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Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

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Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#221

Post by hef19898 »

ncruces wrote: post #183
wewxjfq wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Green" Germany... Germany managed to have dirty electricity with nuclear energy, too. Why do people point at Germany and pretend it's a green energy failure, when Germany had a conservative government for 16 years that never cared about green energy? Green energy was never a policy*, what makes Germany the poster-child of a green energy failure? The conservatives said renewables drive electricity prices up and set…

Germany closed NPPs while extending open pit coal. That's reason enough to criticize them.

Germany decided, or rather re-decided, to close NPPs after Fukushima. Hence, operators didn't invest in maintenance, saftey upgrades, repairs or new fuel. Rather, they did thenminimum necessary to get them to the agreed (operators and the government agreed on dates, surprising, I know), closure date. The result: There was no way to keep German NPPs scheduled for closure running any lomger without massive, and financially uninteresting, investments and a lot of time (refits, repairs, maintenance, recertification, procurent and delivery of new fuel rods, testing, reactivation...).

That coal was increased instead of renewbles was a really bad devision. One driven by a strong lobby and (mostly) conservative politians with a vested interest in coal.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#222

Post by V__ »

ncruces wrote: post #183
wewxjfq wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Green" Germany... Germany managed to have dirty electricity with nuclear energy, too. Why do people point at Germany and pretend it's a green energy failure, when Germany had a conservative government for 16 years that never cared about green energy? Green energy was never a policy*, what makes Germany the poster-child of a green energy failure? The conservatives said renewables drive electricity prices up and set…

Germany closed NPPs while extending open pit coal. That's reason enough to criticize them.

They closed nuclear plants, but the decision to close them down was made ten years ago. To extend them now would be prohibitively expensive and not even the owners wanted to keep them online. You can fault Germany for not building new modern reactors, but the old ones had to be shut down.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#223

Post by Moldoteck »

atoav wrote: post #216
Moldoteck wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pls read abt how france is reprocessing waste or how breeding reactors work

Please do so yourself. Reprocessing is a good thing, but it does not resolve the need for long term storage. And btw. you also didn't answer my question who pays for the 10 to 100k years of storage. The current answer typically is "the state", all while energy companies get to keep the money earned.

if reprocessed or used in a breeding reactor, it should be stored for just ~300 years, if solidified/vitrified - no more risks of spills, just store containers underground and forget. Sweden does already have one big storage build, so again, not a problem And yes, the state will pay for disposal, I don't see any problem with it. Even better, I would want the state to own the reactors, like in France

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#224

Post by mrweasel »

gardenhedge wrote: post #191
mrweasel wrote: post #123

As always, this is the electrical grid only, not all the other stuff a nation will need various type of energy for. Still it's a major stepping stone. Back in 2006/2007 I had a job as a consultant for an energy trading company and it was huge the first day when the entire country ran solely on wind power. If was during the Christmas holidays, so less power was used overall, but still it was absolutely a huge deal for…

> not all the other stuff a nation will need various type of energy for like what?

Heating (and hot water), transportation, industry (which to be fair is also often heating). You can't make cement for instance with electricity, you can't produce enough heat, you need gas (or coal). You can use the electricity to make hydrogen and use that for heat, but then your electricity needs to be really cheap/free, because gas isn't actually that expensive.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#225

Post by adev_ »

hef19898 wrote: post #152
KingOfCoders wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`Nuclear "just works"` No it doesn't. Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk and nuclear waste is not paid for. So nuclear operators are freeloading on society for decades making billions of profits [0]. To make nuclear "work", one would need to adjust insurance and establish a trust to pay for nuclear waste facility operation for the next hundres of years. But then, no one would operate them nuclear p…

The pro-nuclear growd (funny how easy it is for otherwise smart people to be sold on mere talking points) has a point so: during generation a nuclear power plant doesn't emit CO2. What people willfully (?) ignore is the simple fact that a) we don't have enough nuclear capacity installed, and never did and b) you cannot just wish nuclear power plants into existence. The latter being the main blocking point. Just how y…

> Just how you can jump from that to opposing renewables build outs is beyond me.

No you do not get it I think.

The world need Nuclear AND Renewable energy. Working hand to hand to accelerate decarbonization, as fast as you can.

