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I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European

• cavisne 1y ago
  Campaigning for renewables is a literal Russian priority. https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schr%C3%B6der-sworn-in-at-russias-gazprom/a-1949349 https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schr%C3%B6der-sworn-... Solar & wind need to be backed by dispatchable power. Nuclear & Coal are not a good fit as they need to run at the same output always. Batteries are good for predictable outages (night time) but not for long periods of cloudy days with no wind. Gas (which in europe comes from Russia) is the only real option.
• ljlolel 1y ago
  Efficiency always matters. There’s always capex, ROI, and alternative opportunity costs for capital
  • mrtksn 1y ago
    It's OK to be inefficient sometimes.
    • speakfreely 1y ago
      Everyone feels this way until they personally have to pay more money for something.
      • ceejayoz 1y ago
        Sure, but that can happen with too much efficiency, too. See, for example, supply chains during COVID. We had a very good handle on how much (for example) toilet paper we needed in normal times, and produced almost exactly that much. Having some extra power generation capacity means you're not freezing to death in a cold snap or frying all the elderly in a heat wave.
• mlyle 1y ago
  Reducing carbon emissions means electrifying a lot of things that were not electric before. We are going to need a lot more base generation than we have now. Large grids, overbuilding renewables, diversity of renewables, short and medium term storage, and load shedding/dynamic pricing are all good starts but IMO won’t be enough— we should scale up nuclear too.
  • tialaramex 1y ago
    More, but not as much more as people often naively expect because it turns out converting liquid fuel into motion by burning/ exploding the fuel isn't very efficient on a small scale whereas electric motors are very efficient, so 1TW year of "People driving to work" in ICE cars does not translate into needing 1TW year extra electricity generation if they have electric cars instead, let alone 1TW year of extra network capacity to deliver it. Where we're replacing fossil fuel heat with a heat pump we don't get that efficiency improvement from motors - burning fuel was 100% efficient per se, but the heat pump is > 100% efficient in those terms because it's not making heat just moving it. Nuclear is much less popular than almost any generation technology, so you're fighting a significant political battle to make that happen.
    • mlyle 1y ago
      We need a lot more. Right now only about 25 to 33 pc of our energy consumption is electric. Some of the rest will get significant efficiency benefit like you mention — cars, building heating, etc. Others, much less so— high temperature industrial heat, long distance transport, etc. Reaching current nighttime use with storage and wind and existing hydro looks infeasible, and we need a minimum of twice as much. Power to gas (and back to power or to mix with natural gas for existing uses) is probably a part of this, but nuclear improves this (allowing there to be less of it and allowing the electrolysis cells to be used for a greater fraction of the day.
      • thfuran 1y ago
        Building heating won’t see much increase in efficiency from going electric compared to a high efficiency gas furnace.
• xbmcuser 1y ago
  According to this in many parts of the world solar + batteries is enough to provide 97-98% of all the electricity 24hr 365 days a year https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
  • bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Actually, that report is stronger than you're implying. It's saying solar + batteries is enough to supply 97% of power cheaper than any other way in sunny locales. It's possible to get 99.99% of your power with solar + batteries, you'd just need a lot of batteries. The news is that batteries have got so cheap that you're better installing enough batteries to hit 97% and leave your natgas peakers idle 97% of the time. That number used to be a lot lower, and that 97% number will be higher every year. The other cool thing about that report is that it gives a number of 90% for non-ideal places. Sure solar is cheap in sunny locales, but that solar is cheap in places that aren't sunny is far more exciting to me.
    • AlecSchueler 1y ago
      What's the energy and ecological cost of producing and transporting the batteries?
      • xbmcuser 1y ago
        way less than for transporting similar amount of energy in coal, oil, natural gas or building nuclear power plant.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        As with everything, an upper bound on the energy cost, how many n-kWh does it take to produce a battery that stores 1-kWh-per-cycle-times-m-cycles, is the $ cost of that {1 kWH, m cycles} battery divided by the $ cost of 1 kWh of energy. E.g. if a {1 kWh, 1000 cycles} battery costs USD 50 to make, and it's made using electricity that costs USD 0.1/kWh, (USD 50)/(USD 0.1/kWh) = 500 kWh. If it needed more energy than that, they would be getting sold at a loss. As a bonus point, this upper bound naturally includes the entire supply chain including the personal purchases of the people working in the factories that make the batteries, all the way up to any waste from e.g. unnecessary private jet flights made by unwise billionaire owners of the battery companies. This example battery then allows you to time-shift 1000 kWh of electricity from day to night before it needs replacement or refurbishment. But note the difference between "energy" and "electricity". This kind of calculation is made more complicated by the actual energies used being quite diverse in cost and type, e.g. Pacific-crossing cargo ships are mostly fossil fuelled, the stuff the mining company uses could be any mix of electric or fossil, the aluminium is extracted from ore electrically but any steel probably isn't, etc. The ecological cost is also strongly dependent on how far the world has gone in greening itself before that battery was made. The first Li-Ion batteries were made in an industrial base that was mostly fossil powered, new ones in China are made in an industrial base that gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
• fsckboy 1y ago
  >In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice this argument relies on the false-but-widely-held idea that "natural resources" are commercial wealth and if you don't hold them you are poor. Look at Japan, has very limited natural resources and not hippies but has built a world-class economy on knowledge work. Look at resource rich 3rd world countries, why are they poor? If Europe needs oil, they can buy it, it's completely fungible and sold at auction in huge volumes every day. The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument, not the "we don't have our own oil" fallacy.
