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Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

the-independent.com

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Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#161
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.

No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish. Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts

Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#162
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.

No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish. Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts

No, I'm not - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

A lot of NPPs in France are cooled with river water and they need to be kept at low output if the rivers are too warm.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#163
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.

Nuclear seems to be the worst option: You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar. It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years. It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons. It takes a long time to build and bring online. It d…

> You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.

You always need something in the grid that can change the amount of power it generates regardless of what you use in combination with it, because the demand from the grid isn't fixed. All grids need something in the nature of storage/hydro or peaker plants.

The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different. Nuclear can generate power at night and doesn't have lower output during the peak seasonal demand period for heating. Nuclear is baseload; it doesn't make sense to have more of it than the minimum load on the grid, but no one is really proposing to. The minimum load is generally around half of the maximum load.

> It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.

If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years". If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.

> Vulnerable to terrorism.

Nuclear plants are kind of a hard target. The stuff inside them isn't any more of a biohazard than what's in a thousand other chemical/industrial plants that aren't surrounded in thick concrete.

> Enabler of nuclear weapons.

The US already has nuclear weapons and would continue to do so regardless of how much electricity is generated from what sources. The argument against building nuclear reactors in Iran is not an argument against building nuclear reactors in Ohio.

> It takes a long time to build and bring online.

Better get started then.

> It doesn't scale down.

Decent argument for not having one in your house; not a great argument for not having one in your state.

> Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?

The country with the largest uranium reserves is Australia. Kazakhstan is #2 and has about the same amount as Canada. Other countries with significant reserves include Russia, India, Brazil, China, Ukraine and several countries in Africa. The US has some itself and plenty of other places to source it. It can also be extracted from seawater.

The US is also in the top 4 for thorium reserves with about 70% as much as the #1 (which is India), and thorium is 3-4 times more abundant overall than uranium.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#164
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oil free for electricity generation. The media in my country (Finland) also likes to brag about 90+% fossil-free electricity generation. But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free.

Finland has electricified 40% of primary energy which is pretty much world leading (Sweden and Norway are 50%). European average is 19%. Largest chunk left is transport which can mostly be electrified now. Industrial and home heat too. There are hard to electrify sections in both but overall it's fairly obvious what to do next. And the easy parts eliminate 3 or 4 units of primary energy for every one they replace, so…

Yes, ground transport (except long distance trucks) can be electrified now. In principle, most homes could be heated with electricity if we had means to store all the "excess" wind energy or waste heat from e.g. datacenters and use it in district heating. The technology for heat storage is mostly ready but the capacity is not.

But would it be easy or obvious what to do next? Absolutely not. Everything is simple if you have pockets full of money, live in temperate climates and do not rely on energy intensive (and hard to electrify) industries like the Nordic countries.

For example, about 25 per cent of the total energy consumption in Finland is used to heat buildings. Wood burning is about half of the total heating in distric heating systems which account about half of the total heating for buildings. Also heat-storing fireplaces are still a small but a crucial part of the total picture. A lot of extra energy capacity is needed just make sure you stay alive during the coldest months even if some of the systems fail.

Nordic countries have cheap electricity mostly for two reasons: very stable interconnected electric grid and lots of different renewable energy sources. Arguably, hydropower is the most important because it can stabilize the intermittent wind power which in many places we have more than enough already. Nuclear energy is also a major part of electricity production in Sweden and Finland.

And yet our electric grid or electricity production capacity is far from ready to handle even the more realistic dreams of "full electrification" we are told in the media. It will take many years just to get the grid ready.

And what happens if the stablest renewable, hydropower, fails? We might find it out this year as hydropower reserves in Norway are at the lowest level in 20 years. Hydro generates about 90% of Norway's total electricity.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#165
post #57

Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.

> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading. It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels. Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at th…

Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.

Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.

Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#167
post #57

Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.

California is not anywhere near 83% renewable for total electricity generation. [1] Are you just adding up nameplace capacities without capacity factors? 1. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66704

[deleted]

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#168
post #57

Pushback against the outliers of small + blessed with hydro and geothermal is overshadowing real wins: - California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar - Spain: 73%, dominated by solar & wind - Portugal: 90%, dominated by wind & solar - The Netherlands: 86%, dominated by solar & wind - Great Britain: 71%, dominated by wind & solar There's real momentum happening.

Isn't that the list of high energy prices and blackouts?

Although "Getting rid of cheaper electricity generation would make the electricity cheaper" is genuinely an actual right wing talking point in the UK it doesn't make any sense. The reason it's a talking point is that they're funded by billionaires who'd reap the rewards from new fossil fuel licensing. They know they can't deliver, but what they learned from Brexit is that their supporters aren't too smart and simple messages, even if nonsensical, resonate well with those voters. "Drill baby drill" is simple. Wrong, but simple.

Right now in a dark and not very windy UK w/ 10GW of gas burners running the spot price for electricity here is almost £150 per MWh, but at 10am it was sunny with a brisk wind and sure enough that spot price was about £25 per MWh. Gee, I wonder whether the wind and sun are cheaper...

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#169

> Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo produced more than 99.7 per cent of the electricity they consumed using geothermal, hydro, solar or wind power. Let's head to electricitymaps.com ! Albania ( https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AL/live/fifteen_min... ) - On 2026-04-12 16:45 GMT+2, 22,67% of electricity consumed by Albania is imported from Greece, which gen…

Ultragrav (YC S27). We plan on generating the geographic tyranny of who has rivers and mountains and who doesn't by seeking to use ultrasonic audio to disrupt gravity so you don't have to hear it. We're hiring in Kansas city, KS.

In all seriousness, thereis of course a list on Wikipedia of countries by renewable electricity production [1]. China leads here but also has 1.4B people and still has significant coal usage and oil and gas imports. But they're working really hard to wean themselves off of fossil fuels while still rapidly industrializing.

China does have mountains and has built the Three Gorges Dam, which is just massive and produces ~22GW. They're building a dam that'll produce almost three times as much power, the Medog Hydropower Station [2], which is planned for ~60GW.

The part that annoys me about a lot of developed nations is that they engage in greenwashing by simply exporting their emissions to poorer countries eg [3]. Let's at least be honest about what fossil fuels we continue to use and the emissions we indirectly create.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station

[3]: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/1533104...

Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)

#170
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading. It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels. Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at th…

Nuclear is not renewable though, those isotopes were created when some past generation star collapsed as supernova.

Solar will no longer be renewable in 5 billion years as well.
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