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

#311

Post by bpfrh » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #249

bpfrh wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas based Power plants are for providing capacity quickly when needed, and the cost is good compared to lithium batteries: 1 KW Gas is 0,0639€ 1 KW Lithium Battery is ~105€ There is an incoming lithium shortage which means either the price will rise sharply, or you have to build other types of batteries.

Those are the wrong units in two different ways at once. KW = power, kWh = energy = integrated power over time Batteries are reusable. I see claims varying from 2,000, to more than 10,000 times. That reduces the battery cost to between €0.0525 and €0.0105 / kWh.

You are absolutely right, I somehow remembered it as the same.

Isn't my comparison totally wrong on all levels?

I compared batteries, which are storage(or "power plants") with the price of the thing the gas power plant uses.

A better comparison would be the cost of battery storage, cost of filling it up, versus building a gas power plant and then producing the same energy.

If I find a good article on that I will link it.

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

#312

Post by locallost » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

funklute wrote: post #303

locallost wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the debate I was having was about the explicit mention of "increasing CO2", which is just plain false. There are a lot of people that parrot this around the world, by just guessing in line with their beliefs, but the data is pretty clear.

> No, the debate I was having was about the explicit mention of "increasing CO2", which is just plain false. In the context it seems pretty clear to me that "increasing CO2" is meant to refer to relative changes, not absolute changes. Playing semantics is a fairly pointless distraction from the actual argument. So, as I asked before, how would these changes compare to projected decreases, if the nuclear plants were n…

The word "increase" has a clear meaning, and it means that there is more of something than there was before. The word opposite of increase is called "decrease", and Germany's CO2 emissions have decreased since they started switching off nuclear power plants.

Calling a decrease an increase is something I would call playing semantics.

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

#313

Post by belorn » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:49 PM UTC

gibolt wrote: post #218

AYBABTME wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make methane from carbon capture/sabatier reactors. Although I'm not sure if that's any more efficient than desalination/hydrolysis for an H2 plant with fuel cells. In any case, I'm onboard with replacing coal with gas, if nuclear isn't an option. Gas is cheap and fast to build today, and can be supplanted by nuclear/renewable later on. A pragmatic middle ground to (hopefully temporarily) accommodate the nucl…

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.

Solar + a few hours of capacity are economical viable to run on a day and night cycle. Each day they charge up, and each day they discharge, with a market price that goes up and down in a similar pattern. This is possible for the southern part of EU, but more so in the southern parts of that (Egypt and below).

Further north and solar get displaced by wind as the primary source of energy, and wind do not have a day cycle. It has weeks/months long period of low and high amount of wind. A battery solution that last hours is just a drop in the supply bucket. At the same time, rather than being discharge (and thus generating profits) each day, a wind battery solution will only generate profits a few times each year depending on how large the capacity is. The only way that will be profitable is if it several order times cheaper than the batteries for solar, or if the cost isn't directly linked to capacity. The technology that Germany and other "wind" countries is constantly talking about here is green hydro, but which is yet to be economical viable.

One alternative is to build massive transmission lines from Africa and use solar power + batteries from the Sahara desert, through there are political, technological, and economical problems over designing such energy grid for EU.

Thus for now the political winds are blowing towards natural gas and wind, despite the ecological issues of burning a fossil fuel.

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

#314

Post by sfifs » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:51 PM UTC

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.

Europe is small and densely populated. They can't afford to take the risk of having large swaths of land rendered un-inhabitable due to nuclear accidents. If there's one thing the last 60 odd years of nuclear experience has taught us, it is that Human organizations and societies cannot be trusted with maintaining high standards of safety in the long term that is required for fission power plants - even the Japanese who have developed a post-world war reputation for careful engineering and management couldn't manage it. Therefore, fission is simply not suitable for such densely populated countries. Japan and US learned this from failures. Germany smartly learned this from others failings. France will soon change their tune after their turn having a major accident (I sincerely hope they don't, but human fallibility is inevitable).

