91–100 of 162 posts
Anyway, I am just silly old person. So let's march towards bright future. We need solar powered battle tanks and solar powered fighter jets!
> And what makes it even better is that California has the largest grid-connected battery storage facility in the world (came online in January …), meaning those batteries were filling up with excess energy from the sun all afternoon today and are now deploying as we speak to offset a good chunk of the methane gas generation that California still uses overnight. If it exceeded 100% energy demand, why were they still…
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Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens. However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things: - when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's n…
Nuclear can scale up and down. It can do so from 20% to 100%, Reducing under 20% is problematic because it implies a reactor shutdown and restart. 20% is more than enough to modulate side by side with renewables. The French Grid does that all the time intraday. https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/18/french-gove...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-14/france-an...
Spain as a whole 45 million country with diverse geography and scattered population is producing 75 percent of its electricity from renewables and gas and carbon have been down to almost technical zero. It's rained a lot over the last month's and water reservoirs are used as battery. I made a website to track this: https://energy.antizone.online During the day, a huge chunk of the produced energy is sold to other cou…
But the government is closing down the nuclear power stations so we'll be back to gas and coal soon enough!
If you are interested in renewables generation data, this dashboard shows live data across the world https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
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Why is that a concern if already over 66% of energy is made of renewable sources?
Nuclear helps to reliably produce electricity when there is a peak demand or renewable has a problem producing (no sun, draught)
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Nuclear makes for great base generating capacity because it has an incredibly stable output, but that also means the line needs to be kept flat or tons of energy will be wasted.
Nuclear is indeed very inflexible. You can't really turn it off easily or cheaply. The only time it goes down is for maintenance. Typically for extended periods of time when that happens. However, battery is improving the capacity factor of renewables; especially solar by allowing two things: - when there's too much of it, you can charge batteries with energy that would otherwise be curtailed/wasted. - when there's n…
For a few minutes at low demand time. These kinds of over-grand claims are seriously harmful to the cause of promoting renewables because it makes it seem like we’re almost there and can stop caring. Just look at the excellent, accurate, and up-to-the-hour charts put out by the electricity market itself and you will see where and when the challenges we face still are. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.…
Nice link. At this specific moment in time, natural gas is 19.9%, nuclear is 5.6%, and here's the great lie imports are 38.5%. There's no telling what the source of that imported energy is.
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There is no need for backup fossil power to account for more than a few percent of electricity production in the medium term. https://www.volts.wtf/p/what-the-sun-isnt-always-shining
Nuclear is different to fossil fuel power. It comes from a renewable source. It is bad only because it produced waste, but we're working towards solving this issue.