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Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

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Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#301

Post by jabl »

volkl48 wrote: post #226
sleepyguy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next frontier should be preventing forest fires. This is just Canada, imagine if we could prevent them around the world. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-... >Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon

We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now. Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US. Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox…

I suppose, hypothetically, you could gather up the excess fuel in the forests and burn it in a power plant.

Probably impractical at scale though..

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#302

Post by GuB-42 »

baxtr wrote: post #297
hvb2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the sporadic good news item in a sea of bad? Moving away from fossil fuels is a big task, these are the first signs that things are happening.

there is far more good news than bad news, but unfortunately the human mind reacts much more intensely to the latter.

Certainly not in news (as in newspapers). There is a reason we are saying "no news is good news".

And it is not just because of the negativity bias. Things that work as they should don't make the news. I mean, take Ukraine and Poland, both European countries of a similar scale, one is at war, the other is doing well, guess the one that makes the news.

I'd say the only consistent supplier of good news is science and technology (with maybe a 50/50 ratio of good to bad), and sports (for the winning team). Geopolitics is almost exclusively bad news, economics is mostly bad, the good news are often agreements that conclude a stream of bad news, such as wars and economic crisis, and then we stop talking about the thing, because it now works as it should. And then, there are crimes and disasters, which are obviously bad.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#303

Post by volkl48 »

jabl wrote: post #301
volkl48 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried "preventing forest fires" for about a century, and it's a large part of why they're burning so intensely and destructively now. Forest fires are a natural part of the life cycle of many forested regions - particularly in Canada and the Western US. Suppressing all fires as soon as possible means that dead, dry plant matter continues to build up for decades longer than it naturally would, creating a "tinderbox…

I suppose, hypothetically, you could gather up the excess fuel in the forests and burn it in a power plant. Probably impractical at scale though..

Tough economics to imagine attempting to effectively gather mulch from in between the trees when we're talking areas so remote they often aren't even harvested for actual lumber and are a huge distance from the nearest power plant (or grid connection of any significant capacity).

-------

However, this isn't addressing the other problem: Fire is an actual part of the ecosystem in those areas. Various plant/tree species are adapted around it. Some require fire for their seeds to germinate, others need the cleared ground that results (and their seeds can survive the fire), others rely on it to keep other species out with adaptations that make them much less likely to burn in a moderate intensity/natural fire (and so they survive while an invading species doesn't).

Fire also opens up areas and causes natural forest succession - which creates an environment for more than just the biggest trees to exist for a few decades. Etc, etc, etc.

You simply can't have the natural environment out there exist as it is evolved to function without fire in the long-term.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#304

Post by Timon3 »

nec4b wrote: post #287
alpineman wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, plus the ethical angle. It's a bit ridiculous that we have people researching the 'theoretical ethical treatment of LLMs' when we are doing such awful things to animals on a massive scale. We have dogs and cats as pets and we eat cows and pigs (in Western countries). As if cows and pigs didn't also have personalities, memories, parental bonds, the ability to feel pain. It's a mass wilful ignorance. What's the d…

>What's the difference between us and animals? I always find it incredible some people equating animals with people. How do you not see the difference in human range of emotions, ability to do science, technology, arts, etc. Do you perhaps live in the city and don't really have any real contact to animal?

Plenty of humans have have little ability in your mentioned fields, and animals can show an enormous range of emotions. If those were the only criteria, we'd have little trouble eating e.g. brain-dead people.

That's not to discount human lives, we all have worth aside from our abilities to create. But I don't think there's a sensible non-arbitrary hard line you can draw to separate humans from all other animals.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#305

Post by roryirvine »

ragebol wrote: post #276
foota wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only ~20-30% of the energy in the fuel turns into useful work, while electricity is much, much more efficient. So, we need much less of it. Isn't a lot of energy used for heating, not work?

True. For residential heating, heat pumps make for a similar ratio as they make 3-5 units of hear for 1 unit of electric energy, depending on conditions. The challenge in heating is industrial heat, which is much hotter. Can't do that with heat pumps (yet?)

Process heat would be a good use case for SMR nuclear if the economics turn out to be favourable (a big if, admittedly). Also potential for using green hydrogen (though the economics of that are even more iffy).

Even without those, the continued decrease in solar costs means that there's a decent chance that plain old resistive heating will become viable at some point in the 2040s.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#306

Post by rootusrootus »

account42 wrote: post #282
whateverboat wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Thanks for bringing it up. Something that is not emphasized enough is how much of the dampening effect has the renewable energy has had on the electricity prices. It is estimated that without the renewables, the electricity prices would have easily been 8ct/kWh higher and may be even upto 10 ct/kWh.

Which is of course not something any sane person will believe once he looks at the overwhelming volume of evidence to the contrary from countries that have not committed energy suicide.