Now if you have millions of square kilometres of desert or uninhabited wasteland you are willing to sacrifice, sure you can plonk fission reactors there and take risks with the inevitable nuclear accident. US and Canada do have but are unwilling to sacrifice (aka NIMBYism). Russia does have but doesn't really need more nuclear power than it already has for it's fairly small population. China and to a smaller extant India do have such wastelands and the population to need nuclear power. If instead they plonk the new reactors in fertile populated areas, they in their turn will learn the hard way from their own accidents.

Now you can and modern reactors do design for "safe" failure. But frankly why bother when Solar and Wind have become so cheap that virtually no new coal plants are being planned in major economies in the last two years.

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

#315

Post by belorn » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:52 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #173

hammock wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you missed the entire headline and article where it says they will call natural gas green.

It only gets the label if it's greener than existing solutions. They're not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

There will almost always exist solutions that are greener than natural gas. The practical reason to choose natural gas over those are costs, sacrificing the environment in order to save money.

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

#316

Post by ulrikrasmussen » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:53 PM UTC

nathan_phoenix wrote: post #12

For anyone wondering why gas, it's gas only in specific cases. > Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (kWh), replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030 and plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035.

Gas power plants are currently a cornerstone of the Danish green electricity plan. The idea is to base everything primarily on wind and solar, and to build an extensive direct current distribution network to exchange power with neighboring countries. Even with all that, there will still be periods where the sun does not shine and the wind doesn't blow. Gas power plants are then supposed to take over in those periods, which are hypothesized to be relatively short. It has been projected that all gas will be biogas by 2035, i.e. derived from food waste etc, and thus in theory carbon neutral.

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

#317

Post by iso1210 » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:55 PM UTC

Nuclear sure, although I don't think they are practical any more given the cost and time to build vs renewables

But Gas? Europe should be setting a plan to have no gas imports by the end of the decade, not shutting down nuclear power plants and increasing reliance on Russia

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

#318

Post by funklute » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 12:57 PM UTC

locallost wrote: post #312

funklute wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the debate I was having was about the explicit mention of "increasing CO2", which is just plain false. In the context it seems pretty clear to me that "increasing CO2" is meant to refer to relative changes, not absolute changes. Playing semantics is a fairly pointless distraction from the actual argument. So, as I asked before, how would these changes compare to projected decreases, if the nuclear plants were n…

The word "increase" has a clear meaning, and it means that there is more of something than there was before. The word opposite of increase is called "decrease", and Germany's CO2 emissions have decreased since they started switching off nuclear power plants. Calling a decrease an increase is something I would call playing semantics.

Language is full of ambiguities that are only resolved by context. Both a relative increase and an absolute increase are increases, so saying that it has a "clear meaning" is fairly pointless here.

And you're still ignoring my original question, which I asked from genuine curiosity. I'm getting a strong feeling you prefer to focus on a straw man, because if you look at relative changes your position falls apart. Do prove me wrong.

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

#319

Post by joelbluminator » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 1:02 PM UTC

locallost wrote: post #309

Whoever builds nuclear plants because of this, I hope they get more bang for their buck than South Carolina. Years and years of planning and building, $9B spent, only to cancel the project with nothing to show for it. Also as a German resident and tax payer, I'm pretty pissed off that I'm on the hook for about $150B for the disposal of old nuclear waste from nuclear power plants. If this is now a green solution, I ho…

> I'm pretty pissed off that I'm on the hook for about $150B for the disposal of old nuclear waste

Jeez that's a lot! what's your salary?

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

#320

Post by Retric » Sun, Jan 02, 2022, 1:02 PM UTC

unicornmama wrote: post #278

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.

> Solar + Batteries/Storage are cheap to build today. That claim is baseless.

Solar dropped below 2c/kWh in the kind of places you should actually install solar. It depends on interest rates but that’s shockingly low. Batteries provide peaking power cheaper than any rarely used peaking power plant. (2,000 charge cycles on a 100$/kWh battery charged from 2c/kWh solar is ~7c/kWh whenever you need it.)

That’s all it takes for adoption to dramatically increase. Market forces will shift things around as ever more solar comes online, but as long as daytime rates are above nighttime rates solar is an obvious win for electric companies.