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In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

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Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#531

Post by _aavaa_ »

simion314 wrote: post #442
_aavaa_ wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the roads. "Yet you participate in society, c…

Public transport uses the roads too. In my country Romania there are road taxes included in the fuel prices and there are vehicle tax that is proportionalw itht eh engine size and vehicle age and how mych it pollutes. So people that drive more use more fuel and pay more tax. If you use your bike then you will not pay that taxes, now what should we tax for the bike lanes ? And how should we convert he fuel road tax fo…

> tax for the bike lanes

That already exists. In large parts of North America there isn’t a tax proportional to vehicle age, and the tax on gasoline doesn’t cover road wear (to say nothing about the unproved externality of pollution). So municipal property taxes and the like are used to cover the costs of road repair.

> electric cars.

The same way we pay for electricity and natural gas, report your kms and then have the odometer inspected on a semi regular basis and when you get rid of the car.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#532

Post by _aavaa_ »

bjackman wrote: post #309
_aavaa_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads? Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.

"Car culture" and "public roads" are not the same thing. I'm a militant cyclist and I'm extremely unhappy with the state of urban planning in the world. But... Roads are a really good thing and I'm glad my government builds them. I just wish they'd built them a bit differently, at least in the city.

I am not trying to equate the two concepts. Just that in most of North America car culture is what dictate the roads we have and who they’re built for.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#533

Post by _aavaa_ »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #234
_aavaa_ wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term you're circling is "grid defection". > must be connected to the grid. That's a legislative problem. If a home can prove it can produce enough electricity for itself, it should not be forced to be connected. > You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top A lot of places already do this.

It's not a legal problem. The reality is that the vast majority of homes with solar must be connected to the grid because that's how they're wired and designed. You can do a completely off-grid approach, but it's more expensive and requires large batteries. Most people just do the simple panels and don't have any intention of going off-grid. Also: Even if half of a neighborhood doesn't need the connection, the work e…

Even if you stay connected, many place already charge you a fixed cost every month regardless of usage, which presumably should be covering this

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#534

Post by korhojoa »

nandomrumber wrote: post #519
owenversteeg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. Y…

> The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. … and 7.8% for Europe. Yes, the _! ONLY !_ thing is, this won’t move the needle at all on climate change. Wind and solar for electric is the lowest of low hanging fruit. No one has even proposed that they have maybe even possibly have perhaps thought of an idea to address transport and agriculture related emissions. Lithium ion batteries, or a sol…

Confident talk, but that's not at all the reality that I'm seeing.

Public transport is almost completely electric powered where I live (ferries still haven't changed to electric, but it's coming.)

Trucking is electrified, as in, the operators have realzed that they're cheaper to run, so they are changing over when possible. (Sidenote: with some of the heaviest loads worldwide)

Very many agricultural buildings in active use either have, or are installing solar. Their energy usage is so high, that any offset to it is "free" money. Many have installed batteries also, so if there is an interruption in power delivery, there isn't an immediate need to start up a generator.

Electric tractors are also something I've heard them want. Less maintenance means less time spent not being able to work.

Sure, fertilizer and animal husbandry have other emissions which aren't tackled by this, but why exclude improvement just because some other area isn't affected.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#535

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

MakersF wrote: post #472
IshKebab wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what th…

It's unfair you're being down voted, you're right. I used to think that we could get by with just solar wind and batteries, but then after collaborating with people on an ideal energy mix the numbers were obvious: there is a (small) fraction that cannot be covered. Not with storage (the discharge cycles are so few that the cost is prohibitive. How can a battery pay for itself with 10-20 discharges a year? And this ap…

Forget tidal, it’s dead in the water.

Everyone who’s tried it suddenly realises that anything you put in the ocean is almost immediately covered in marine growth, or destroyed by the ocean itself.

And that wave / tidal energy is very diffuse, or that where it isn’t diffuse it’s also extremely destructive.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#536

Post by jacquesm »

zdragnar wrote: post #520
jacquesm wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.

Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.

That's true.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#537

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

kieranmaine wrote: post #437
IshKebab wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what th…

Regarding long term storage keep an eye on the UK's Cap and Floor scheme which offers guaranteed revenues to long term storage technologies [1]. Page 7 of https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/2025-09/LDES%20... lists the technology types of the project applications. The majority are Li-Ion BESS, but there are also other battery chemistries and Liquid/Compress Air Storage 1. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/press-rele…

> offers guaranteed revenues

Government picking winners?

When did that ever work out well?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#538

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

micwag wrote: post #462
IshKebab wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what th…

> In a calm cloudy winter week all renewables and battery storage are totally screwed. Hydro doesn’t really care about a calm cloudy winter week and is the reason my state was 100% renewable last year. So it’s definitely not a problem for ALL renewables.

Effectively all renewables.

When was the last time a new dam and hydro electric power plant was built in your country?

Either all of the favourable geography has already been dammed, or good luck getting environmental approval.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#539

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

KaiserPro wrote: post #411
IshKebab wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what th…

> In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days True, but then for the UK solar power isn't the right thing for winter, hence why we need a massive mix of other stuff. Also we have the advantage that france isn't that far away. In the UK battery is about grid stabilisation, as in making sure that it hums at 50hz rather than 49.

Your answer to renewables being intermittent is: France!.

Good, we agree the solution is: Nuclear!.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#540

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

KaiserPro wrote: post #475
kieranmaine wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery revenues are shifting away from stabilisation now from https://cn-cob.com/info-detail/2026-uk-energy-storage-market... : > the focus of energy storage has shifted from frequency services to energy arbitrage. Due to market saturation, the share of frequency services in the revenue stack has significantly declined, from 80% in 2022 to just 20% in 2024. Looking ahead to 2030, we expect energy arbitrage to domina…

Indeed, in the same way that solar has now peaked in spain/portugal in its current config. They are moving to solar+battery to absorb solar mid day and replay that in the morning/evening. (that doesn't really apply in the UK because of the rain) As more renewables come on stream and the grid gets more complex, batteries are going to plug holes. Energy Arbitrage is usually a good thing, so long as its regulated to for…

> (which means less price pressure linked to LNG prices, if you're not into the co2 aspect)

No it doesn’t.

The arbitration is only possible because the battery storage providers can ever so slightly undercut the gas peakers.

The price pressure is still linked to the LNG price.

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