211–220 of 435 posts
They've been signalling a 40%+ gas price increase for the winter in the news here in Romania. For the poor people and pensioners who often live month to month this is tragic news. They don't know how they'll make it when they'll have to choose between food and medicine or heat.
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Do we have the lithium/etc reserves to meet the storage needs for the entire planet? Nuclear is proven and if we claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat I don’t know why we would pin all our hopes on solar and wind and some to-be-discovered storage solution. To be clear, I’m not against solar and wind—on the contrary, I want a diverse clean energy portfolio. But wasting time emitting while we pr…
Sorry, but Nuclear is just proven to fail. Even if we would reverse course on Nuclear today it would be 20 or 30 years until the plants would be build. By that time solar and wind will another magnitude cheaper. The way forward is wind and solar. Everything else shouldn't be focused on.
Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
Nuclear is not as clean as people try to green wash it out to be, nor is it ethical. https://meta.eeb.org/2017/10/18/french-state-owned-company-c...
The immense energy density of nuclear fuel means far less of it needs to be extracted to provide energy.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Environmental...
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French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic. Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
It will go down to 0% in Germany in several months. Germany is shutting down its last six nuclear power plants and no new ones can be built. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium also want to shut down their nuclear power plants. Shameful, unscientific public opinion in Western Europe despite more people realizing the danger of global warming.
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Building more nuclear helps de-risk wind droughts. This isn’t specific to nuclear; building more of a different kind mitigates the risk.
Not really. NPPs as backup to wind would be horribly expensive. Wind droughts don't happen often; even the current price during them would not make a NPP pay off. What would make sense is larger local stores of hydrogen, to be burned in combustion turbines during the rare wind outages.
Most of the time, people saying grid-scale storage is feasible point to technologies that exist in the prototyping phase. The reality is that we don't know whether these solutions will be feasible at scale, or if they'll hit bottlenecks or poor scalability that drives up cost when deployed at scale. Comparing a hypothetical cost of hydrogen, to actual historical cost is comparing apples to oranges.
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You can't compare 1/3rd of all plants being down with the volatility of wind power. On November 3, 2015, German wind power generated only 0.2 GW. Its power rating at that time was over 40 GW. How do you want to compensate for that?
By having other power sources as well. Starting with offshore wind, then of course, solar cells. Build up more storage (both biological gas and synthetic gas, water, batteries), strengthen the European networks. The chance is very good that on windless days in Germany, there will be quite a bit of wind in France. Same with solar. A 1 GW DC line to Norway was put into operation just recently. And of course, we can kee…
Windmills are f.king stupid for anything other than local production.
Solar, Nuclear + Gas and grid storage seems like a way better approach.
Not to mention the fact that in wintertime windmills needs to be de-iced with the same chemicals they use on airplanes in colder climates.
In Norway, where hydro powers most of the country's energy demands, consumer energy prices are now around 100-130% above July-August rates. The explanation is apparently partly milder weather, with less rainfall and less wind. The other part of the explanation is that Norway is connected to the continental grid, and is affected by higher rates in Europe.
He was top on the income lists every year (they are public in Norway). From trading electricity futures, he was seemingly very very good at it for years. But suddenly a big swing wiped out his entire fortune with a margin call. Almost bankrupting the Nasdaq insurance fund in the process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997823
It was argued much recently that connecting us with the rest of Europe through ACER would increase the prices since other markets would pay more. But that it would also lead to higher profits for those delivering the fixed costs part of the power bill, thus that part should be cheaper and it was supposed to even out somewhat.. ?
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French generation is ~70% nuclear (10% wind/solar) and German is ~10% (~40% wind/solar). Yet their prices track each other closely. So I think this explanation is too simplistic. Possibly there are large interconnects between the French and German grids levelling out wholesale prices, but my assumption is that they cannot carry enough power for this imagined scenario where nuclear makes a big difference.
It will go down to 0% in Germany in several months. Germany is shutting down its last six nuclear power plants and no new ones can be built. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium also want to shut down their nuclear power plants. Shameful, unscientific public opinion in Western Europe despite more people realizing the danger of global warming.
We're working on reducing gas dependency, shortages and price fluctuations are one factor, but dependency on Russia is another. I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us keep the peace.
I do wonder how much our gas import from Russia is helping us keep the peace. I'm really afraid that high gas prices would be the tipping point when US and EU would turn from funding internal revolution in Russia (figures like Navalny) to a hot war. Europe always needed and wanted our resources. Just read German documents from WWII: only part of it was hatred and desire to genocide Russians. The most serious motivati…