551–560 of 809 posts
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prices in poland are dictated by coal. Coal got insanely expensive due to co2 taxes
Correct. Exactly my point.
I'm sure my sewer bill would be a lot lower if I could just pipe my sewage into your garden.
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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…
It's not net zero, but nearly zero will probably do fine?
Politicians like to say net zero, but when we are 90% there will we maybe not stop caring and find other more pressing problems?
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Yes I am aware. Which means that if China takes over political control of Taiwan and says, "We will still sell chips just like normal to everyone except the US". Would the rest of the world decide to go to war with China for the political freedom of Taiwan?
Taiwan will burn (explosive demolition) the fabs before China gets them. This is baked into their defense plan and made known to China.
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I am certainly not an expert. What resources or military capability does Russia have that China could not eclipse, replace, or source from a partner? What would it mean for Russia to become a "real" western country? Why would China fear that? Whatever happens, Russia needs to sell resources to stay afloat. I have a hard believing that if it came down to it, China couldn't just seize Vladivostok.
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The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a f…
Intermittence really has always had the flavor of an engineering problem instead of a physics problem (it is about putting the energy when/where humans want it, rather than having enough of it). IMO load shifting seems like a cleverer and more engineer-y solution. Imagine a giant smart system where all of our appliances talk to each-other and can optimize the timings of their workloads. It’s a magnificent society-wid…
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Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response. Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose. It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obvio…
This is just a conspiracy theory of mine, but how credible is the notion that in Germany, the Greens who campaigned (successfully) for nuclear shutdown were in fact funded by Russia?
At the time when the Greens were in power a decade later, it was already way to late to build out nuclear infrastructure again (not to mention the lack of fuel).
So yes, you've metioned a conspiracy theory without any substance.
The Greens continually pushed for renewables, which the (conservative) government largely ignored in favour of building gas pipelines to Russia.
It used to be the big worry among climate activists that you'd never get every country organize and move in one direction. Like you'd need some global body to clean everything up. That's very fragile. Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air,…
Oil the west doesn't use isn't magically staying in the ground. Middle and low income countries (most notably China) increased consumption is more than offsetting reductions from high income countries.
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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…
This just shows batteries shouldn't be the only storage technology, at least at high latitude. There needs to be a complementary long term storage technology with low capacity capex, even if its round trip efficiency is bad. Examples: green hydrogen, ultra low capex thermal storage. To see the effect of including such, go to https://model.energy Using a long term storage technology (in addition to wind/solar/batterie…
It’s a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen and the capital items already exist.
Curtailment fees should be replaced with purchases of green LNG.
If you’re interested in this topic I highly recommend Tony Seba’s analyses. He argues that because solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of new energy generation, they are on an unstoppable exponential "S-curve" that will make coal, gas, and nuclear power obsolete by 2030. Look up his videos on YT, for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj96nxtHdTU