We need low carbon electricity production. And try to achieve that exclusively with renewable due to (close to) religious beliefs is an extremely dangerous bet on humankind.

I am not aware of many lobbies arguing that we need a world 100% nuclear.

However, I know many old world lobbies (like Greenpeace) that would prefer to die on the hill of climate change instead of admitting that the world need nuclear energy.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#226

Post by natmaka »

kawhah wrote: post #200
katbyte wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. Unless you want to burn gas (co2) or coal (co2 and radioactive emissions that cause more cancers in the us then nuclear has world wide) Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does…

My proposal would be to use combined cycle gas turbines to peak renewables until over-installation and storage make that no longer necessary. Gas is the cleanest fossil fuel. Modern gas turbines are by far the most efficient way of generating electricity from fossil fuels. Replacing fossil fuels burnt in ICEs and for heating with electricity generated using gas will drastically reduce emissions quickly. There is plen…

Moreover modern gas turbo-alternators can burn hydrogen instead of methane, and electricity generated thanks to renewable units' (wind turbines, solar panels...) overproduction can be used to obtain hydrogen (dubbed 'green hydrogen', thanks to water electrolysis).

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#227

Post by natmaka »

Moldoteck wrote: post #162
atoav wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nuclear waste thing is my pet peeve. Maybe this works in sparsely populated countries where you just dump it in a remote area, but in Europe producing a ton of nuclear waste means you have a ton of radiating toxic waste that you have to guarantee to store safely in a densely populated landmass for the next 10.000 years. There isn't many options to do that and all of them ain't even cheap today . Unless you want t…

Pls read abt how france is reprocessing waste or how breeding reactors work

Please name a single model of breeder reactor ready for industrial deployment.

There is none, therefore this is not a solution.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#228

Post by Cthulhu_ »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #117
adev_ wrote: post #75

Meaningwhile, today 17/11/2023 the same Portugal is back to the normal and emitting 170g CO2/kwh [1][2] - This is 6.8x the emissions of Sweden (25g) running on Nuclear and Hydro - This is 4.1x the emissions of France (41g) running on Nuclear, Hydro and Gas - This is 2.8x the emissions of Switzerland (59g) running on Nuclear and Hydro But still much better than "Green" Germany that reaches 647g CO2/kwh.... with 22GW o…

`Nuclear "just works"` No it doesn't. Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk and nuclear waste is not paid for. So nuclear operators are freeloading on society for decades making billions of profits [0]. To make nuclear "work", one would need to adjust insurance and establish a trust to pay for nuclear waste facility operation for the next hundres of years. But then, no one would operate them nuclear p…

Nuclear is clean in that it doesn't have the same amount of CO2, but taking everything into consideration, it's expensive.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#229

Post by RandomLensman »

katbyte wrote: post #187
hef19898 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time. Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way…

There is none except hydro and nuclear for base load. Unless you want to burn gas (co2) or coal (co2 and radioactive emissions that cause more cancers in the us then nuclear has world wide) Renewables outside hydro cannot, and will never, be able to provide a a stable base load for the grid, battery storage isn’t there and has all sorts of issues, pumped storage requires even more rare conditions then hydro, as does…

Fission is too expensive. The good real reasons from a cost perspective for reactors are weapons, medical and industrial applications as well as research.

Why would you want to use battery storage instead of pressure or gravity, for example? You can do gravity by moving stuff around underground, not just classical pumped storage. Digging big and deep holes is something people know how to do quite well, same goes for moving weights/mass up and down.

Could also do some chemical storage as another avenue.

For heat you can have certain thermal storage, too.

Re: Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row

#230

Post by Moldoteck »

hef19898 wrote: post #212
Moldoteck wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, France should build more reprocessing, but it's not like they don't know what to do with the waste. They know and they've done this for decades. Can you specify exactly about what impact you are talking about? The CO2 emissions or what?

What kind of emissions and polution could come from a nuclear reprossesing site? Hmm... Radiation, maybe? https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-sellafield-nuclear-wa... Sellafield is infamous for radioactive polution, reprocessingnof nuclear waste is dangerous, dirty and not always economically feasible. Or do you thonk anybody would buy new fuel rods if reprocessed ones were cheaper?

so you say that something that is done like shit have shit consequences? Somehow La Hague is doing much better so maybe reprocessing/storage is not that a big problem and humanity should just get their sh* together?
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