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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)

#401

Post by leonidasrup »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #382
leonidasrup wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power plants can and do load follow. 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'…

Meanwhile to achieve load following in France they sync the fuel cycles of the entire fleet and then let the plants take turns across the week. You have it the other way around. The marginal price for renewables are zero so consumers buy that first. Which means nuclear power, like the coal plant I linked, is forced to load follow. Which craters their earning potential. Nuclear power is literally the worst combination…

If you are now (in the year 2026) optimizing only for costs of producing electricity then you end with electric grid which has more or less structure of Chinese electric grid - big chunk produced with domestic fueled base-load fossil fuel power plants+nuclear power plants, as much hydro as you can build, little bit variable renewables.

If for example Germany would optimize for costs of producing electricity then they would not shut down already build and running nuclear power plants, would not import LNG, would use much more domestic coal.

If you care for CO2 emissions (which is not the case in China) then the problem of electric grid is much more complicated.

Germany is a nice example of electric grid with significant amount of variable renewable penetration (lot of solar and wind, small amount of hydropower). First they decided to phase-out nuclear power and ban construction of nuclear power plants (beginning in 2000), then they decided to replace domestic coal production with imported fossil fuels and then decide to decarbonize grid (until 2045), which is now much more expensive because nuclear phase-out.

In contrast France has already decarbonized the electric grid.

The economic situation EDF is bad because decade long taxation of EDF, the ARENH mechanism.

Under the so-called Regulated Access to Incumbent Nuclear Electricity (Accès Régulé à l’Electricité Nucléaire Historique, ARENH) mechanism set up to foster competition, rival energy suppliers could buy electricity produced by EDF's nuclear power plants located in France that were commissioned before 8 December 2010. Under such contracts, between July 2011 and December 2025, suppliers could buy up to 100 TWh - or about 25% of EDF's annual nuclear output - at a fixed price of EUR42 per MWh.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Agreement-on-pos...

https://www.8advisory.com/en/2026/03/31/nuclear-power-naviga...

So no France didn't actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, it was shielding renewable competition from its aging nuclear fleet.

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

#402

Post by tialaramex »

hunterpayne wrote: post #305
peterashford wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NZ we're discussing pumped hydro in Lake Onslow which will provides months of backup for the country

Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a…

It's nowhere close to 50%. Round-trip (so that's after both ways) efficiency is about 70-80% for a pumped storage scheme. Buy 10MW to pump the water, and get back 7-8MW when you release it. Contrast that with a reality here in the UK where the gas dominated spot price this morning when I woke up was about £180 per MWh, yet yesterday afternoon solar and wind had it down to £25 per MWh, so you could buy 100MWh of energy for £2500 but sell it less than a day later and make 400% on your investment in under 24 hours despite the efficiency loss. Very silly to insist this can't be profitable.

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

#403

Post by stavros »

hunterpayne wrote: post #309
grumbelbart wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But electricity is under half (30%?40%?) and the rest of that energy isn't fossil-free. The trick of course is that if you electrify heating and transportation they'll need much less energy. Your average car with an ICE has an efficiency of 20-40%, electric cars have 60-80%. Heating your house with gas has an efficiency of around 100%, heat pumps have 300%-500%.

Not sure where you get your numbers but they are way off. Natural gas is 90% (nothing is 100%). Heat pumps are geothermal masquerading as electric. And the highest number I ever heard for a heat pump was 135% which was under nearly ideal circumstances. In Finland, heat pumps can't make nearly enough heat to handle a winter there so you need something else too or instead of. Truth is that electricity is great for kine…

Are you saying that, for a given amount of electricity, you can only convert 10% to heat? I can't even think of a way to make this correct, since all forms of energy end up as 100% heat, the question is just whether the heat ends up in your home or not.

So, what do you mean with the 10% metric?

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

#404

Post by Thlom »

tyfon wrote: post #50
jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And have either a small population or a very low per-person energy budget. But: 7 isn't the number that matters, what matters is that next year it will be 8 or 9. That would be worth documenting.

