301–310 of 583 posts
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That is, surely, fixable by constructing transmission lines massively cheaper than nukes.
Which would result in prices going up in the North. Ready to see why people would work against it.
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You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU gri…
Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden? We could put them anywhere. Sweden is already producing enough low cost energy to meet its needs, only prices are high because we are exporting it to other countries willing to pay. If Sweden wants to invest in power for export, we could make that investment anywhere.
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Can you explain how it was made unprofitable or point me at something?
So for example, laws around nuclear has changed so that the owners are now liable for any damages in case of a major accident.
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> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure. Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers. Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business…
Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.
But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?
There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
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Transmission capacity from the northern hydro to the southern nuclear regions has decreased due to the closing of reactors in the south. Power transmission is more complex than just building a fatter pipe to pour more water through. Having stable power in the south is a prerequisite to transfer hydro power from the north.
I don't understand, surely the southern grid is stabilized by interconnections to europe? I thought closing reactors would be independent of transmission. What am I missing?
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The overwhelming majority of utility scale storage will not be in batteries, so battery technology does not matter. The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
Ok, I'll bite. What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery ? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1]. A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries . In which case, I'll bite: what then? 1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy product…
However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.
Meanwhile in Germany: https://switzerlandtimes.ch/world/german-greens-remain-firm-... Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
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The overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, unless a massively cheaper battery chemistry takes over. Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".
I suppose I should have clarified that I meant "lake Mead if at capacity" which it isn't. Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways). The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of…
Sweden has lots of high mountains that may have shallow reservoirs built cheaply on top of. Reservoirs with earthen dikes are radically cheaper than the sort of dams needed for traditional hydro power, and may be placed almost anywhere, because they do not need or destroy a watershed. Lots of small ones, placed close to users, are better than one big one like Lake Mead.
The new coalition government has pledged $40B (approximately the market cap of Twitter, heh) in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction. They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors. In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent s…
The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale.
You are exactly right - this is the only way.
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I'd imagine we'll probably continue to store power the same way the vast majority of power is stored now, using pumped hydroelectric storage.
Pumped storage is geographically limited: as more convenient sites are developed, viable locations become more and more remote. Hydroelectric storage is great, but not the pumped kind. The energy storage supplies by the Hoover dam, the Coolie dam, dwarf pumped hydro. It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.