EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green • Hacker News Board

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#251

Post by pydry » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:36 AM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #151

Yaina wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Germany did was very quickly turn off all nuclear power plants without any plans on replacing them with sustainable alternatives. Now they're offline, what's done is done. France still has nuclear power plants, and they're really pushing for nuclear energy to be considered green. This is about investing and creating incentives. So IMHO Germany shouldn't build new plants and France shouldn't get EU funding for th…

> Every euro spen[t] on a "transitional" does not go towards the truly sustainable technologies. We won't have many euros left if we need to fight climate change effects while we wait for new technologies. We need to use the technology we already have. In addition to that, in parallel, we also need to find enough land owners that are willing to have a wind turbine in their proverbial back yard. And in parallel instal…

>Nuclear isn't so simple, but has unique advantages

Its advantages are dwindling compared to solar/wind/battery/pumped hydro/demand shaping.

It requires gargantuan subsidies to even exist.

For instance, the nuclear industry in the US has barraged us with propaganda about how really incredibly safe it is and how overregulated they are but insurers will still refuse to insure a nuclear plant unless 99% of the liability for accident cleanup is placed on taxpayer shoulders.

Its main advantage is that it can mitigate some of the costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. This is realistically why the US, UK and France keep it but Germany doesnt think it's worth it.

These three elephants in the room: cost, accident liability and nuclear arsenals are invariably absent from media discussions about nuclear power in the US largely because of who drives the discussion.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#252

Post by situationista » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

Part of the rationale for labeling certain gas power plants as "green" is that they solve the problem of uneven supply from wind and solar. As far as I understand it, these plants are intended to supplement renewables and make them a more viable primary source.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#253

Post by michaelt » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #48

user_7832 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious on why you're pessimistic on hydrogen. I agree that cars are likely not the best use of fuel cells (heavy vehicles are able to utilize H2's strengths much more), but in a future based on renewables hydrogen allows you to store energy in a very dense way. Lithium batteries are acceptably heavy/expensive at small scales, but how do you think will supply vary to meet demand in the medium-long term without a…

Call it a solution in search of a problem. The best fuel cells today reach about 50% round trip efficiency. That's even a high estimate. That by physics defines the price difference between where you buy low and sell high. Without even counting the hydrogen storage, fuel cell itself and everything needed to make it function. That number also defines the arbitrage marginal any other solution has against hydrogen. Be i…

Well, Europe needs some way to store renewable energy in the summer for use in the winter. Especially if they plan to move all transport and heating off hydrocarbons, without using nuclear. And storing energy during summer for use in winter needs a battery 100x larger than storing it in the day for use at night.

I don't know what solution our leaders have in mind for this - but I can imagine the costs of gas and battery storage scale differently.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#254

Post by ben_w » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:41 AM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #226

gibolt wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar + Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today. No need to choose a worse technology in every way now, that only becomes less viable as time goes on.

"Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today" And yet the existing battery facilities that could keep a smallish region (or a single city) supplied for 15 minutes or more are exceedingly rare. Maybe they aren't as cheap as you claim. Australia is recently building a 1200 MW battery in New South Wales for 2.4 billion dollars - a cost comparable to a new nuclear reactor. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/f…

The facilities don’t yet exist in large numbers because batteries have only recently become cheap enough to do this cost effectively.

Even the battery factories are in their early stages right now.

Do you have a reference for the storage capacity of that NSW battery? Because every newspaper I’ve found talking about it, only talks about megawatts (power) not megawatt-hours (energy), and it’s the latter which is expensive for batteries, not the former.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#255

Post by odiroot » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #115

AQuantized wrote: post #63

Nuclear investments desperately need to be recognized as green so you don't have oxymoronic policies similar to Germany's current plan where you're decommissioning nuclear to become more "green" yet producing much more carbon dioxide.

The "green" movement to squash nuclear going back to the 60s was the best investment the fossil fuel industry has ever made.

I wouldn't be surprised to discover that USSR (and then Russia) was sponsoring these movements.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#256

Post by seunosewa » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #220

numpad0 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I’m not sure solar is a viable mass power production. I think it’s just a nice option for remote power production, as in “no one else in x miles” situation where x is an unsigned int.

