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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

#591

Post by black_puppydog »

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…

Nice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked.

Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at ~15,700TWh.

I'd guess that demand for Oil is so inflexible mostly due to its use in transportation? If that's the case, we should see this value drop as the adoption of EVs progresses, but clearly so far they haven't made a dent.

Edit: after clicking around a bit more, it seems that the EU energy use reduction might be mostly due to off-shoring energy intensive industries... ayayay. XD

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#592

Post by Tade0 »

filloooo wrote: post #514
Tade0 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia recovering from this invasion they started is the naive take. It's currently selling its resources at a steep discount and that is unlikely to change because its customers are only in it for the bargain they're getting.

Russia has always been selling it's oil and gas at a discount, that's why it had so much clout in the EU and CIS, nothing new, it's literally its geopolitical strategy since the Soviet Union. All these talk of cutting off Russia won't last more than a year after the war, nobody refuses cheap energy, certainly not the cash strapped Europeans. They'll probably be the world leader in critical metals and rare earth depos…

> Russia has always been selling it's oil and gas at a discount

No. Urals blend used to closely track Brent, now it's $10-20 below that. Chart here details the discount over time:

https://energyandcleanair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/...

Overall there's a clear trend of Russia's fossil fuel revenue declining:

https://www.russiafossiltracker.com/

> nobody refuses cheap energy

Only Russian gas was really cheap. The EU found other suppliers who don't pose such a geopolitical risk.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#593

Post by nandomrumber »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #574
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…

> despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind,

What are you talking about?

> Both were due to government incentives,

How can the government be opposed to it, while also providing rebates to rooftop solar?

Anyway, it was all a big bait and switch manoeuvre, as the solar feed in tariff per kWh is only a fraction of what you pay, but it didn’t start out that way.

That continued existence of any incentive to add rooftop solar is dependent on continued electricity price hikes that out pace general inflation.

That’s how intelligent Australian voters are.

We have the world’s largest known uranium deposit, which we’re happy for others to use, but instead we voted for this shit.

Rooftop solar is a scam.

What it does is shifts the long term maintenance costs from the industrial sector, or government if you’re a socialist, to the owner of the roof owner, the residential / business customer. All the while leaving the affordability of the entire fiasco up to whichever bunch of wankers are in Canberra this week deciding the feed-in tariff.

Why would anyone think any of that is a good idea.

And I say that as someone who recently installed solar.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#594

Post by b3orn »

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 largest "but" is that they only look at electricity generation, not energy in general. There's a lot of heating with natural gas and of course most cars still have internal combustion engines which burn petrol or diesel.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#595

Post by nandomrumber »

triceratops wrote: post #558
buckle8017 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Middle and low income countries can't print dollars to buy oil. They'll happily take free energy from the sky.

Free*

* Conditions apply, nothing if free

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#596

Post by lambdaone »

SECProto wrote: post #507
youngtaff wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use Does that 26% include the energy that's involved to ship the fuel in tankers? Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world

> Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world Note that marine shipping is extraordinarily fuel efficient (from a gCO2/(t*km) basis), so I doubt that it adds a lot on a per ton of fuel basis. We just ship a lot of fossil fuels. This [1] graph looks to be in the right ballpark from what i remember in school 15 years ago, i didn't verify it in depth but +- an order of magnitude bet…

Even though petroleum product shipping accounts for almost 40% of shipping, the surprising efficiency of ocean transport still means that it's not that big an energy cost; a single-digit percentage of the energy content of the shipped oil/gasoline.

But even that is still worth saving - it's a few percent more benefit for electrification.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#597

Post by ljlolel »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #446
toyg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ow the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce electricity 10x cheaper By forcing oil prices to get 10x cheaper, at the barrel of a gun. See: Venezuela and Iran. Will it work? I would not bet on it.

Seems unlikely that we'll be selling oil for $5, unless fossil fuels are completely replaced and it becomes a side-of-the-road novelty.

Then it loses economies of scale and capital wasted so price won’t go down

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#598

Post by nandomrumber »

jhrmnn wrote: post #19
raincole wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Europe were a big customer for Russia energy, it seems like Russia would have an incentive to not antagonize it. Oh, see how well it went.

Europe was a bit customer for Russia energy, and Russia invaded an EU neighbor nonetheless. After which it stopped being the customer. So it seems like that incentive didn't really work.

The EU hasn’t stopping being a customer of Russian gas.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#599

Post by lambdaone »

epolanski wrote: post #409
bee_rider wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want. I pay low energy prices during night than day, that's normal, but I'm still not gonna do laundry at 9 pm, I'd rather pay the 10/20 cents more during the day.

But it's not you, it's everyone. And some people will be swayed even by that 10 to 20 cents. Put them all together, and you have a substantial "virtual battery" capacity, and all you need to do it is to make sure people have price awareness.

Don't knock small gains like this. Even a couple of percentage difference is worth having; all the marginal gains add up to make large scale gains.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#600

Post by clarionbell »

Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3]

Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4]

The whole process has been mismanaged at best.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/business/economy/Europes-specialty-chemi...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/europes-chemical-ind...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_economic_crisis_(2022%E...

[4]https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/heating-eating-energy-b...

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