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If you need the gas plants ready to dispatch at any moment, can you still say you are running on 100% renewables?
by antuneza 3y ago
If you need the gas plants ready to dispatch at any moment, can you still say you are running on 100% renewables?
- not2b 3y agoFor those six days they could. But even if we need fossil fuel as backup for some time, burning a lot less of it means we don't cook the planet as much.
- melling 3y agoPeople like these small wins. Population of Portugal is 10.5 million people. We have such a long way to go. Global fossil fuel will hopefully peak by the end of the decade. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-demand-peak-by-2030-iea-says-2023-10-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/world-oil-gas-coal-d...
- pmoleri 3y ago> People like these small wins. And for good reason, it proves wrong the mainstream thinking that this is impossible. Quite a few countries already run the full year over 90% renewable[1] and we still neglect it with all kind of excuses. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
- mmasu 3y agoa lot of data there is pre-covid, would be interesting to see what’s happening today - especially in Europe, with the consequences of the Russia-Ukraine war on energy markets.
- kieranmaine 3y agoThis contains data up to Jun 2023 for the EU. https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/eu-fossil-generation-hits-record-low-as-demand-falls/ https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/eu-fossil-genera... "The first half of 2023 saw a collapse in EU fossil generation, leading to the lowest output on record. Wind and solar continued their growth, with solar generation increasing by 13% and wind by 5%. Hydro and nuclear are recovering from their historic lows in 2022, though their long term outlook is uncertain." The section "Wind and solar are leading the renewables charge" has graphs for each EU country showing H1 TWh generation by either fossil or renewables.
- mmasu 3y agothanks!
- barney54 3y agoWe still neglect what? There is incredible pressure to build renewables.
- pmoleri 3y agoAsk the countries that keep building coal and gas power plants, polluting the only planet we have.
- vasco 3y agoIf only they all listened to you! I don't have all the answers but a few of the ones I researched that are being built are needed to ensure people have heating through the winter in the next 3-7 years until reliable other solutions appear.
- sien 3y agoSort that by percent of renewables and then check the hydro. If you have lots of hydro you can have 90% plus renewables.
- huytersd 3y agoYes? If you’re not burning gas, there’s no issue.
- marcusverus 3y agoThe issue is that renewables require extensive, expensive redundancies which are misleadingly excluded from the ubiquitous “renewables are cheaper” studies.
- zik 3y agoNot really. Most real world studies take this into account. It's still way cheaper than nuclear.
- eldaisfish 3y agono, they do not. The vast majority of studies that estimate the LCOE for renewable generators consider only the spot price of electricity and OPEX costs. The cost of reliability is absolutely not factored into this energy cost.
- notTooFarGone 3y agoFirst give me a world that runs on 90% renewables all the time. The last 10% is really not something that will have weight. Actually I consider complaining about that bad faith. Too many countries run on pretty much majority fossils, reducing that has the largest impact and setting an example will help there. A world where we run on 90% renewables is a good one.
- tsimionescu 3y agoFirst of all, to avoid the 2 degrees warming threshold, we need to be at net 0 emissions in like 10 years. Which absolutely requires 0% fossil fuels in electricity and heating, all year round, all over the world. 10% fossil fuels in electricity is nowhere close to good enough. Secondly, the current best for renewables is nowhere close to 90% year round. Those 6 days in the article are a huge record for Portugal. 90% would essentially mean 330 days of exclusive renewables use, which no one in the world is close to, except maybe Iceland.
- defrost 3y agoYes - the plants are on standby, not consuming much beyond a "pilot light" worth of natural gas and not putting energy into the national grid. This is quite different to coal fired power generation which doesn't have low energy standby mode with rapid online to full generation ramping up in the manner of gas fired turbines. During the six day period the national grid was supplied only with energy from renewable sources.
- deburo 3y agoAt what cost?
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoWind and solar are cheap as chips. Hydro has always been cheaper than alternatives, where the geography is favorable.
- jagger27 3y agoGood question! At what cost do the externalities of fossil fuels come? What is the cost of inaction? What are you trying to achieve with this banal line of questioning?
- deburo 3y agoWhat's the cost of maintaining both green energy plants & non-green plants for Portugal? What's the cost of electricity there? Is it subsidized (perhaps heavily)?
- defrost 3y agoAt the cost of building enough solar and wind farms to supply the nation I would guess, with additional costs to upgrade the distribution infrastructure for smarter load balancing, etc. It's quite possible Portugal has put out a white paper on their transition toward renewable energy that you can find with some hunting about. Wikipedia has a rough overview that'll provide some points to drill down further into if you're interested in the per capita comparative costings of a hybrid national power scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Portugal
- wongarsu 3y agoAs long as the gas plants aren't burning any natural gas, I would say that's fair. Standing by to supplement power on load spikes is one of the primary roles of gas plants (together with pumped hydro), and that they didn't need to supply any electricity over those six days is noteworthy. From a climate standpoint there also isn't much wrong with having generating capacity in fossil fuels, what matters is how many greenhouse gases and how much pollution they put out. Which isn't much if they are just standing by.
- gustavus 3y agoOf course if they had a nuclear base they wouldn't even need the natural gas plants.
- helloooooooo 3y agoHow would they regulate fluctuations in demand? Nuclear can’t do that. You need storage, or a reasonably scalable generation medium. Nuclear as a base load is moot
- flextheruler 3y agoDidn’t Germany just put its nuclear power plants on standby instead of shutting them down last year
- kuchenbecker 3y agoControl rods modulate the output.
- malfist 3y agoNot quickly
- flashback2199 3y agoNot great, not terrible
- dpierce9 3y agoIf I have a hybrid car and I make a trip that doesn’t use the engine, are you saying I can’t say I didn’t use the engine because I could have?
- lazide 3y agoOr that it’s misleading to say you drove an electric car?
- hiddencost 3y agoThis is not a misleading headline.
- tambourine_man 3y agoDon’t you have a backup for your files? Do you not have a savings account?
- cranky908canuck 3y ago"If you need..." misses the point. The point of the article was that there is sufficient renewable capacity that the standby wasn't needed, for six days. So that's a milestone of some sort. Or, if not a milestone, then at least a checkpoint that shows that seven, eight, ten, or twenty days is only a matter of continuing to scale up.