  • jasonsb 1y ago
    > The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument I hate this argument. Why should one care about global warming in order to switch to solar? It just makes sense economically. Even if you think that the world is flat, solar energy is still cheaper than anything else.
    • pfdietz 1y ago
      Because there are uses of fossil fuels where solar won't be cheaper to replace them, but that still must be eliminated to avoid eventual disaster.
    • tialaramex 1y ago
      Because it's a fact. When your interlocutor doesn't care about facts there's no particular reason they should care it's cheaper, that's just another fact. You say "OK, Joe thinks the Earth is flat but he should still use Solar" and Joe doesn't follow. Joe's number one news source is "Jenny Truth Sayer" on TikTok and Jenny just told him that the solar panels attract Venusian Space Clowns, and he has to smash them with a hammer or else his genitals will explode There are greedy assholes for whom it doesn't matter why the line is going up. But it turns out they don't like wind or solar because they're too democratic. Those assholes are - like most capitalist asshole, used to a system where you own stuff (a mine, a well, a pipeline, a ship) and you get infinite money, but newer systems aren't about owning stuff. You can't own the sunlight, or the wind, well then it's no good is it? The big oil companies stepped back from "We're part of the transition" and doubled down on fossil fuels, because that means more money for them, and if we all die well, too bad.
• ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  > I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA. > The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase. What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures. Yes, sure, nuclear takes 10 years to build, and 10 years ago, people like you were complaining about the same things, and same for 20 and 30 years ago. If we didn't listen to the "it'll take 10 years..." 10, 20, 30 years ago, we'd have a lot more nuclear power now, that also works at night.
  • lukan 1y ago
    I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun. And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines. And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem. It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • Animats 1y ago
      > I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
• mnahkies 1y ago
  > we can dig holes and transfer materials into anything we need with the practically free daytime energy. I guess you mean stuff like this https://gravitricity.com/ https://gravitricity.com/ - I believe there's a few old coals mines in Scotland that have (/in progress) been retrofitted as gravity batteries to store renewables which is pretty cool (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yd18q248jo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yd18q248jo)
• nine_k 1y ago
  Currently not even the battery capacity is the limiting factor; transmission lines are. The average lead tine to connect your generator to an existing high-voltage transmission line in 12 to 18 months in most of the EU. Building a new line takes years. Due to that, much of the solar generation can't but be highly local.
  • thebruce87m 1y ago
    I see transmission lines mentioned a lot, but surely keeping the lines we have loaded 100% of the time is part of the equation and batteries can help with that too. I’d love to know how well loaded the lines are and a cost analysis of batteries at every sensible junction. Things like charging batteries close to solar and discharging them at night and having residential batteries to cope with peak demand.
• vimy 1y ago
  Batteries can’t cover a dunkelflaute that lasts weeks. Like what happened last year (or the year before, not really sure).
  • standardUser 1y ago
    How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.
    • vimy 1y ago
      Well, we don't have that capacity.
      • standardUser 1y ago
        Installed battery capacity has been skyrocketing in just the last few years. It's almost as if time is linear.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        Yet. But people are working on it.
  • notTooFarGone 1y ago
    Let's take the worst case scenario and use it as an Argument. You do t have to handle dubkelflauten because there is still gas capacity and gas can cover the 1% of times that it is necessary.
• JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  One of the benefits of nuclear, it turns out, is it’s less likely to be bomber than panels, batteries, transformers and HVDC cables. I have no doubt that Europe will monoculture its energy balance again. But that also makes it uniquely easy to bully by military threat, overt or covert.
  • bryanlarsen 1y ago
    Solar plants are fairly resilient to bomb damage: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant-partly-resumes-operations-after-bombing/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant...
  • toxic72 1y ago
    That is true, but I'd rather deal with a busted solar farm than a busted nuclear reactor
  • pornel 1y ago
    Why would they be less likely to be bombed? Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant got bombed in 2022. There's no strong deterrent there. These plants don't blow up like nukes, or even Chernobyl. Nuclear disasters require very precise conditions to sustain the chain reaction. Blowing up a reactor with conventional weapons will spread the fuel around, which is a nasty pollution, but localized enough that it's the victim's problem not the aggressor’s problem. Why do you even mention transformers and cables as an implied alternative to nuclear power plants? Power plants absolutely require power distribution infrastructure, which is vulnerable to attacks. From the perspective of resiliency against military attacks, solar + batteries seem the best - you can have them distributed without any central point of failure, you can move them, and the deployments can be as large or small as you want. (BTW, this isn't argument against nuclear energy in general. It's safe, and we should build more of it, and build as much solar as we can, too).
