Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time.

Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way too long. Also, we need a lot of those clean sources.

So what is your proposal? A realistic one, please, not a scenarion of "we should have done X decades ago", but one that can be worked on right now, on the basis we have.

There is also geothermal, where some very interesting innovations are being made by Quaise Energy among others.

Also, energy storage is emerging as an electricity grid stabilizer. The cost trend of solar+wind+storage is looking very promising when compared to nuclear.

Pls read abt how france is reprocessing waste or how breeding reactors work

Here is a visualisation of of all the high-level nuclear waste produced in France over the last 60 years, superimposed over the port of Marseille.

https://twitter.com/laydgeur/status/1433463215321669633?lang...

Just how you can jump from that to opposing renewables build outs is beyond me.

No you do not get it I think.

The world need Nuclear AND Renewable energy. Working hand to hand to accelerate decarbonization, as fast as you can.

We need low carbon electricity production. And try to achieve that exclusively with renewable due to (close to) religious beliefs is an extremely dangerous bet on humankind.

I am not aware of many lobbies arguing that we need a world 100% nuclear.

However, I know many old world lobbies (like Greenpeace) that would prefer to die on the hill of climate change instead of admitting that the world need nuclear energy.

So what's the CO2 free alternative? AFAIK nobody is really opposing renewables. It's just the 100% RE dream that would require massive battery, grid and space (building many, many wind turbines)

I like the calculation; makes things more clear.

However, to your last point: You are saying that nuclear power plants then are insured to risk. Can you point me in your sources to the place where it is shown how nuclear power plant operators today then are insuring "to risk" the risk of nuclear disaster and all costs and risks of the disposal?

"Based on facts, it is currently plain wrong."

No.

"Your sentence "Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk" is pretty typical of the anti-nuclear argumentation: Mainly based on feelings not on facts."

  A:   Fukushima is costing $200B
  B:   US nuclear power plants are insured for a payout of $15B 
  A+B: US power plants are underinsured by $185B 

Moving goal posts, hand waving, talking about my feelings (thanks for caring!), personal attacks and sources unrelated to nuclear power plant insurance doesn't explain the fact away, that "Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk".

PS: "EnergyWende" is not a German word. While Java is using Camelcase, German is not using Camelcase.

cheap, clean, reliable -- under current conditions you only get to pick 2

Or near fault lines. Or near rivers if those risk running dry in summer. Or near densly populated areas.

Sure, nuclear is maybe better than coal. We get it, even greenpeace and the green party in Germany does. That point has been discussed, and agreed upon.

I love that, you know? You have some good news regarding electricity and renewables, and instead of being happy, people start to look for problems.

But let's role with it for second. Renewables are, unfortunately, not at a point yet where they can cover 100% of demand. We cannot change the current mix neither. So, what would be your proposed way forward to "solve" climate change? I am really curious, because most of the time people just ignore the time schedule behind those transitions (power plants have to be built, grids to be extended...).

I have good news for you, Germany did so in 2011:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-based-carbon-...

Did you include the electricity needed for when all heating, transport, industry etc is electrified?

This is a work in progress. The growing fleet of renewable units will enable Spain to shut reactors down without building other ones.

This is heavy industry, nothing can be done in a jiffy.

I am half surprised. People are often shocked when they discover the real number about the Carbon intensity of the German electricity production.

There is years of green washing to digest before accepting the truth.

I wouldn't say lying, but misrepresenting decribes that claim rather well.

The main challenge is not production but storage - e.g. several people I know have solar panels on their roof, sometimes with 5x their electricity peak usage without a way to store that electricity for later/night usage. The slow uptick of EVs in Germany is partialy part of the problem, it would be the easiest way to increase storage.

As a tought experiment, if all cars in Germany would be EVs, those could store 2 days of electricity usage.

For flat owners solar panel usage increased a lot, but battery production is way behind, the first usable ones arrived this year, but it will take some more years to get out of BETA. Also energy providers in Germany fight this tooth and nails, e.g. there is no easy way to get to the current usage data of your flat to regulate battery usage from solar storage ("zero feed-in").

Here's a harsh reality: "zero co2" nuclear emits massive amounts of CO2 during mining, during enrichment, creation of fuels, the massive motorcades that transport the fuels to their final power plant destination where they finally produce power without emitting CO2. So maybe its better for local air quality, but really the emissions are quite high.

That's complete bollocks, because all those CO₂ emissions are proportional to the amount of fuel, and the power density of nuclear fuel is such that the total amount is indeed tiny.

Solar panels and wind turbines also require emitting CO₂ for their manufacture, and it turns out that they emit more than nuclear, fuel included.

Additionally, while enrichment requires a lot of energy, to spin turbines or fuel gas separation, it's electrical energy, and in France for instance it's nuclear energy fueling enrichment.