Technically, the Sun send us orders of magnitude more energy that we will ever need. So, yes, I agree with you that today, efficiency of solar panels is not enough for really big scale. But results are already impressive and furthermore, we have yet an infinity of optimizations to research to extract more energy from the sun. In fact, while absolutely not probable in the coming decades Solar could even be one of the…

Solar panel tech extracts energy efficiently enough, actually. The problem is storage.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#257

Post by otherme123 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:45 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #240

mulmen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as simple as I originally stated. The argument that solar emits carbon is counting the carbon emitted in construction and plant operation. That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power that it isn’t even worth talking about for the purposes of classifying gas as “green”. Getting the construction and logistics of anything carbon neutral is orthogon…

> That is such a minute amount of carbon in comparison to the energy produced by a gas plant in generating power Citation needed. A gas plant dwarves solar in energy output. The whole point is that solar does have an emission and burying your head in the sand does no good when we are comparing solutions that don’t emit during generation but do to make (solar vs wind + batteries vs nuclear?).

Yes, solar has emissions. But in your previous message you implied that it is larger than it is by making a deceptively long list of items. These are the number of total CO2 emited per energy produced (gCO2e/kWh):

- Nuclear and eolic, 4.

- Solar, 6.

- Gas CCS, 78.

- Hydro, 97.

- Coal CCS, 109.

Citation, as requested:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9

Implying that solar, nuclear or wind have emissions nowhere near gas or coal is not fair play.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#258

Post by arghwhat » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

wott wrote: post #230

consp wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far more a us/Canada problem than a European one, and this is a European proposal.

Please update your views of European urbanism (browsing Google's aerial photos should be enough). Urban sprawl is the defining key of the last 50 years. Here is a starting point, miles and miles away from the historical centre of Toulouse: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.537841,1.2268468,2639m/data=!... Now it is not only happening around cities, around big towns, around small towns, it also happens at unprecedented s…

Urban sprawl is not a problem, and neither is a little country-side car dependence.

The problem with total car dependence arises when you only create "big", pedestrian unfriendly shopping "stroads" that are 6 lanes wide, where even going to the adjacent store is a car trip, and crossing the road takes unreasonably long or is flat out impossible on foot. In these places, driving is your only option even if you can see the store you want to visit from where you live.

This is in stark contrast to the highly trafficated European cities, which are car friendly. Take Copenhagen for example. There are of course 6-lane arterial roads going through in various directions, but stores are back-to-back and the destination is rarely ever the arterial road itself. If you're going outside peak hours you might be able to find some street parking down some side street, but otherwise you'll have to locate one of the low-footprint multi-story parking basements/garages and then join the pedestrians from there.

In less densely populated cities (say, Lyngby), some shopping areas might have a shared 40-car parking lot associated - not a parking lot for hundreds of cars per store.

Should you live out on the countryside and want to go to the city (say, for shopping), you might use a car to get to a central parking area and then join the pedestrians for the actual access - the dense shopping streets are pedestrian-only anyway.

People in the outer city are more likely to just use a bicycle or take public transportation, as it's usually faster, cheaper and more convenient - especially for restaurant visits or party, as you might want to drink alcohol.

The TL;DR is "car friendly != car dependent". This applies to most European cities I've seen.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#259

Post by ben_w » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:49 AM UTC

rsj_hn wrote: post #193

onethought wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is not renewable… right? Ie there is a finite amount of nuclear material on earth and it’s not overly abundant either. Am I missing something?

Breeder reactors can create more fuel, but even without these, there is a substantial amount of uranium that this is a non-issue. By the same token, solar is also non-renewable since it requires real resources mined from the earth which are in finite supply and solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable). In this sense, nothing is renewable -- even hydro wil…

> solar panels are not 100% recyclable (and especially not the batteries required to make solar reliable)

While I can believe that we don’t have a current recycling chain set up for these, I absolutely do not believe that they are genuinely non-recyclable.

We make both of these out of a variety of literal rocks, extracting trace elements and purifying them greatly in the process of manufacture. Even in the worst case, it’s easier to start from the end products than from rocks.

Re: EU drafts plan to label gas and nuclear investments as green

#260

Post by fulafel » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #2

The quoted level, 230g CO2/kWh is actually very good, and far better than most other gas turbines, even the latest combined cycle systems. I wonder how they achieve that? Perhaps burning biogas (where the carbon doesn't count?)

Cogeneration (combined heat and power), probably. Lots of city heating runs on coal CHP currently, with district heating systems.