431–440 of 818 posts
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Top five countries with the highest wind energy capacity in 2020 China – 288.32 GW. ... United States – 122.32 GW. ... Germany – 62.85 GW. ... India – 38.63 GW. ... Spain – 27.24 GW.
This means nothing if you don't factor in storage, or at least measure the CONSISTENT power output. These are just PEAK numbers that are totally useless when planning a grid.
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Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific. I believe a global renewable energy system can be constructed using only elements available in essentially unlimited amounts, and using those elements at a modest scale compared to industrial society as a whole.
> Which raw material are you talking about? Be specific. Uh Lithium?
Utilities will choose the cheaper among many alternatives, not the most expensive; the which is why they are not building nukes.
Funny article in that it doesn't discuss lifecycle costs. A side-by-side comparison of the cost of grids powered by nuclear power plant relative to those powered by wind/solar/storage is what I'd expect to see from a 'paper of record' like the NYTimes. Except in some specific cases (Finland, other Arctic regions with long periods of low sunlight) I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of w…
Is the environmentalist lobby ready to allow the amount of mining required to produce the copper, nickel, cobalt, and aluminum needed to support going "100% renewable asap"?
Aluminum is the most abundant metallic element on earth. Cobalt demand is already peaking. Copper and nickel have been produced in the millions of tons annually for a century, and will not slow down.
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You are missing the point. With continued investment and improvements to technology nuclear will be much cheaper and faster to deploy. Compare wind/solar prices from the year 2000, and imagine we've spent the last 22 years giving nuclear the same level of attention and promotion as them.
Investment and improvement in nukes are falling, not rising. For reasons. There is no reasonable expectation for substantially better costs for nukes. Anywhere they have to compete with $0 opex renewables, they will run at well under 50% capacity, thus more than doubling their per-kWh cost, making them even less competitive.
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They are happy to support it when it is done outside their own country (speaking as an American)
By the number of downvotes, I'm going to take away the idea that, no, the environmentalist lobby does not approve of the increases in mining required to support going 100% renewable ASAP.
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> Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh. [0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...
Which is a lithium ion battery facility. Not a thermal batter facility.
My point was that GWh-scale thermal battery proposals would be competing with already existing (and possibly cheaper) chemical batteries, and that energy storage on this scale is not unheard of.
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Germany is not building more coal plants it it shutting them down.
Let's not argue semantics. Building new plants, extending existing ones, digging more coal or importing it from abroad. It's all the same. "Green" energy failed, even for one of its biggest proponents. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec... > In the first half of 2021, coal shot up as the biggest contributor to Germany's electric grid, while wind power dropped to its lowest level since 2018.
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The new Korean plants are designed for a lifespan of 60 years. If governments provide guarantees for the loans, a discount rate of 3% is not unreasonable. Set it like that, and it spits out a price of €32.6/MWh. Now, to make it even more reasonable to emerging economies, assume that through mass production and a relaxation of security requirements to less paranoid levels, the overnight cost can be reduced to €1500, y…
When your argument depends on all existing trends reversing, that tells us all we need to know about your conclusion.
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> There are no paths to clean energy by 2050 without nuclear power. This is either stupidly wrong or stupidly right. Stupidly right, there's fairly new nuclear plants in operation that there's no real reason to shut down, so will probably be running in 2050. Stupidly wrong, it seems to be placing some entirely unwarranted implication that without nuclear we'd be lost, when most serious analysis agree that renewables…
Expecting global energy consumption to drop 8% in the next 30 years (while also reducing fossil fuel usage to 20% and all of that with carbon capture and underground storage) is... hilariously unrealistic (or very pessimistic for overall energy usage trends). Here[1]'s a visualization of world energy usage over time. Here[2]'s a sketch I just made to show what the IEA apparently thinks will happen to get to net zero…
Conversion efficiency of Solar/EV/battery storage vs. extraction/refining/storage/burning just for transportation is like 10x better.
If EVs go with their curve (especially with petrol prices) we can project 80% are EVs on the road by 2040, that'd be a massive improvement in transport alone.