131–140 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will happen when we have better weather forecasting models. If it gets randomly cloudy for 5 days this month and 17 days next months screws up planning for factories, farms, datacenters etc.
I always post this https://www.rte-france.com/en/data-publications/eco2mix/powe...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using German coal dependence as a baseline statistic to prove that nuclear is more economical than green energy is a remarkable stunt.
What's the stunt? France built reactors for modest cost and phased out coal. Germany wasted enormous amounts of money on green energy and made very little progress. Which country is more "green"? Which technology is more "green"?
When Germany started serious bets on wind and solar, after 2000, France didn't really add much nuclear anymore.
So, the comparison you are making just doesn't work well, no matter if one likes nuclear or not.
The title is misleading. $135 is not "money saved", it's "money not spent on fossil fuels" (even for that I couldn't find how it was calculated by solarpowereurope, but the number seems plausible). To the discussion of whether $50B/y is a big figure or not. EU has around 400GW of PV installed. Cost to install per 1kW ranged between $600 and up to $4000 because a big chunk of that capacity was built when prices were m…
Thanks, China.
In addition to my primary system, I have a toy installation with 6 500W panels and a micro. I paid around 500 euros for that last August and by this time this toy installation generated me 1281 kWh. That's around €400 in terms of retail energy prices. So, I'll break even this August.
So, everything generated after would be exactly the "money saved".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the stunt? France built reactors for modest cost and phased out coal. Germany wasted enormous amounts of money on green energy and made very little progress. Which country is more "green"? Which technology is more "green"?
I'd say you are comparing different things in different eras. When France built the majority of its nuclear plants, 70s-90s, Germany didn't do anything renewable to speak of but sunk billions into the dying coal industry. Unions and other worker movements put lots of pressure on policy makers to keep subsidizing coal long after it was remotely meaningful to do so, mainly to avoid coal workers getting unemployed and w…
Instead they chose to pour money into wind and solar and ended up with:
* higher CO2 emissions
* higher consumer electricity prices
* all that for much higher implementation cost
The gap is massive. I think it's directly comparable: these are two neighboring EU countries, comparable in size, population and GDP. They made different choices which led to significantly different outcomes.
This seems highly doubtful. If solar saves money, why does Germany (with a lot of solar) have higher rather than lower energy prices?
The price of electricity is set by the marginal cost of the most expensive individual source - if your grid is 80% solar, 20% coal, the price you pay is the price of coal, because the solar providers can increase their prices to just below that of coal. Obviously I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's the general dynamic. This is "by design" in the sense that it offers big subsidies to more solar generation to come onl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have any evidence that this is true?
Logic. If energy is already cheap, building out any new power source is unnecessary. Once you've determined you need new electricity generation, the cheapest source tends to get built. Right now that's solar; that's an objective fact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't explain why energy costs are higher in Germany. You have to replace the words "Alice" and "Bob" with something that is relevant to the topic at hand.
Bob is the marginal generator: the most expensive power plant that still has to run to satisfy demand in a given hour (or whatever the auction period is, I assume it's per hour). Bob is not one single concrete thing, it's the abstract concept, anthropomorphised. Germany's energy is expensive because the marginal generator is so expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bob is the marginal generator: the most expensive power plant that still has to run to satisfy demand in a given hour (or whatever the auction period is, I assume it's per hour). Bob is not one single concrete thing, it's the abstract concept, anthropomorphised. Germany's energy is expensive because the marginal generator is so expensive.
The marginal generator is likely so expensive because solar was used to replace cost effective nuclear and coal plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
batteries are not yet competitive with fossil fuel
This is not true. Batteries are cheaper than peaker power plants using fossil fuel. They also allow the operator to fulfill market demands at the minute level versus the hours previously that it took to turn on a peaker plant. This is being done at scale in California and Texas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean higher than in other countries with less solar energy, like France, which has mostly nuclear.
The "saves $" value is based on fossil fuels, not nuclear.
_-_renewable_energy.svg){kind=link}