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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

#41

Post by sigmar »

defrost wrote: post #23
deburo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what cost?

At the cost of building enough solar and wind farms to supply the nation I would guess, with additional costs to upgrade the distribution infrastructure for smarter load balancing, etc. It's quite possible Portugal has put out a white paper on their transition toward renewable energy that you can find with some hunting about. Wikipedia has a rough overview that'll provide some points to drill down further into if you…

Is this the paper you're referencing or something else? "long-term strategy for carbon neutrality of the portuguese economy by 2050" [pdf, english] https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/RNC2050_EN_P...

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

#42

Post by voisin »

alexnewman wrote: post #39
simonhorlick wrote: post #26

Note that since about 2021 renewables have overtaken fossil-based sources of energy on price. New installations of utility scale wind and solar PV are now cheaper than their alternatives. Not to mention protection from price fluctuations in the cost of fuels needed to power fossil fuel plants.

Alas only at 0% interest rates. When you factor in 5% rates they are below again

Source for this? I would think inflation in construction and maintenance costs for traditional generation would still keep it more expensive.

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

#43

Post by Rebelgecko »

deburo wrote: post #13
defrost wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - the plants are on standby, not consuming much beyond a "pilot light" worth of natural gas and not putting energy into the national grid. This is quite different to coal fired power generation which doesn't have low energy standby mode with rapid online to full generation ramping up in the manner of gas fired turbines. During the six day period the national grid was supplied only with energy from renewable sourc…

At what cost?

Around 9 eurocents per kWh

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

#44

Post by malfist »

kuchenbecker wrote: post #36
helloooooooo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they regulate fluctuations in demand? Nuclear can’t do that. You need storage, or a reasonably scalable generation medium. Nuclear as a base load is moot

Control rods modulate the output.

Not quickly

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

#45

Post by pmoleri »

simonhorlick wrote: post #28
pmoleri wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tidal, waves, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass. Many options to choose from, it just takes political will.

Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu: > Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 100…

I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.

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

#46

Post by Cyphase »

simonhorlick wrote: post #28
pmoleri wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tidal, waves, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass. Many options to choose from, it just takes political will.

Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu: > Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 100…

Source: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/zjl/pdf/tide1.pdf

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

#47

Post by cranky908canuck »

antuneza wrote: post #2

If you need the gas plants ready to dispatch at any moment, can you still say you are running on 100% renewables?

"If you need..." misses the point.

The point of the article was that there is sufficient renewable capacity that the standby wasn't needed, for six days. So that's a milestone of some sort. Or, if not a milestone, then at least a checkpoint that shows that seven, eight, ten, or twenty days is only a matter of continuing to scale up.

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

#48

Post by marcusverus »

huytersd wrote: post #5
antuneza wrote: post #2

If you need the gas plants ready to dispatch at any moment, can you still say you are running on 100% renewables?

Yes? If you’re not burning gas, there’s no issue.

The issue is that renewables require extensive, expensive redundancies which are misleadingly excluded from the ubiquitous “renewables are cheaper” studies.

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

#49

Post by defrost »

sigmar wrote: post #41
defrost wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the cost of building enough solar and wind farms to supply the nation I would guess, with additional costs to upgrade the distribution infrastructure for smarter load balancing, etc. It's quite possible Portugal has put out a white paper on their transition toward renewable energy that you can find with some hunting about. Wikipedia has a rough overview that'll provide some points to drill down further into if you…

Is this the paper you're referencing or something else? "long-term strategy for carbon neutrality of the portuguese economy by 2050" [pdf, english] https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/RNC2050_EN_P...

At a glance it looks like a paper worth reading so yes, that's the kind of paper I'd chase down (and still look for others).

Most countries have policy and costing papers, most companies file technical reports with stock exchanges, fossil fuel companies such as BHP have fat technical reports on the energy demands that they meet and project - these are all sources for hard data that can be compared (after normalising for apples V oranges).

The US is a mixed bag - Federal infomation is free and transparent, digging into details can get harder. The UK has a good civil service that puts out a lot of infomation on things that affect policy - from crime to consumption to energy use.

My comment was intended to encourage the user asking "at what cost" to form a better question and pursue their own answers.

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

#50

Post by EmmaEngineer »

simonhorlick wrote: post #28
pmoleri wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tidal, waves, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass. Many options to choose from, it just takes political will.

Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu: > Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 100…

Solution: in summer we pump the tides higher with PV, and in winter we draw them down.
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