You build something like 3x peak demand and produce hydrogen or ammonia while you have a surplus so that you can burn it while the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow or use it as feedstock for your industrial processes. Industrial scale hydrogen electrolyzers exist, we just need to build more of them once we have a steady electricity surplus that allows us to run them economically.

Very simply - vastly increase hydro generation capacity by adding extra turbines to existing hydro powerplants. You can't increase overall amounts of electricity produced this way because water in dams is finite, but you can increase max power output when needed. This costs a tiny amount compared to digging up dams themselves, displacing businesses and people on the lands to be flooded, buying up land etc. because the footprint of the hydro powerplant doesn't change.

In some countries that's a problem because they don't have enough water. Portugal is lucky with that. Water in dams provides seasonal storage of a sort (even if it's never literally pumped up - just used only when necessary, on a high throughput if need be).

It will also mean that at daytime and overnight when wind is strong, hydro plants will completely stop.

...In fact, that seems already done. Portugal has 7.6GW of hydro capacity, up from 5GW in 2008. This allows for peak hydro production to cover 1.37 of average and almost entirety of peak electricity consumption in the country. So the answer is very trivial: "when situations like today happen, just use hydro, and don't use hydro in other situations when either wind or solar are available".

That wouldn't explain the 3x difference between what you report for Germany vs what Our World in Data reports for Germany.

Are your numbers electricity or primary energy? You're sources don't say. I assume nowtricity is electricity because of the domain? But then it says "CO2 emissions per country" so one would assume it's all of primary energy (including traffic and heating?).

Germany decided, or rather re-decided, to close NPPs after Fukushima. Hence, operators didn't invest in maintenance, saftey upgrades, repairs or new fuel. Rather, they did thenminimum necessary to get them to the agreed (operators and the government agreed on dates, surprising, I know), closure date. The result: There was no way to keep German NPPs scheduled for closure running any lomger without massive, and financially uninteresting, investments and a lot of time (refits, repairs, maintenance, recertification, procurent and delivery of new fuel rods, testing, reactivation...).

That coal was increased instead of renewbles was a really bad devision. One driven by a strong lobby and (mostly) conservative politians with a vested interest in coal.

They closed nuclear plants, but the decision to close them down was made ten years ago. To extend them now would be prohibitively expensive and not even the owners wanted to keep them online. You can fault Germany for not building new modern reactors, but the old ones had to be shut down.

"kWh per hour worked" would be an interesting comparative metric, like the Big Mac index.

How 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

Nuclear is emphatically not an instant-on hot backup. Plants take time to spool up, and very importantly time to cool down. Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off, it produces energy that has to go somewhere while the intermediate fission products decay over hours-to-days.

This guy doesn't understand nuclear

No? Either you have enough nuclear to cover 100% of peak demand, in which case you just run them exclusively (at a terrible capacity factor) because nuclear is almost exclusively capex, or you don't, in which case you need gas peakers.

At 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

Good 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?

Around 9 eurocents per kWh

On one hand, solar and wind are very cheap - significantly cheaper than fossil fuels. On the other hand, you still also need either a significant amount of fossil fuel capacity or energy storage available to kick in during hours when solar and wind can't provide as much production. So instead of building enough fossil fuel production for 110% of your peak need, you might lower that to 50% and then still also build 110% of your need in renewable energy -- so you'd be over-capitalized at a total installed capacity of fossil fuels + renewables at about 160% of peak need.

So, marginal cost is lower. Total capital outlay might be higher. Portugal provides energy at an average of 9.7¢ / kWh which presumably is high enough to pay back all the capital costs in addition to the marginal costs. Mississippi only has 1% renewables and provides electricity at 11.55¢ / kWh.

So it would appear at a very rough glance that the answer to "At what cost?" is..."Negative cost".

Wind and solar are cheap as chips. Hydro has always been cheaper than alternatives, where the geography is favorable.

a 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.

We still neglect what? There is incredible pressure to build renewables.

Sort that by percent of renewables and then check the hydro.

If you have lots of hydro you can have 90% plus renewables.

Not really. Most real world studies take this into account.

It's still way cheaper than nuclear.

First 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.

For renewables, most of the cost is up front, then they're cheap to run because they don't need fuel. (High capex, low opex.) Fossil fuel plants have more of a mix of upfront and operating costs. High interest rates make it expensive to borrow the upfront cost of renewables.

says me. i invest heavily here and do own maths. look to capital vs op costs of renewable

there might be privileged financing somewhere i'm not aware of but it's a tough space rn. had breakfast with someone who's been in financing and constructing these for a long time and he's still working on it but much tougher.

if you want a public markets proxy, look at invesco's solar etf; down by around half. sedg is down 75%

existing infrastructure is more maintenance than construction

Yeah, start-upsnonly fail because of the interest rate hike and not because they are unsustainable businesses. But other sectors requiring serious financing are absolutely not affected... Not.