    • Nasrudith 1y ago
      Nuclear plants and their cooling towers tend to be made of reinforced concrete. That makes them harder to bomb. If you want to take out power you bomb the transmission or substations instead as they are far less durable. I recall hearing in school that 9-11 masterminds had considered planes against nuclear power plants but abandoned it after doing the math and realizing that it would do little damage. Not sure how true that is admittedly.
• moffkalast 1y ago
  I'm more concerned with what happened in Spain recently when solar was peak and they couldn't correct for a voltage oscillation. Power companies keep building solar and wind with grid following inverters so there's very little frequency and voltage inertia if steam turbines aren't running. We need to start legislatively mandating grid forming inverters or flywheels or something that maintains stability or blackouts will be get more and more common as we switch over.
  • scythe 1y ago
    The root of the issue here is underinvestment in storage. The weather is unpredictable, but the Sun is not. It doesn't suddenly get vastly brighter. Oscillation occurs within a predictable range. But partially because storage keeps getting cheaper, countries are investing at the bare minimum right now. Why buy $100 worth of batteries today when you can get it for $80 in three years?
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      Batteries are also inverter based sources so they typically don't add any inertia to the grid either. It's not really about the supply of power, it's about maintaining the 50hz frequency to a 0.002% accuracy (yes really) and keeping the voltage similarly exact, otherwise things start quickly disconnecting and tripping in a chain reaction. DC sources would work much better with a HVDC grid... if we had one.
      • ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        Grid forming inverters are off the shelf technology today. Price the ancillary services and you will be swimming in them.
      • rcxdude 1y ago
        grid-scale batteries generally do add inertia, because that's the most valuable service for them to provide at a small scale. Inverters attached to batteries can do it way better than spinning generators, but they need to be set up to do that. (And a DC grid would be much more difficult to manage: the nice thing about frequency is that it has to be pretty much the same over the whole grid, so it's a useful signal for the balance between supply and demand, while voltage is really quite sensitive to local effects)
• tomp 1y ago
  > I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA. No, you got this exactly the wrong way. In fact, it was Russia who initially funded European (German) "green" movement, their main purpose was opposing nuclear (by far the greenest elective source of energy, as evidenced by France's carbon footprint), so that Europe (Germany) would get hooked on Russian gas. The plan worked brilliantly!
  • pergadad 1y ago
    I'm afraid I have to ask here for a citation for your very confident but to my knowledge wrong statement that Russia (I suppose you mean the USSR) financed the green movement in Germany. Russia is equally a builder and supplier for nuclear energy, so makes significant profit on that angle and has no reason to fight nuclear. Also the initial green movement was not against nuclear power per se but rather a peace movement against nuclear weapons, the concept just expanded over time to cover also civilian nuclear power, notably after Tchernobyl. In contrast Russia is indeed known to finance both the far left (which has a lot of 'Ostalgia') and far right (whereby nationalism works against Western unity and strength) movements.
  • ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    Nuclear power is great if you have it. Not even the French seem capable of building new ones at a timescale or cost that is relevant in todays world dominated by renewables together with storage recently kicking into overdrive.
    • lysace 1y ago
      ”The west is weak. Not capable of building like the motherland.”
    • exiguus 1y ago
      It's great for the companies that run the plants because they are highly funded by subsidies from the society in which they are built. Nuclear power simply does not work from a capitalist point of view. Former Governments just swallowed this pill, because they had no natural resources that produce enough energy and they tried to stay independent. Now you can do this with renewable energy.
• vimy 1y ago
  > In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. We have plenty of oil and gas (normal and fracking). We have just convinced ourselves its better to leave it in the ground and pay foreign countries instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The energy crisis in Europe is a self-inflicted wound.
  • standardUser 1y ago
    I hope someday the word 'crisis' gets a breather. That poor, abused, overworked and misunderstood word :(
    • vimy 1y ago
      Gas price are still twice as high as four years ago. Whole industries are collapsing because electricity is too expensive for factories. Personally, just heating my home has become very expensive. Europe is deindustrializing. Especially Germany, the EU economic engine, has been hit hard. So yes, the word crisis is used correctly here. > For instance, BASF, a global chemical giant, recently announced plans to downsize its operations in the country with the reason being unbearably high energy prices in Germany. Now, the company is shifting its focus toward expanding its production efforts in China and the U.S. to access more stable energy costs. Germany’s prime power- the Automotive industry, is also struggling due to immense pressure caused by rising energy costs. A recent study revealed that energy costs for Germany’s automotive sector increased by 20% in 2022 and a similar trend followed in 2023. https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/ https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/
      • standardUser 1y ago
        > Whole industries are collapsing Ok, I'll bite, name 3 collapsing industries - on the verge of extinction due to rising energy prices - that could be fixed by building highly-polluting power generators ASAP?
        • vimy 1y ago