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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)

#351

Post by Mawr »

watwut wrote: post #171
littlestymaar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I am pretty sure we dont need to evacuate large areas and keep sarcofag over former food processing plants. The chernobyl was poisoning Russian soldiers by the start of Ukrainian invasion when they were dumb enough to sleep there.

Your "large area" is actually tiny, and the solution is to... not go there. Yeah, all you have to do is not go to a very specific tiny area in Ukraine. I think that's quite easily manageable.

As usual, when such things are mentioned, you lack any and all sense of scale and statistics. Just pure fearmongering.

Look at the number of all nuclear plants over their entire lifetime and divide their benefits by the cost of what, the two or three major incidents you can think of? This simple calculation alone makes your arguments utterly ridiculous. We accept 1000x the risk and cost of that on a daily basis, in e.g. driving, gas and coal plants.

Go ahead and evacuate to get away from the negative effects of soot, tire dust, CO2, and all the other fun pollution that's spread out over the entire atmosphere. Good luck living on Mars.

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

#352

Post by ben_w »

oblio wrote: post #340
micw wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, coal and oil is not. Since we have micro organisms that can consume wood, coal and oil will never be produced again. > During the Carboniferous period, massive amounts of plant matter accumulated to form coal because microorganisms and fungi had not yet evolved the ability to break down lignin, a tough, aromatic polymer in woody plants.

We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too. Though it's close to useless because at that point they're too expensive to be worth it for anything else than very niche uses that absolutely require them.

> We can make synthetic oil and I think we can also make synthetic coal, too.

IIRC, that's basically what charcoal is. Except charcoal is cleaner once made, because most of the nasty stuff happens while being made from the source plant material.

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

#353

Post by ben_w »

oblio wrote: post #341
dalyons wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply costs have surprisingly not that much to do with Californias silly electric rates. They load into the retail rates all kinds of disaster recovery costs, environmental blah blah costs, distribution upgrades, social programs, the list goes on. Plus straight old fashioned corruption in a state sponsored monopoly. You can get some idea of the BS that gets loaded in by comparing some rates from municipal grids like…

> Plus straight old fashioned corruption in a state sponsored monopoly. Why don't they just nationalize it? At that point there wouldn't be a huge incentive to raise prices and increase profits and state control would demand lower prices for residents.

> Why don't they just nationalize it?

Given the general dysfunction in American politics (and I say this as an outside observer), the current owners would raise a stink about it, possibly playing the "nationalize == communism == USSR == gulags" card as a negative campaign in the next election.

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

#354

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lpcvoid wrote: post #303
tialaramex wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically both the Tories and Reform pledge to eliminate the "Green levy" funding for renewables. But that funding doesn't just vanish in a puff of smoke after voters pay it, it's paying for us to have renewable energy generation. The very stupid part is that we spent a lot of money already and they can't reverse time's arrow, they can't unspend that money, they can only choose (and at least publicly are choosing)…

In the UK, Reform probably gets paid by russia to be anti-renewable, I highly doubt they believe that themselves.

The anti-renewable policies would cost the UK a roughly similar amount to Brexit.

Some random numbers:

Renewables reduced UK energy costs by 100 Billion over the 2010-2023 period (despite just getting started and costs continuing to decline)

The conservative "cut the green crap" changes around 2013 that are milder versions of what Farage would do, add a cost of about 5-15 billion a year (ongoing) in higher bills.

EVs will be 30 to 70 Billion a year savings once you get to 33 million.

He's also against grid batteries that will save about 5 to 15 billions per year once scaled.

Brexit is about 100 billion a year according to Bloomberg.

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

#355

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

mastermage wrote: post #323
kalleboo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year. You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".

All of the discussions here conveniently ignore the existance of Wind. Which fortunately has higher yield in the months when there is less sun.

Yes, it's a mix. It's always a mix. Arguing that "renewables" = "solar" is a classic straw man.

So is comparing rooftop solar for a single property to grid solar for a country to a continent-sized grid of mixed renewable sources.

Battery and storage tech are barely getting started. Pumped storage is perfectly capable of smoothing out seasonal loads.

There's some capex for physical pumped storage - less than for a nuke plant - but once running it's comparatively low cost.

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

#358

Post by pelasaco »

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…

wondering why isn't Brazil in this list https://www.iea.org/countries/brazil

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

#359

Post by pelasaco »

neves wrote: post #52
WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fun fact for Paraguay: the Itaipu Dam is one of the largest in the world located between Brazil and Paraguay, where each country gets 50% of the production. But 50% of that production for Paraguay, a country of 7 millions inhabitants, means that it cannot consume that much, so it's essentially reselling that energy to Brazil, a country with 30x more inhabitants. Paraguay only uses about 1/3 of its share (and thus res…

And it means that it has been oil free since the 70's. Brazil, a continental country, has more than 80% of its energy from renewables

Yes, https://www.iea.org/countries/brazil

Put the meme of Macron with an old picture saying Brazil is BURNING THE AMAZON

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

#360

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

littlestymaar wrote: post #345
mastermage wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looking at the current Geopolitical Climate this does not seem like an Irrational Fear. And I do not mean the fear of a reactor meltdown. But if you refine Uranium for a Powerplant you can also Refine it for a bomb.

Any country that can make a nuclear bomb could decide to make one whether or not they chose to have a civil nuclear industry (Israel being the prime example). And in the current geopolitical climate, expect more countries to build a bomb.

If we're talking about war, what does more damage to the surroundings - dropping a nuke on a solar plant, or dropping a nuke on a nuclear plant?
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