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If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) it wouldn’t need support from politicians. Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive f

by tomp 4y ago

If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) it wouldn’t need support from politicians. Hint: it’s not, it’s a massive failure, and stupid countries like Germany are now paying the price.

jl6 4y ago
Fossil fuels have two major unaccounted-for externalized costs: pollution, and the national security risk inherent in importing fossils from unsavory regimes. Once you account for these, renewables are far cheaper. All the green movement is really doing is calling for better accounting standards for energy.
- yisonPylkita 4y ago
  Yet Germany still depends heavily on imported Russian gas despite all of theirs green propaganda
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    The idea was, that gas is certainly much cleaner than oil and coal. And that some gas will be needed in the transition to 100% renewable, gas is ideal for peaker plants. It was of course completely stupid to rely to such a large extend on immported Russian gas, especially since 2014. It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.
croes 4y ago
Yeah sure, because superior always wins ... not. Just look at France on how cheap and available nuclear energy is for instance. Germany is paying the price because politicians blocked green energy they effectively hindered the expansion of solar and wind energy. Take Bavaria as example they don't want wind turbines and prefer nuclear energy but the don't want power lines for wind energy from north Germany or a nuclear repository. Instead their Minister President suggests fracking, not in Bavaria of course.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  Nuclear is the optimal solution only in rather small niches (polar zones with long winters for example). As far as France, the drought has taken several French nuclears offline due to the high cooling water demand for nuclear reactors: https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-down-nuclear-reactors-due-to-drought/ https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-dow... That's on top of several major aging and maintenance issues which arose some months ago: https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-reactors-taken-offline-adding-to-electricity-demand-on-european-grid-12600662 https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-re... Add in the current European wide-risk of the military destruction of the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and the balance sheet for nuclear relative to solar/wind/storage looks more and more negative.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Polar zones with long winters away from coastlines. Near coasts, wind is really great in polar zones. When I play with my favorite modeling site https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ the place with the lowest cost to get to 100% renewable baseload is... Greenland!
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      Oops, that's not right. The cheapest place is Antarctica. (These assume the cost to install a wind turbine is the same everywhere, which obviously isn't right, but it does give an idea how good the wind resource is in these places.)
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    The drought doesn't really have to affect nuclear power's output. This is because of environmental regulation that requires that the plant keep a river below a certain temperature. Because apparently warming a river is worse environmental impact than climate change. Furthermore, many nuclear plants are cooled by the ocean or by waste water. Renewables require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. Even just building one hour of storage is 2,500 GWh globally. We'll need around 3 weeks of storage to make a completely renewable grid: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... We have no feasible way of delivering that much storage. Wind and solar are cheaper to make small reductions in a grid that is mostly fossil fuels. Their intermittency isn't an issue there because it's just opportunistically shutting down the fossil fuel plants when wind and solar are producing. But actually delivering a 0% carbon grid with intermittent sources is not just hard, it's not possible.
dgb23 4y ago
If X inferior to Y but X is supported by politics to a degree that Y is being slowed down and prevented, then Y still needs political support, even if superior in objective terms.
wccrawford 4y ago
Yeah, "green technology" isn't more profitable if corporations don't have to deal with the consequences of non-green energy production. Everyone knows that. Some people are also interested in not destroying the environment they live in, though. They are interested in acting as a global society to stop destroying the planet. To that end, they want to pass laws that force corporations to clean up the messes they make and include the cost of that in their energy production. If they had to pay for the mess they make, it might very well make "green" energy more profitable and also help our environment. At the very least, they'd have to stop destroying the environment.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) You should inform yourself before making wild claims. Fossil fuels are cheap mostly because of government subsidies. Reminder that 6.8% of the world's entire GDP (5.9 trillion US dollars) was spent on subsidies for fossil fuels just in 2020. [0] [0] https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...
- foverzar 4y ago
  You should read more attentively before jumping in on a high horse. Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying. Calculate how much it will cost to power a city 100% with renewables for a week. Oops, you can't, cuz we don't have the technology for uninterrupted power draw from non-nuclear renewables.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    > Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying. And yet this is exactly how fossil fuel companies and their proponents (even individuals outside the industry, if you can believe it) justify their "lower cost". The true cost of fossil fuels is hidden due to extreme externalities such as their impact on the climate, ecology, and human health.
    - Manuel_D 4y ago
      You realize there's options besides intermittent sources and fossil fuels? Nuclear power has been around for decades. When plants are built in series, it's a lot cheaper than the one-off plants that have been built recently. The plants built in series cost about $1-2 billion per GW.
      - powerhour 4y ago
        This doesn't really contradict my point (maybe it's a reply to a different comment). Letting fossil fuel proponents hand-wave or ignore or lie about externalities won't make nuclear power happen any faster.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
For quite some time, some pioneers found a use for Renewables and improved efficiency. The ROI was (marginally) viable to them. Over time technology got cheaper/more efficient (gradual improvements to ROI), and slowly more and more people started to adopt renewables, better insulation, heat pumps, etc. Recently, energy prices in Europe have (roughly) doubled [1]. And suddenly -by comparison- that same ROI starts to look very interesting to a lot more people. [1] (YMMV, check your local energy spot prices for actual numbers)
- mordae 4y ago
  This. Heat pumps and solar everywhere! And as the summers get hotter, everyone wants solar + aircon. It's crazy!
- CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
  Just for the data point. Around here (southern Sweden) energy prices for the coming winter may very well be close eight times higher than normal. The demand for new heat pumps is very high at the moment

by tomp 4y ago

jl6 4y ago

Fossil fuels have two major unaccounted-for externalized costs: pollution, and the national security risk inherent in importing fossils from unsavory regimes. Once you account for these, renewables are far cheaper. All the green movement is really doing is calling for better accounting standards for energy.

