291–300 of 397 posts
I feel like the issue is that a lot of consumers get stuck paying a fixed per kWh delivery/transmission fee. IMO: this doesn’t make sense. Transmission and distribution costs are largely the amortization of the cost of building the system peak carrying capacity. There’s no shame in charging higher D&T rates during peak times and near-zero rates at 3AM. Could also make electricity taxes a percentage instead of a fixed…
Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…
I feel this article is missing the forest for the trees: > German electricity consumers paid 80 million euros in tariffs to get 8 million euros worth of wind power to the market. > There is simply no point to make any market-driven investments in Germany; the tariffs are simply too large compared to the market value of electricity. > (...) > This might not be a problem if “getting more renewables” is the end-goal one…
> The subsidies are (overly) high so that lots of renewable energy production/infrastructure is built In the first half of last year a total of 35 new wind turbines were added across Germany[0], the lowest rate for 19 years . If German government policies are supposed to encourage the creation of new renewable energy production then they don't appear to be working particularly well. [0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtsch…
- Switching to an auction model in 2017 to drive prices down, which was implemented very poorly.
- Strongly incentivizing small "citizen" project to increase acceptance in the population. Which messed up larger scale deployments and lead to awful bureaucracy.
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Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.
Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently. So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?
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The waste is a non-problem, especially when you compare with co2 over decades. Nuclear energy emits less co2 than renewables: it requires less metals (especially if you store electricity with batteries or other means), and renewables are not baseload energies, meaning you need to burn either coal or gas when there's no sun or wind. Wind mills require a lot of metals, and installing them is complicated. Solar panels r…
Just tell this to the people in Fukushima and Tschernobyl. Also you worded it like you don’t need mining to produce nuclear energy, it’s not complicated to handle and reactors don’t fall apart over time.
You need less mining for uranium.
Reactors have a huge lifespan. They're cheap and clean when considering the energy they bring.
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Because the cost of transmission will be even higher. Moving large amounts of electricity over large distances is hard; it’s much cheaper to move gas or oil.
Not any more. China's longest power transmission link is 3324 km. 1.1 megavolts DC. 12 gigawatts. Running for over a year. Equivalent to moving 30 million tons of coal per year. China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in. The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.
Some negatives I've found are UHV lines used for renewable transmission will see low utilization and the switching equipment is quite unreliable so overcapacity is needed.
I did find a book with some details in case anyone wants to dig deeper: Ultra-high Voltage AC/DC Power Transmission (2018) (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D8...)
Jean Marc Jancovici is a french energy expert, and he often talks about Germany. An important story to remember about Germany, is how Fukushima led the country to stop using nuclear power. Merkel has a PhD in physics, so naturally she understands that nuclear power is green and just better than renewable and coal. But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "asse…
> But after Fukushima, she was forced to stop nuclear plants, because as Jancovici argued, she is an "assermented executor": if all germans want to stop nuclear energy, then there's nothing to do. I live in Germany. Seems a different country from the one you describe.
Here in a central european country, end-user price for Russian natural gas is about 4 eurocents/kWh. Electricity is 12 cents/kWh, in Germany even more iirc. I have no idea about wholesale spot prices, but I don't see any incentive to switch to electricity as the price isn't going below 4 cents so often.
That’s crazy. I use Griddy in Texas and my price has been generally below $0.02c/kWh the past two months.
Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…
Finland itself is heavily dependent on energy imports from Russia. So Finnish heating is not exactly carbon neutral.
Interestingly, most of Finland heats with electricity. I used to live there before I moved to Germany. Unlike Germany, Finland does not use a lot of natural gas. So, Germans subsidizing Finnish heating with clean energy is not necessarily a bad deal for Finland. I'd say it's a better deal for the planet than Russia subsidizing gas usage in e.g. Belarus, which is currently negotiating a new deal for this with Russia (…
Phasing out gas heating is going to be a very, very big job in the Netherlands. Replacing an energy source is easy, just place a nuclear power plant / solar field down and phase out the coal power station. Done. However, almost all homes in the Netherlands are heated by gas directly from the source. The gas is used to heat up water in the home and pump it through radiators on the wall or in the floor. A highly effici…