4 ms·

The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it

nilslindemann 1y ago
No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you. Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
- chickenbig 1y ago
  > Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
  - nilslindemann 1y ago
    Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
    - chickenbig 1y ago
      "Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years" https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        That's with breeding, not with existing commercial reactor designs.
pfdietz 1y ago
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of). In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
- Paradigma11 1y ago
  And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe. So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        They use the bad arguments because they don't have any good arguments. It's a tell.
mperham 1y ago
You should check out these things called batteries.
- realusername 1y ago
  You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
  - thijson 1y ago
    Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      Using batteries for long term storage is one of the classic bullshit moves of anti-renewable arguments. There are much cheaper options at scale.
      - realusername 1y ago
        Cheaper solutions which no-one bothered to implement until now. The proof is in the pudding.
        pfdietz 1y ago
        If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago. What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.

No one cares, you buy it temporarily from the one who has it. And next time you may be the one who has it, and he may buy from you. Do they produce coffee beans in your country? No? Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?

chickenbig 1y ago
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee? Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
- nilslindemann 1y ago
  Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
  - chickenbig 1y ago
    "Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years" https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      That's with breeding, not with existing commercial reactor designs.

pfdietz 1y ago

With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of). In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.

Paradigma11 1y ago
And we do have detailed weather data for the last 70 years in Europe. So it should be easy for proponents of renewables plus batteries like you to show that their proposed solutions would have worked all those years.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      They use the bad arguments because they don't have any good arguments. It's a tell.

mperham 1y ago

You should check out these things called batteries.

realusername 1y ago
You can't manage a winter load with batteries (and no country on earth does it), batteries would need a 100x improvement for that purpose.
- thijson 1y ago
  Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    Using batteries for long term storage is one of the classic bullshit moves of anti-renewable arguments. There are much cheaper options at scale.
    - realusername 1y ago
      Cheaper solutions which no-one bothered to implement until now. The proof is in the pudding.
      - pfdietz 1y ago
        If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago. What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.