There are a few countries just below as well like Norway with about 98% renewables in 2024 [1]. The gas power plant is mostly up north powering the gas compressors that fill LNG ships headed for Europe and the coal I think is for Svalbard but that mine/plant closed in 2025 [2]. [1] https://www.nve.no/energi/energisystem/energibruk/stroemdekl... [2] https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/norges-siste-kullgruve-pa...

Norwegian electricity prodcution in February this year was 98,8% hydro and wind and 1,1% thermal (mainly gas). I guess the last 0,1% might be the diesel powered generator on Svalbard (the coal one was turned off 3 years ago).

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

#405

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

runako wrote: post #290
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California: 83% renewable, dominated by solar California's grid is pretty decently balanced. Solar isn't even close to 50% - so saying that it "dominates" is pretty misleading. It's like ~30% solar, ~12% hydro, ~10% wind, ~10% nuclear, all other renewables ~8% (~70% renewable, including nuclear) -> ~30% fossil fuels. Are you maybe only counting domestic production and not total consumption? Or are you looking at th…

EIA puts this out daily: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/daily_... Today was 31% solar, 16% wind, 16% hydro, 6% geothermal, etc. Some of the difference to your numbers will be seasonal/weather-related, but the pace of solar and wind installation is such that data that's even a year or two old can be wildly out of date.

Yes, but the whole point is daily metrics fluctuate a large amount per day, so I'm more interested in yearly metrics

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

#406

Post by mpweiher »

rtpg wrote: post #296
cyjackx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all. If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.

Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.

Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.

They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.

With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?

They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.

https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear...

So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.

Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.

But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.

Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s

And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.

So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.

Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.

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

#407

Post by DrScientist »

mpweiher wrote: post #396
DrScientist wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Inter…

> because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation

It does it if your interconnects make the grid scale large enough, and it does if you consider distributed generation and storage as part of the overall system.

Sure if you take a grid designed for centralised on-demand generation, and apply that to renewable generation then you'll have problems. However I'm not suggesting that.

I'm also not suggesting something that has no emergency on-demand generation capacity.

> they massively reduce resilience.

I'm not talking about renewables alone - but in tandem with a grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, multiple layers of distributed generation and storage.

Note nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline.

https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuse...

But just to be clear - I think there needs to be a mix - and part of that mix is grid capability improvements.

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

#408

Post by red-iron-pine »

leonidasrup wrote: post #361
jcattle wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For countries that can reliably get to 99% hydro, save for some exceptional droughts, "build nuclear" is about the worst advice you can give them.

Building dams is not without environmental costs especially in water stressed regions. Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has long been a source of tension between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt. https://www.dw.com/en/gerd-grand-ethiopian-renaissance-dam-s... Motuo Hydropower Station - will overtake the Three Gorges dam as the world's largest. The project has attracted criticism for its potential impact on millions of Indian…

"a source of tension" is a understatement. might have have caused a war, and still could.

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

#409

Post by mpweiher »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #206
littlestymaar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal. The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.

”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”. You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices. Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered. Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh

HPC is 2 EPR reactors. At their design CF they will produce 25 TWh per year. Over the expected operating life of 80 years that will be 2000 TWh.

At the $400/MWh you are postulating, that would be €800 billion of income.

Although I am sure the operators wouldn't mind (15% ROI per year over 80 years is...nice) I am going to go with "your numbers are BS".

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

#410

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

leonidasrup wrote: post #401
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile to achieve load following in France they sync the fuel cycles of the entire fleet and then let the plants take turns across the week. You have it the other way around. The marginal price for renewables are zero so consumers buy that first. Which means nuclear power, like the coal plant I linked, is forced to load follow. Which craters their earning potential. Nuclear power is literally the worst combination…

If you are now (in the year 2026) optimizing only for costs of producing electricity then you end with electric grid which has more or less structure of Chinese electric grid - big chunk produced with domestic fueled base-load fossil fuel power plants+nuclear power plants, as much hydro as you can build, little bit variable renewables. If for example Germany would optimize for costs of producing electricity then they…

I love the framing. "Little bit of renewables" when in China they are literally 5x in size of the nuclear production. Nuclear power in China peaked at 4.7% in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. Entirely irrelevant.

The problem I am mentioning has nothing to do with ARENH, and the protectionism isn't the ARENH. It is not building more renewables and dragging their feet on interconnects.

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