371–380 of 512 posts
> 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…
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Tbf, solar has gotten so much more effective/cost efficient in the last 12-24 months that it's beating pretty much everything aside from hydro in the cost efficiency department at this point - including (most of) northern Europe and Canada. Most data you find will be using data that's massively out of date and be off by at least 2x though... I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear ag…
> I had another facepalm moment when I read about EU planning to go nuclear again. That would've been amazing and smart in 2015 - but now? Yeah, it's dumb af. And that's coming from a German living at the northern end of the country. In 2015, Germany produced about 650 TWh of electricity. In 2025, it’s around 507 TWh , a drop of roughly 22–23% . Consumption has also declined, mainly due to efficiency improvements, hi…
If sodium-ion, or some kind of thermal, or some kind of gravitationnal (except pumped hydro), or whatever techno comes up that makes it possible to handle this dunkleflaute thing (i learned that word today, love it already :) [1]), then Germany will already have the panels and windmills.
If for some reason, there is a great chemistry already advanced in the labs, is it possible that Germany buys a GWh battery before the first few EPR-2s come out of the ground ?
That's one hell of a bet to make. By refusing to reconsider nuclear, Germany is basically betting on some sort of breakthrough (or continued gas supply, which, well, is betting on geopolitics...)
So maybe "carving up mountains" isn't such a crazy plan, after all...
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Hydro electricity is also one of the most dangerous forms of energy production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure (This is the worst disaster, but could put Chernobyl to shame?) Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_st...
Sure, if you consider only local dangers and don't care at all about regional or global externalities.
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Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
All thermal plants have this same issue, not just nuclear. And if you lose the natural gas peakers (which are also thermal and thus has this issue), you lose your baseload renewables too. Not that it matters, renewables used for baseload make more CO2 than just using FFs. Variability is a terrible quality in an energy source.
Do you know what else you'd get a lot of if it's so hot in the summer that you can't use lake and river water for cooling? Sunlight to run your PV. Because that's exactly why the water was heating up.
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> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.
1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night. 2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
I see that Norway is big on renewables - great that all that Oil & Gas revenue can be used to build hydro & wind to salve their conscience.
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Blows me away that energy policy is so political, and that somehow self-styled libertarians who don’t say a peep about oil subsidies are deeply offended by renewable ones. It you consider yourself libertarian can you at least be forward-thinking enough to see that shifting to renewables is also a step towards decentralization?
Hi! How is it decentralization if it's subsidized by the government? And which libertarians are in favor of oil subsidies? I'd like to have a talk with them
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Not what I was responding to. Saying nuclear plants can't ramp for predictable night time demand is wrong. Nuclear plants can't do instant demand response, but they can absolutely respond over windows of several hours.
But not economically. And it can’t ramp twice. Once is easy. For the French to do load following they sync their entire fleet to manage it. Letting plants take turns and spread out where they are in their fuel cycle.
According to the current version of the European Utility Requirements (EUR) the NPP must be capable of a minimum daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100% Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% Pr /minute.
https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
The problem with integration of solar and wind with nuclear power is that it doesn't make economical sense to build solar and wind in electric grid based on nuclear power generation. Because the fuel costs of nuclear power plants are so low and the capacity factors can be very high (nuclear power plants need only very short pauses for maintenance) building solar and wind in such electric grid doesn't lower the costs for grid customers.
This is big problem for solar and wind investors and manufacturers.
Nuclear power is a big competition also for coal and gas producers. I think coal producers in Australia are quite scary even of the idea for nuclear power production in Australia.
Wake me up when a heavily industrialized country will be in the list, thanks!
Albania is fairly industrialized though I'd say: ~20% of GDP as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania?useskin=vector#Economy vs 15% of US economy as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
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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 t…
