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Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

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Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#391

Post by stjohnswarts »

gerdesj wrote: post #330
hagbard_c wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of t…

"daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time" Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%. We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by…

If that were true here in the USA my bill would go from $200 in the winter to $2000. I could afford that but poor people would just have to turn off the heat and suffer and some of them die, so this seems..... like there's more to the story.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#392

Post by stjohnswarts »

diordiderot wrote: post #284
garmaine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)

Electricity absolutely, unarguably, is a substitute for gas.

You act like everyone can just miraculously pay for an entirely new HVAC system on the spur of a moment?

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#393

Post by tmikaeld »

wumpus wrote: post #387
robertlagrant wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Percentages are misleading when it comes to power sources that only work some of the time.

That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced.

Do you only use electricity only some hours a day?

No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to.

And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#394

Post by nomel »

Gare wrote: post #213
pixelpoet wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying 41c/kWh for ökostrom / 100% renewable energy here, and doing some mining with two 150W Radeon 6000 GPUs to keep this computer room warm goes a long way to making it cost effective.

Using heat pumps also makes it almost on par with the cost of natural gas.

Heat pumps don't work below -10C, so this really depends on the local climate. You can use geothermal heat pumps, but now you're no longer near par.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#395

Post by nomel »

sgift wrote: post #382
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air. The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear…

> and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. Afte…

> So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat.

That's completely idiotic, correct?

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#396

Post by AnthonyMouse »

_1tan wrote: post #385
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive. What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardwa…

Which cryptocurrency would work for example? Monero?

The returns from CPU mining are really low. The advantage is you can use your existing PC(s) and not buy anything.

Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:

https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...

"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#397

Post by wumpus »

tmikaeld wrote: post #393
wumpus wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced.

Do you only use electricity only some hours a day? No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to. And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.

Well, speaking for myself, I do use different amounts of electricity during the day. As does everyone in my region. And your region, probably.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#398

Post by nootropicat »

sgift wrote: post #382
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air. The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear…

> and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. Afte…

>It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat.

Wow. Idiocracy vibes.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#399

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

hilios wrote: post #230
BenoitP wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Germany's wind was done without a thought about how to implement storage; it did not have to; it was a perfect egotistic game-theoretic play: The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else. What happens at the moment is France's nuclear reduces production when Germany's wind is over-producing; there is no energy storage at all. So right now, on top of wind use…

While yes, Germany profits from the European grid to offset some of its over or under production, it doesn't really affect Germany's or France's nuclear energy production. As you can see even at time when wind provides more than half of Germany's total energy production, the red nuclear bar remains nearly unchanged. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c... If you check France's energy productio…

My understanding is that nuclear doesn’t do variability very well

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#400

Post by Krasnol »

GravitasFailure wrote: post #199
Krasnol wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is only 12% of the whole mix in Germany.

In 2020 Germany exported 18TWh of energy and produced about 61TWh of nuclear. How much renewable capacity has been added in the past year and how much capacity is being taken off line?

How much can you narrow it down to derail the topic even more?

Yes, they didn't do much last year. This is because the last Government didn't care or rather even sabotaged the Energiewende but last year wasn't representative for the whole programme. Also, the new Government will push where the last one slept. Everybody who's even remotely interested in Germany knows that. Didn't you?

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