Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get a drought and you have to shut them down, ask France. "Base load" is just some nonsense from nuclear fans to get the cost per GWh down.
Base load is an industry term coined by the very engineers who make the grid work. But I'm sure a random poster on an Internet forum knows more than the engineers who actually do the work. PS France has the cleanest grid in Europe
Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
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Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#392I 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.
It's not (mostly) to salve their consciences; it's fundamental to their avoidance of the Resource Curse/"Dutch Disease". Norway, unlike just about everywhere else "blessed" (and I use those scare-quotes intentionally) with oil and gas, anticipated the value of not getting high on one's own supply: they have some of the most heavily taxed vehicle fuel in Europe, as well as strict limits on how much oil/gas tax revenue…
Funny story is that a very important reason why Norway ended up with the oil policies it did is a Iraq-born immigrant named Farouk Al-Kasim.
He was a geologist with a Norwegian wife, moving to Norwegy since their kid had cerebral palsy. In a testament to how desperate Norway was for competence in petroleum, he could pretty much just walk in to the ministry of industry and get a job, and ended up writing the nation’s blueprint for how it would organise its fledgling oil industry. Without him things could have gone very very different, and he has been awarded Royal Norwegian Order of Saint Olav Knight 1st Class for his importance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farouk_Al-Kasim
https://web.archive.org/web/20100123225932/http://www.ft.com...
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#393tbh times like this, thinking about only renewables is totally stupidity. Look at what germany did to it's economy stupid fellas.
Germany: electricity 56% renewables, 4% GDP growth since 2021Q1, 6.4% unemployment
Denmark: electricity 92% renewables, 14% GDP growth since 2021Q1, 2.7% unemployment
I don't think renewables are what's wrong with Germany, more likely it's a) their lack of infrastructure investment and maintenance in the past decade-an-a-half, b) their excessive coddling of established and well-connected businesses.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.
No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish. Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts
Problem isn't nuclear cooling per se. It's the designs of these nuclear reactors which expected to work with mild European weather. India and China have nuclear reactors working in desert without any cooling issues. Of course, as most of EU and west atrophied in building nuclear reactors in general, building new reactors or modifications won't be economical.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#395Earlier 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.
Sure, but the problem with coal and oil is not their chemical composition, per se. The problem with specifically fossil coal and oil is that the carbon atoms used to be buried deep underground and end up as part of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. Making synthetic kerosene for jet engines is one of the top contenders for long-distance air travel in a post-fossil fuel world, IMO.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix. In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets. In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumpt…
Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered.
"distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be.
Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Build times and costs of long-distance HVDC is comparable to build times and costs of nuclear power plants. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-starts-construc...
Comparable to the build times an costs of badly run FOAK nuclear power plant construction projects.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#398> 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…
A jolly pie-in-the-sky one is to dam the red sea which could produce 50 GW. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Dam)
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For renewables the only harm that comes are for the people who has chosen to work in the industry. We are definitively not including hydro power and their dam projects in that category.
On a whole hydro has saved lives due to managing rivers which previously caused devastating floods. The reason a ton of dams exists is not to make power, it is manage the river. Making power is a secondary concern. But when we’re done with climate change we should of course restore as many rivers as possible due to the ecosystem damage they cause.
On the whole, nuclear power has saved many more lives, over 1.8 million up to 2011.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/kh05000e.html
And the worst power-production disaster in history so far was neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl, but the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And it's not even close.
Re: Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
#400Where's nuclear? How is solar more renewable than nuclear?
Nuclear burns uranium which doesn't renew much. Although there isn't really a shortage either.
The sun of course will run out one day but people don't really plan that far out.