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You are right that degrowth is not a politically viable path to saving the climate. Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industri

You are right that degrowth is not a politically viable path to saving the climate. Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society. What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too. The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.

beretguy 3y ago
> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.
    - fifilura 3y ago
      Water magazines and elevation change is required for pumped storage. But why not build that together will already existing hydro plants? The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power. I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now. The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago. But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.
      - ralphhughes 3y ago
        Your comment makes a lot more sense if I swap magazines => reservoirs, is that the word you meant?
        fifilura 3y ago
        Sorry, yes. Swenglish.
    - guepe 3y ago
      I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them. Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months. -- On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed. Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h. In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B. -- Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either. We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
  - ericd 3y ago
    Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
    - lumost 3y ago
      This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.
      - ericd 3y ago
        Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.
        ta1243 3y ago
        Transmission capacity does seem to be the main problem with expanding the grid in several countries - a problem that applies equally to new nuclear (which can't be where older coal/gas/oil plants are as they tend to need things like large amounts of water)
  - beretguy 3y ago
    > Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+ https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+
    - ta1243 3y ago
      Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation
      - beretguy 3y ago
        What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct? I posted videos in reply to this comment: > Why not solar, wind and storage? So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.
  - a_gnostic 3y ago
    So make it easier for individuals to convert cars, build and sell them, by removing barriers to the market. Move away from corporate monopoly thinking in infrastructure. Enable many individual solutions, and allow them to stand or fail on their own merits; Grass roots vs. Top down. Implement tax-breaks instead of subsidies.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.
- cesarb 3y ago
  I don't think it's that realistic; nuclear simply takes way too long to build. For instance, the most recent nuclear reactor under construction near where I live has been under construction for 40 years and it's still not complete. In the meantime, the amount of added solar, wind, and hydro has been several times the power that single reactor will have once it's finally done.
- konschubert 3y ago
  I’m all for trying, but solar is the one that’s taking off at the moment.
bko 3y ago
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if solar is cheaper, why isn't it the dominant energy source today? Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I missing here?
- gruez 3y ago
  Problems with storage and/or grid connection.
- Symmetry 3y ago
  Here in the northeastern US, the permitting process for adding new power plants to the grid is long and cumbersome in a way that is usually the long pole in adding new generation to the grid when the new generation is as quick to put up as solar. We have more solar power in the process of getting approval than we currently have installed.
- enqk 3y ago
  Because money is the wrong thing to use for decision making, we should be tallying resources and energy expenditure. Money is an imperfect proxy for something akin to human labour and related activity, and does not encode information about physical resources being used
- rout39574 3y ago
  Momentum, installed base, established interests, changing uses. Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over. 2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere and there are no transmission losses. In 2022, we installed about 228GW of solar panels. Assuming constant production (HAH!) that says it should take more than a decade to replace the existing demand. Which will of course stand still for us. Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power; about how quickly folks are convinced to change; about the construction of projects which were planned before this price threshold was passed; about the impact of using grid power to do transportation work which was previously done by pumping dead dinosaurs... The confounding factors abound. But that's an ignorant sideline answer to why. :)
timeon 3y ago
> Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society. Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Coal is being displaced already.
  - timeon 3y ago
    Sorry I forgot to include some data that motivated me to post it. If we are talking about coal, for example this graph [0]. There it seems that coal is actually growing. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...
    - konschubert 3y ago
      You have a point. China is going wild on call. In industrialised countries, coal is being pushed out though. (Your graph shows the US and Germany.) So it's do-able, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet in China. The thing is: I am confident that Solar will push out Coal, even in China. China is building a lot of new factory capacity for PV modules. Factory capacity is proportional to the acceleration of PV power production: It's a second derivative. The more battery capacity gets added, the faster PV capacity will start growing. The more PV capacity grows, the more clean power will be produced, competing with coal. http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/highlights47 http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/highlights47
Tar90 3y ago
Degrowth is really about scaling back on the over-the-top way we live. It's about finding a sweet spot where people live well but not at the expense of everything else. It’s cool and useful that solar is cheap, but degrowth means chill on the endless buying and using and discarding stuff, be sustainable and make sure everyone gets a fair shake, not just those who can afford it.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Consuming more thoughtfully is cool and all, but it's not going to save the climate.

beretguy 3y ago

> Nuclear can be useful too. I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.

