be to run them as little as possible. While the end goal has to be to get to 100% renewable, short term the most important impact can be made by going 80-90% renewable this way.

radu_floricica 5y ago

I thought Germany is buying a lot of energy from its neighbors to offset lack of storage, most of it dirty from what I remember. There were some numbers saying that by closing their nuclear plants they're actually doing quite a bit of harm if you see things at a larger scale. Anyways, things may or may not work if other countries go into renewables. They may have different spike times - but I kinda doubt it. Most Europe wakes up and plugs its kettles at about the same time. And it's small enough that being windy or cloudy will happen in most of it, at least some of the time.

iso1631 5y ago
Looks like Germany is a net exporter of electricity, and that has been increasing for some time https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.html https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.h... https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/Electricity-exports https://knoema.com/atlas/Germany/topics/Energy/Electricity/E...
- flavius29663 5y ago
  If I put solar panels on my home, say I have an oversized system: produces 10kW on average when I only use 8kW on average. It would appear as I am a net energy exporter to the grid. This alone doesn't tell the story that I use the grid as a big battery which I can use when there is no sun.
SiempreViernes 5y ago
Germany buys power occasionally but is a net exporter. Main import country is France which is mainly nuclear, maybe you heard someone quote partial results for this year where most have been from the Netherlands that mainly burn various sorts of fossil fuels? In any case it seems like an unreliable source. Example of German power imports: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&stacking=grouped&dataBase=trade_imp_twh&year=2020 https://energy-charts.info/charts/power_trading/chart.htm?l=...
_ph_ 5y ago
Like with car traffic, Germany is a transit country for energy. While Germany is importing a lot of French nucler power, most of the time, it is exporting to other countries at the same time. This might exaggerate now much French electricity Germany gets. And while they might be in the same time zone, there is already about an hour of solar distance between the center of Germany and France and more if you look further eastwards. This smears out the power peaks at least. Definitely, there is about 1 day of time differential between Germany and France when you look at moving weather systems. If I (in Munich) want to know about the weather development, it is often a good guess just to ask a friend in Paris.

JamesBarney 5y ago

I think Germany proves that if you have neighbors with high base loads and you double electricity costs you can achieve a pretty significant use of renewables without sacrificing grid stability in a normal year. I don't think the but storage is used to argue we shouldn't build renewable resources. I see three parties to this argument in the states. 1. Climate change deniers - These people don't ever really ever argue about storage in good faith. Because they don't believe climate change is a problem. 2. Pro-Nuclear climate change believers - People who believe climate change is a problem that needs to be addressed and believe nuclear is probably our best bet. This is the group that brings up "but storage" all the time. 3. Anti-Nuclear climate change believers - These people believe that storage isn't really an issue or will be fixed shortly. They believe solar and wind is the solution to our climate change problem. Group 2 is believes in replacing fossil fuels with renewables. But when it comes to finite amounts of attention, and funding they believe nuclear is a better option.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
My groups would be 1. People who don't or won't believe that renewables work 2. People who believe they do. So whether you like nuclear is irrelevant. If you like nuclear but hate renewables you're in group 1 with the climate change deniers, if you like nuclear but believe the general reality based consensus on renewables costs and viability you're in group 2 along with the people who don't like nuclear.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  In the end, global warming or not, fossil fuels are pretty bad on their own: - air quality, radiation from burning stuff - noise, pollution - accidents(mines, oil rigs etc.) - with every gallon/liter of oil you buy, you send at least 50% of those money to a foreign despot. Being a climate change "denier" is mostly irrelevant for this discussion.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Doesn't affect my groups though. If you (correctly) think coal causes lots of pollution and fossil fuels have issues and need replaced then whether you end up in group 1 or 2 still depends on whether you agree with the general consensus that renewables are better/cheaper than nuclear or not.

LorenPechtel 5y ago

Look at his very first "fallacy". He's acting like putting in some storage to move power from 2pm to 2am is not a big deal. Store it how? Storage systems are either very inefficient or cost more per kwh than simply generating the power would. Utilities only build storage systems for dealing with rapidly changing demand--you can draw from a battery or pumped hydro faster than you can spin up another generator.

liotier 5y ago

> Germany is close to 50% renewables, and it barely built any storage at all in the past years Because they have French nuclear power to back them up. And fucking German coal.

kergonath 5y ago
They have lignite. Actual proper coal would be cleaner (!).