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You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare o

You are not wrong. More storage is needed; more solar is needed; more connectivity to Europe is needed. The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. So connectivity helps, storage helps, having people with solar on their roofs helps. There's a need for "base load". I hesitate to use that term because people get carried away with weird notions of it. If you slap a percentage on it, it's probably closer to 5% than to 50% of overall capacity if you look at it at a European level. We're talking a cloudy, wind free day across the entirety of the continent. A day would be tolerable. A few weeks highly unusual. The thing is, that base load is much smaller than the current base load provided by nuclear + legacy fossil fuel plants. Germany has been shutting them down by the GW. Nuclear is nearly done. Coal is next unless they have to get out of Russian gas first. They're putting 200 billion into fixing their grid in the next few years. Something, tells me that they'll manage without blackouts. Blackouts have not been a problem so far when they grew renewables from next to nothing to the majority of their supply. Same for other countries across Europe. A little bit of nuclear on the side will help. But it will mainly keep energy cost high because all that stuff has to be subsidized. Maybe these smaller reactors will reduce prices to be a bit less problematic. Otherwise, expect renewables to outgrow this stuff by orders of magnitude like it has for this exact reason. Add a few GW of nuclear over ten years or so. Add a few hundred GW of wind. Just wind. It might add up to 5%. That might be enough. I'm not against it. Just realistic about prices and amounts.

pydry 5y ago
>The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I've never actually seen numbers which take into account pumped storage, grid interconnects, actual weather, low-hanging-fruit demand shaping and the anticorrelation of wind and solar but I wish somebody would produce some. There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions. My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance. While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.
    - regularfry 5y ago
      It's been a while since I read it to know if the specifics you're after are in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a directionally-correct reading from https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/. Provisos obviously include changes in costs since it was published, but it would give you a starting point.

pydry 5y ago

>The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide. It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost. Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants. Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too. That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well. That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%. Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.
- pydry 5y ago
  I've never actually seen numbers which take into account pumped storage, grid interconnects, actual weather, low-hanging-fruit demand shaping and the anticorrelation of wind and solar but I wish somebody would produce some. There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions. My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance. While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.
  - regularfry 5y ago
    It's been a while since I read it to know if the specifics you're after are in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a directionally-correct reading from https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/. Provisos obviously include changes in costs since it was published, but it would give you a starting point.