ta1243 3y ago
Why not solar, wind and storage? To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much. It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change. Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.
  - fifilura 3y ago
    Water magazines and elevation change is required for pumped storage. But why not build that together will already existing hydro plants? The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power. I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now. The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago. But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.
    - ralphhughes 3y ago
      Your comment makes a lot more sense if I swap magazines => reservoirs, is that the word you meant?
      - fifilura 3y ago
        Sorry, yes. Swenglish.
  - guepe 3y ago
    I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them. Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months. -- On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed. Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h. In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B. -- Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either. We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664/photo/1 https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.
- ericd 3y ago
  Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power. Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.
  - lumost 3y ago
    This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is? In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.
    - ericd 3y ago
      Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.
      - ta1243 3y ago
        Transmission capacity does seem to be the main problem with expanding the grid in several countries - a problem that applies equally to new nuclear (which can't be where older coal/gas/oil plants are as they tend to need things like large amounts of water)
- beretguy 3y ago
  > Why not solar, wind and storage? Because it’s nowhere near effective enough. ———- I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+ https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation
    - beretguy 3y ago
      What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct? I posted videos in reply to this comment: > Why not solar, wind and storage? So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.
- a_gnostic 3y ago
  So make it easier for individuals to convert cars, build and sell them, by removing barriers to the market. Move away from corporate monopoly thinking in infrastructure. Enable many individual solutions, and allow them to stand or fail on their own merits; Grass roots vs. Top down. Implement tax-breaks instead of subsidies.
- konschubert 3y ago
  For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.
cesarb 3y ago
I don't think it's that realistic; nuclear simply takes way too long to build. For instance, the most recent nuclear reactor under construction near where I live has been under construction for 40 years and it's still not complete. In the meantime, the amount of added solar, wind, and hydro has been several times the power that single reactor will have once it's finally done.
konschubert 3y ago
I’m all for trying, but solar is the one that’s taking off at the moment.

bko 3y ago

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if solar is cheaper, why isn't it the dominant energy source today? Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I missing here?

gruez 3y ago
Problems with storage and/or grid connection.
Symmetry 3y ago
Here in the northeastern US, the permitting process for adding new power plants to the grid is long and cumbersome in a way that is usually the long pole in adding new generation to the grid when the new generation is as quick to put up as solar. We have more solar power in the process of getting approval than we currently have installed.
enqk 3y ago
Because money is the wrong thing to use for decision making, we should be tallying resources and energy expenditure. Money is an imperfect proxy for something akin to human labour and related activity, and does not encode information about physical resources being used
rout39574 3y ago
Momentum, installed base, established interests, changing uses. Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over. 2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere and there are no transmission losses. In 2022, we installed about 228GW of solar panels. Assuming constant production (HAH!) that says it should take more than a decade to replace the existing demand. Which will of course stand still for us. Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power; about how quickly folks are convinced to change; about the construction of projects which were planned before this price threshold was passed; about the impact of using grid power to do transportation work which was previously done by pumping dead dinosaurs... The confounding factors abound. But that's an ignorant sideline answer to why. :)

timeon 3y ago

> Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society. Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.

konschubert 3y ago
Coal is being displaced already.
- timeon 3y ago
  Sorry I forgot to include some data that motivated me to post it. If we are talking about coal, for example this graph [0]. There it seems that coal is actually growing. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-country https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...
  - konschubert 3y ago
    You have a point. China is going wild on call. In industrialised countries, coal is being pushed out though. (Your graph shows the US and Germany.) So it's do-able, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet in China. The thing is: I am confident that Solar will push out Coal, even in China. China is building a lot of new factory capacity for PV modules. Factory capacity is proportional to the acceleration of PV power production: It's a second derivative. The more battery capacity gets added, the faster PV capacity will start growing. The more PV capacity grows, the more clean power will be produced, competing with coal. http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/highlights47 http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/highlights47

Tar90 3y ago

Degrowth is really about scaling back on the over-the-top way we live. It's about finding a sweet spot where people live well but not at the expense of everything else. It’s cool and useful that solar is cheap, but degrowth means chill on the endless buying and using and discarding stuff, be sustainable and make sure everyone gets a fair shake, not just those who can afford it.

konschubert 3y ago
Consuming more thoughtfully is cool and all, but it's not going to save the climate.