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Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

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Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#61

Post by pydry »

robocat wrote: post #51
helloooooooo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they regulate fluctuations in demand? Nuclear can’t do that. You need storage, or a reasonably scalable generation medium. Nuclear as a base load is moot

> Nuclear can’t do that You are repeating a myth. Load following is used in France: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo... It mostly isn't used in the US due to regulations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254716 The reason load following is not generally used is because because the economics of nuclear (large fixed costs) favour base load.

You can technically use nuclear power plants as load followers in much thr same way that you can technically keep warm by setting $50 bills on fire.

Load following with a nuclear plant basically means provisioning a 2GW plant and then using, say, 0.5GW of that - throwing away the rest.

(since the vast majority of the cost is capex not fuel)

Every kilowatt hour produced by that 2GW power plant is already 5x the cost of a kilowatt hour produced by a wind farm. If you assume it is used for load following that goes from 5x-20x depending on capacity utilization.

Pumping water uphill (snowy 2, coire glas, etc) is way way WAY cheaper and the geography to do that is ridiculously common.

Electrolyzing water and storing hydrogen underground is way cheaper too, and can be stored for months cheaply.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#62

Post by Marsymars »

simonhorlick wrote: post #28
pmoleri wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tidal, waves, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass. Many options to choose from, it just takes political will.

Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu: > Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 100…

There’s discussion about that piece here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#63

Post by addicted »

monero-xmr wrote: post #34
simonhorlick wrote: post #26

Note that since about 2021 renewables have overtaken fossil-based sources of energy on price. New installations of utility scale wind and solar PV are now cheaper than their alternatives. Not to mention protection from price fluctuations in the cost of fuels needed to power fossil fuel plants.

Why did they cancel all the wind power plants in New Jersey even though they are cheaper?

Offshore wind is also the most expensive form of wind/solar.

With financing getting more expensive its almost certain that some of the more financially on the edge projects would get cancelled and since offshore wind is easily the most expensive, it’s unsurprising that in renewable energy those are the projects getting cancelled.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#64

Post by lazide »

dpierce9 wrote: post #9
antuneza wrote: post #2

If you need the gas plants ready to dispatch at any moment, can you still say you are running on 100% renewables?

If I have a hybrid car and I make a trip that doesn’t use the engine, are you saying I can’t say I didn’t use the engine because I could have?

Or that it’s misleading to say you drove an electric car?

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#65

Post by zik »

marcusverus wrote: post #48
huytersd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? If you’re not burning gas, there’s no issue.

The issue is that renewables require extensive, expensive redundancies which are misleadingly excluded from the ubiquitous “renewables are cheaper” studies.

Not really. Most real world studies take this into account.

It's still way cheaper than nuclear.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#66

Post by ajross »

gustavus wrote: post #11
wongarsu wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the gas plants aren't burning any natural gas, I would say that's fair. Standing by to supplement power on load spikes is one of the primary roles of gas plants (together with pumped hydro), and that they didn't need to supply any electricity over those six days is noteworthy. From a climate standpoint there also isn't much wrong with having generating capacity in fossil fuels, what matters is how many gre…

Of course if they had a nuclear base they wouldn't even need the natural gas plants.

Nuclear is emphatically not an instant-on hot backup. Plants take time to spool up, and very importantly time to cool down. Fukushima happened because you can't just turn a reactor off, it produces energy that has to go somewhere while the intermediate fission products decay over hours-to-days.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#67

Post by pydry »

addicted wrote: post #63
monero-xmr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did they cancel all the wind power plants in New Jersey even though they are cheaper?

Offshore wind is also the most expensive form of wind/solar. With financing getting more expensive its almost certain that some of the more financially on the edge projects would get cancelled and since offshore wind is easily the most expensive, it’s unsurprising that in renewable energy those are the projects getting cancelled.

It's more reliable than onshore though.

There are offshore wind farms with nearly equivalent capacity factors to some (aging) french nuclear power plants.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#68

Post by fbdab103 »

vegetablepotpie wrote: post #31

This article promotes a narrative that privatization leads to more renewables. This point lacks nuance as different energy markets that employ privatization can have wildly different ways to involve private firms and vastly different outcomes. 1. The retail competition of Texas, which has the highest renewable energy production in the U.S. [1], but is also a market where consumers overpay for electricity [2]. 2. The…

>...California where municipalities have the ability to buy electricity in bulk and pass the savings onto the consumer.

Uhh, come again? Price savings? Here in SoCal, I am paying for the most expensive electricity in my life. Almost a 4x multiple of what I was charged in the midwest.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#69

Post by fbdab103 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #20
627467 wrote: post #10

- Portugal electricity prices: ranks top 30% of EU - Portugal per capita GDP: ranks bottom 30% of the EU

So if a relatively poor country like Portugal can do it, what excuse do the rich countries have?

Powerful entrenched interests.
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