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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

#571

Post by tsimionescu »

jopsen wrote: post #552
MakersF wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Falling back on gas 10-20 times per year sounds very reasonable. 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?

Net zero is barely enough to help with climate goals, given how late we are. It's not a huge goal, it is the absolute bare minimum to avoid >2 degrees of warming.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#572

Post by FrancisMoodie »

jmward01 wrote: post #570

Is anyone accurately predicting solar and renewable adoption? Year after year I see terrible predictions that fall way short of the reality in the world. If so, when do those models predict the death of fossil fuel based power plants? There is generally some moment where keeping the infrastructure going becomes so expensive that things just shut down. Are we close? I wonder what the graphs of fossil fuel plan constru…

I don't understand why it always has to be one or the other? Why can't we have both? More sources of energy means more reliable energy distribution, multiple fail-safes, in summer there is more solar, in fall there is more wind, in winter we probably need power plants to uphold the need for energy so everyone can stay warm. But this polarization of things, just like with politics, is so stupid. They all have pro's and con's. We should be investing in all of them, maintaining as much different sources of energy as possible and reassess the situation over time. Or am I missing something in your comment?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#573

Post by reeredfdfdf »

pfdietz wrote: post #541
zdragnar wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost no one lives in a location where heat pumps are never (or even usually) inappropriate. Yes, it might get to -20 F, but how often does that happen over a winter, never mind over a year?

Yeah, over here in Finland we have pretty cold winters, but heat pumps are still very popular and deliver value most of the year.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#574

Post by BLKNSLVR »

softwaredoug wrote: post #288

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,…

There's also the case in Australia where, despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind, people power kinda took over to get the unexpectedly high penetration of home solar panel installations, going back beyond a decade, and currently home battery installations.

Both were due to government incentives, I'm not sure if both parties may have initiated parts of these incentives, but only one party significantly and constantly talked down solar and renewables (and still would, although they don't currently have the platform)

* I have to assume the reason is money (read: lobbying) for any political party to downplay Australia's potential to lead the world in solar power generation given our natural massive, otherwise mostly useless land mass and beyond plentiful sunshine. Also, Australia's dependence on petrol / oil from overseas should be treated as a national security issue. Australia does have plentiful coal reserves, however, which is where I believe the lobbyists (and therefore unimaginable amounts of money) come from.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#575

Post by Moldoteck »

pfdietz wrote: post #551
altern8 wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Exactly my point.

So, it's not renewables fault, it's that you're no longer getting away with distributing your negative externality over the world for free. I'm sure my sewer bill would be a lot lower if I could just pipe my sewage into your garden.

Co2 tax is less about externality and more about putting this extra money into renewables. When ren are underperforming but bidding low prices, they will still be compensated by the merit order which is artificially bumped even higher with CO2 tax.

And the worst thing is other regions like US or China don't have such a tax, causing industry offshoring. It's a noble case to want to subsidize ren sector, but this method is hurting EU more than helping

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#576

Post by Moldoteck »

p0pularopinion wrote: post #468
Moldoteck wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the prerequisite for fast electrification is cheap electricity. Currently many EU countries have expensive electricity for households

This is just objectively untrue. Source: I live in Germany, a country with some of the highest electricity prices, I drive a BEV and I heat my home with a heatpump. My systems SCOP hovers around 3.5, which means that my kWh of heat made from my heatpump with electricity is cheaper than my current gas rate. My heatpump electricty bill is significantly lower as compared to my apartment (Gas furnace), despite both build…

You pay less vs gas heating because of co2 tax. And it's just an individual case. Germany's electrification percent is lower vs China's amd the rate of changing is lower too. In other words Germany has more energy used indirectly instead of electricity and electrification percent increase per year is lower than China's too

Amd Germany isn't even the worst example in terms of electricity prices. UK is even worse which will slow it down even more

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#577

Post by hexbin010 »

IshKebab wrote: post #396
pranavj wrote: post #113

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…

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…

Try 2 weeks of seemingly endless cloud up this way lol. This winter has been seriously depressing so far

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#578

Post by Zentrix »

pranavj wrote: post #436

Related: The 80% Problem: Why the Energy Transition Isn't What You Think - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724535

Hey, thank you for your post.

I noticed that you are missing an important part of the story, the argument for why the 80% might not be that hard. Here is a video from Simon Clark that explains it. [1]

Also, you seem to have used old data in your analysis. You need to look at/use data for 2025 because renewables are on an S-curve so the predictions for their growth are constantly underestimated.

Hope that helps.

[1] https://youtu.be/6c94vRmbM6Y?si=pPmvfJAGjHa2zOF1

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#579

Post by anovikov »

owenversteeg wrote: post #246
kokey wrote: post #47

Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc. This time, however, it looks like it'…

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…

Overall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement.

Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#580

Post by pmezard »

mschuster91 wrote: post #3
mekdoonggi wrote: post #2

Curious if this will eventually change China's calculus with regards to Russia. If Europe is a big customer for Chinese exports, and Russia is antagonizing, it seems like China would have an incentive to put pressure on Russia. It already seems like Russia is positioned to be completely subservient to China in the future.

> If Europe is a big customer for Chinese exports, and Russia is antagonizing, it seems like China would have an incentive to put pressure on Russia. China wants Russia to at least keep the Ukraine war going, if not eventually win the darn thing. Russia winning (or getting away with an armistice that lets them keep Crimea and Donbas) means a precedence China has for a land-grab of its own - obviously Taiwan, but othe…

USA already set the precedent with Venezuela. The rest also follows from Donroe Doctrine.
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