yisonPylkita 4y ago
Yet Germany still depends heavily on imported Russian gas despite all of theirs green propaganda
- _ph_ 4y ago
  The idea was, that gas is certainly much cleaner than oil and coal. And that some gas will be needed in the transition to 100% renewable, gas is ideal for peaker plants. It was of course completely stupid to rely to such a large extend on immported Russian gas, especially since 2014. It is also a lot to blame the previous government for, who curbed the roll out of renewables, or otherwise germany would be much further ahead with its transition as it is. Nevertheless, producing over 50% of all electricity by renewable sources is an achievement for a large industrial nation.

croes 4y ago

Yeah sure, because superior always wins ... not. Just look at France on how cheap and available nuclear energy is for instance. Germany is paying the price because politicians blocked green energy they effectively hindered the expansion of solar and wind energy. Take Bavaria as example they don't want wind turbines and prefer nuclear energy but the don't want power lines for wind energy from north Germany or a nuclear repository. Instead their Minister President suggests fracking, not in Bavaria of course.

photochemsyn 4y ago
Nuclear is the optimal solution only in rather small niches (polar zones with long winters for example). As far as France, the drought has taken several French nuclears offline due to the high cooling water demand for nuclear reactors: https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-down-nuclear-reactors-due-to-drought/ https://www.thelocal.fr/20200825/france-authorities-shut-dow... That's on top of several major aging and maintenance issues which arose some months ago: https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-reactors-taken-offline-adding-to-electricity-demand-on-european-grid-12600662 https://news.sky.com/story/nearly-half-of-frances-nuclear-re... Add in the current European wide-risk of the military destruction of the largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine, and the balance sheet for nuclear relative to solar/wind/storage looks more and more negative.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Polar zones with long winters away from coastlines. Near coasts, wind is really great in polar zones. When I play with my favorite modeling site https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ the place with the lowest cost to get to 100% renewable baseload is... Greenland!
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    Oops, that's not right. The cheapest place is Antarctica. (These assume the cost to install a wind turbine is the same everywhere, which obviously isn't right, but it does give an idea how good the wind resource is in these places.)
- Manuel_D 4y ago
  The drought doesn't really have to affect nuclear power's output. This is because of environmental regulation that requires that the plant keep a river below a certain temperature. Because apparently warming a river is worse environmental impact than climate change. Furthermore, many nuclear plants are cooled by the ocean or by waste water. Renewables require immense amounts of storage to even out intermittency. Even just building one hour of storage is 2,500 GWh globally. We'll need around 3 weeks of storage to make a completely renewable grid: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-storage-80-percent-wind-solar/ https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/03/01/12-hours-energy-stora... We have no feasible way of delivering that much storage. Wind and solar are cheaper to make small reductions in a grid that is mostly fossil fuels. Their intermittency isn't an issue there because it's just opportunistically shutting down the fossil fuel plants when wind and solar are producing. But actually delivering a 0% carbon grid with intermittent sources is not just hard, it's not possible.

dgb23 4y ago

If X inferior to Y but X is supported by politics to a degree that Y is being slowed down and prevented, then Y still needs political support, even if superior in objective terms.

wccrawford 4y ago

Yeah, "green technology" isn't more profitable if corporations don't have to deal with the consequences of non-green energy production. Everyone knows that. Some people are also interested in not destroying the environment they live in, though. They are interested in acting as a global society to stop destroying the planet. To that end, they want to pass laws that force corporations to clean up the messes they make and include the cost of that in their energy production. If they had to pay for the mess they make, it might very well make "green" energy more profitable and also help our environment. At the very least, they'd have to stop destroying the environment.

DoingIsLearning 4y ago

> If “green technology” was superior on it’s own terms (cheaper, more available, etc) You should inform yourself before making wild claims. Fossil fuels are cheap mostly because of government subsidies. Reminder that 6.8% of the world's entire GDP (5.9 trillion US dollars) was spent on subsidies for fossil fuels just in 2020. [0] [0] https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

foverzar 4y ago
You should read more attentively before jumping in on a high horse. Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying. Calculate how much it will cost to power a city 100% with renewables for a week. Oops, you can't, cuz we don't have the technology for uninterrupted power draw from non-nuclear renewables.
- powerhour 4y ago
  > Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying. And yet this is exactly how fossil fuel companies and their proponents (even individuals outside the industry, if you can believe it) justify their "lower cost". The true cost of fossil fuels is hidden due to extreme externalities such as their impact on the climate, ecology, and human health.
  - Manuel_D 4y ago
    You realize there's options besides intermittent sources and fossil fuels? Nuclear power has been around for decades. When plants are built in series, it's a lot cheaper than the one-off plants that have been built recently. The plants built in series cost about $1-2 billion per GW.
    - powerhour 4y ago
      This doesn't really contradict my point (maybe it's a reply to a different comment). Letting fossil fuel proponents hand-wave or ignore or lie about externalities won't make nuclear power happen any faster.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

For quite some time, some pioneers found a use for Renewables and improved efficiency. The ROI was (marginally) viable to them. Over time technology got cheaper/more efficient (gradual improvements to ROI), and slowly more and more people started to adopt renewables, better insulation, heat pumps, etc. Recently, energy prices in Europe have (roughly) doubled [1]. And suddenly -by comparison- that same ROI starts to look very interesting to a lot more people. [1] (YMMV, check your local energy spot prices for actual numbers)

mordae 4y ago
This. Heat pumps and solar everywhere! And as the summers get hotter, everyone wants solar + aircon. It's crazy!
CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
Just for the data point. Around here (southern Sweden) energy prices for the coming winter may very well be close eight times higher than normal. The demand for new heat pumps is very high at the moment