It's more reliable than onshore though.

There are offshore wind farms with nearly equivalent capacity factors to some (aging) french nuclear power plants.

I knew somebody was going to regurgitate this.

That's if you make up some number for fossil fuel externalities and count it as a subsidy. Pollution from fossil fuels is a very real and very big issue but it has been presented in such a way that people think governments are actually giving oil companies trillions of dollars in direct subsidies. No other business has had this kind of math applied to it. The fossil fuel industry is taxed heavily from when the oil comes out of the ground to people pumping gas into their cars, it is a huge tax revenue generator.

I really want to emphasizes the "make up a number" part. Trying to understand the physical part of climate change is already a monstrous task with big uncertainty. From there trying to to estimate economic effects is basically impossible.

There's lots of exciting progress happening with underground mechanical storage like this. It's so interesting that the U.S. DOE has been studying underground pumped hydro since at least the 1980.(https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6517343)

Today: - Hydrostor just signed a near $1 Billion contract to build their first underground facility in California using advanced compressed air with water to help efficiency. See also: Green Gravity, Gravitricity, Terrament, Renewell, RheEnergise, and more.

That paper assumes that the worlds energy will keep increasing at the average rate from the last 50 years for 1000 years.

That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.

If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.

I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.

There’s discussion about that piece here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283

Solution: in summer we pump the tides higher with PV, and in winter we draw them down.

Source: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/pdf/tide1.pdf

Yup, this is what I mean about 'we're exceptional' claims.

'It can't work here, and can never work here, because ...' and then followed by some basic math mistakes wrapped up into some wild extrapolations, augmented with some demonstrably pessimistic assumptions that every piece of the stack can't ever get better, or be swapped out for something better.

That suspiciously well-prepared rando on tiktok you used as a citation - the comments attached to that thread quite rightly point out his math mistakes, around hydro generation, dam sizes, and so on.

He's also assuming that rail will never augment / replace large tracts of (currently) road transport - which is a despairingly safe claim in the USA, where rail infrastructure is just awful, but it doesn't need to be forever.

He then assumes the only way you can 'green' truck transport is to use current-tech (Lithium) batteries - this is obviously not the case, and Lithium / solid state batteries are probably NOT the answer there anyway.

He says the logging truck uses 2.5 MW (not MWh) of power per day - and then talks about '3 megawatt battery pack' - not MWh.

Essentially he's ignoring the fact that the height of technology that is transport infrastructure today is the result of a century of roads, mining/drilling, refineries, fuel distribution, engine/truck design.

He's effectively repeating that standard trope - 'green tech' at year #10 isn't as integrated as fossil tech at year #100, so it can be dismissed.

Clearly some practice has gone into reciting this rant, but it's not a compelling argument for the 'we can't get there from here' camp.

Pricing externalities correctly is the height of capitalist economic thinking.

I too have lived different places and also have traveled a bit, I don't think travelling credentials are needed to identify someone who is living by stereotypes though.

If you want I can send you many pictures of my travels in France so we compare the number of abandoned tractors, completely trashed banlieues and so on. Or I can send you pictures of how Dutch people every week have a day where they dump trash in the sidewalk, the same fridges and old moldy furniture that you speak of, all around the city, or all the bicycles and trash in canals. Or about all the human shit in Paris homeless encanpments that are worse than dog poop in the street of Lisbon, etc.

Obviously I'm a bit defensive, and of course every country has people who don't care, and maybe there's even more in portugal than other places, which I'm glad to accept if you have any data, but you didn't present any data, just your stereotypes based on anecdata.

Biomass is carbon neutral.

It matters because hydroeletric is a non-intermittent renewable source.

The available hydro does not allow to cover all base load. It needs to be supplemented and the other renewable sources available are by their nature intermittent.

So the problem of energy storage needs to be solved fast in order for gas/coal to be finally sunset.

Then that's solving the problem from the top down.

It's like the EU giving tax benefits to those who buy electric vehicles, and slapping taxes on those who burn dinosaurs -> when a lot of those have no choice but to burn dinosaurs, and they have to drive old cars because they can't afford new electric vehicles.

How do you expect "regular people" to be onboard, when they are getting squeezed and penalized for being poor/middle class? It's not like they have a choice.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the " something that can and should be solved in different ways" should have come first, before anything else, and it's not happening any time soon.

Guess who is paying in the meantime?

The sentiment that fuels extremism and movements that oppose these measures don't pop out in the vacuum.