I'd like to see that overwhelming evidence. Everything I've been able to find suggests that renewables, since they have a ~zero marginal energy cost, displace the most expensive dispatchable alternatives. But wholesale pricing seems to be heavily influenced more by the highest priced energy source in the mix than the lowest, so at this point the wholesale price drop is modest (but still a drop). Retail pricing has to include all sorts of extra stuff, like paying for the local grid infrastructure, subsidies, etc, and this makes what the consumer sees on their bill have only a passing relationship to the wholesale cost.

If you have a good source for something that says otherwise, I'd be genuinely interested to see it. Not that I would probably change my opinion on renewables, since I personally think cutting pollution of the air I breathe is worth paying a little extra for, but I like to be informed nonetheless.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#307

Post by ragebol »

inigyou wrote: post #299
ragebol wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why that would be the case. Why is the 20% of eg. an internal combustion engine coupled to the 500% COP of a heat pump? I see a vague connection as an ICE also uses expanding gasses etc, but that's about it. What am I missing?

An ICE is not an ideal heat engine. But if you did have an ideal heat engine, it could either produce work by reducing a temperature difference, or increase a temperature difference when provided with work. No physical device can do better than an ideal heat engine.

Ah, thanks, had to be something like that indeed. Had a hard time imagining putting work into an ICE and getting anything useful out.

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#308

Post by Timon3 »

quantumwannabe wrote: post #215
anticorporate wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that same logic, fossil fuels are carbon neutral because they come from living things. The problem is we have too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not too much of various assorted carbon-based compounds on the planet.

But the supply of herd animals is essentially fixed. There isn’t infinite growth. Eating meat therefore does not increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, no matter what vegans who want to ban meat for personal moral reasons assert. If humans stopped eating meat, the only way to reduce the amount of carbon that animals “emit” would be to kill all of them and bury their carcasses underground where they can’t decom…

The supply of herd animals very obviously isn't fixed. Humans breed them for resources, and since the world population has more than doubled over the last 50 years, the supply of herd animals has also increased a lot. If humans stopped breeding cattle for resources, there'd be far less cattle.

The amount of atmospheric methane also very obviously isn't fixed. Increases in production result in a higher concentration of methane, since it takes ~a decade to break it down. As long as you keep increased output of methane, the baseline concentration will also stay increased.

Your point about "kill[ing] all of them and bury[ing] their carcasses underground where they can’t decompose" also shows that you really don't understand that 1) different animals produce different greenhouse gases that may have weaker or stronger effects, and 2) that we're actively causing far more cattle to exist than would without us continuously breeding them.

The only way I can see your points making sense is if you're literally approaching the topic from an absolutist binary perspective (as in, "either we keep going exactly as before, or we have to literally kill all animals, no middle ground possible").

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#309

Post by throw0101d »

leonidasrup wrote: post #295
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the guy that double counted everything? Because he counted when something got bought and then counted the subsidy used to buy and added then together?

Double-counting was criticism from Fraunhofer ISI. Jan Emblemsvåg has responded to the criticism with follow on article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2026.2...

Doing a quick search for Emblemsvåg, this seems fairly relevant:

> […] He has researched and published significantly in Life-Cycle Analyses, Life-Cycle Costing, energy, risk, Lean and other areas. […]

* https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/jan.emblemsvag

> Everyone jokes about the 20/20 hindsight of cost management. In Life-Cycle Costing, Jan Emblemsvag proposes to do something about it. Here's a new approach to life cycle costing that brings activity-based costing, risk, and uncertainty into the forefront. You'll focus on future costs and learn how you can perform any type of cost management activity better than before by introducing uncertainty into models and exploiting them to the max.

* https://www.wiley.com/en-us/shop/general-introductory-accoun...

Re: Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time

#310

Post by throw0101d »

bildung wrote: post #69
throw0101d wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Meta: I understand some folks aren't a fan of nuclear. I disagree, but recognize people have different values and weighing of priorities. But I just find it fucking stupid that coal was left to keep running by people who claim that climate change is a priority. Certainly a discussion can be had about pros/cons of new nuclear, but why the fuck would you prioritize closing current nuclear over coal ?)

Well first, coal went down, too , if we are still discussing Germany. In parallel with shrinking nuclear generation. See the cleanenergywire link upthread for the numbers. So the coal vs. nuclear discussion is baseless already (again, if we still talk about Germany). Secondly, energy != electricity. Coal is mostly used for central heating (a plant heats water, water is then transported to a whole neighborhood). Elect…

> Well first, coal went down, too, if we are still discussing Germany.

Yes, but when it comes to coal more down is more better. And if nuclear was still around I would hazard to guess that's what would have happened.

The graph I'm looking at is labelled "Installed net electricity generation capacity in Germany". Lower down there's a pie graph with shares, and coal makes up ~20% in gross electrical production.

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