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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)

#141

Post by littlestymaar »

phtrivier wrote: post #27

> 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…

> So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!

Came to say that, every time you'll see a country running on 100% renewables for an extended period, it's going to be hydro, because it's the only controllable supply among renewables (with geothermal as well, but it's been so niche so far I put it aside, but I hope it will change).

Unfortunately most of the hype and investments go to solar and wind power, which fundamentally don't offer the same capabilities. (Solar is fine as long as you're in q sunny place that is not in Europe though because it can be predictable enough to be relied on, but Solar in above 40° North and wind are borderline scams at this point).

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

#143

Post by pfdietz »

jacquesm wrote: post #139
pfdietz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're going to see a lot of grid defection, and not just from little consumers. Corporations won't wait for grid connections and will roll their own microgrids.

There will be serious pushback to that by lobbyists. This is already happening in the form of mandatory participation in 'the market' while at the same time (you can't make this up) having to sell to that market at some kind of arbitrary price that you don't get a say in as producer. I'm a small step away from going off-grid again, the biggest stumbling block is that - predictably - you can't do any practical small p…

Sure, but large corporations have a lot of influence (read: money) to stop that sort of thing, so I don't see it going very far. Those building data centers can always play their trump card: just build the data center somewhere else.

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

#144

Post by hvb2 »

thangalin wrote: post #138
Tepix wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's dangerous. For millenia. See https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead... > Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.

The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities.

We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.

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

#145

Post by graemep »

input_sh wrote: post #41
phtrivier wrote: post #27

> 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…

I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in…

Sri Lanka used to rely on hydro, with oil as a backup, and has added a lot of coal.

I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?

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

#146

Post by colechristensen »

tialaramex wrote: post #140
colechristensen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro. You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.

I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only…

Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.

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

#147

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jdlshore wrote: post #108
ambicapter wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.

> They take too long to build and cost too much.

The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.

> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.

Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.

HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.

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

#148

Post by littlestymaar »

Tepix wrote: post #131
cyjackx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.

The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.

The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).

In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!

I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.

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

#149

Post by hvb2 »

tialaramex wrote: post #140
colechristensen wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro. You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.

I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only…

Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...

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

#150

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Tepix wrote: post #131
cyjackx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.

What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?
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