Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

the-independent.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 512 posts

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

#431

Post by ahhhhnoooo »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #17
ahhhhnoooo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then solar and wind aren't technically renewable either, because the sun is going to eventually consume the earth and explode. Geothermal is renewable.

However much solar or wind energy we use, the Sun will last exactly as long. This is not a matter of scale. Even if we were to build a photovoltaic Dyson sphere around the Sun, it would have the same lifespan. That is not the case for geothermal. It could in theory be cooled down if exploited at a massive scale. Saying geothermal is not renewable is not an indictment nor a criticism. Geothermal is great and we should…

I guess there's a point where that's arguably true. But it's not correct universally, and it's certainly not true if you look at earth and the sun.

The heat generated within the earth comes from nuclear decay and the energy radiates out from the planet. It would do that no matter what. Humans can tap into it and it would have the same lifespan.

If humans somehow started extracting the heat leftover from the planets formation, then yeah, that is exhaustible. There's about 100,000,000,000 times our total annual energy (not electricity) use in there. Planet only has 5 billion years left, and only about 1 billion livable years.

That time gets considerably shorter if we start pumping that energy to the surface, because we cook the surface with the waste heat.

So even assuming it was technologically possible to access the heat there, you could not draw enough to exhaust it in the time frame you have remaining to do so without killing the biosphere.

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

#432

Post by grey-area »

belorn wrote: post #251
jdlshore wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Lets put down some Swedish numbers. During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home…

Scotland at a similar latitude to the populated parts of Sweden has hit 100% renewables generation in the past and will do so again.

Renewables are not just solar and hydro storage is also suitable.

You are also ignoring that improving housing stock with good insulation is a much better answer to excessive energy use in winter than attempting to find more supply in winter.

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

#433

Post by weezing »

phtrivier wrote: post #27

> 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…

>So, the lessons for all other countries in the world is pretty clear: grow yourselves some mountains, dig yourselves a big river, and dam, baby, dam !!

And have basically no meaningful industry and small population.

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

#434

Post by DrScientist »

mpweiher wrote: post #425
DrScientist wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 suggesti…

> grid infrastructure that has reach across timezones, "Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across. Never mind "winter". > nuclear powerstations are not as reliable as you might think - they often go offline. Define "often". They are actually a lot more reliably than you seem to think: the capacity factor of the US fleet, for example, was >90% for the last decade(s). And that Nuclear po…

> Night" reaches across more time-zones than you can build your grid across. > Never mind "winter".

Demand isn't at an even level across the night ( high early evening, low 3 am ) - if your grid spans time-zones you can smooth that out, and renewables span more than solar. Wind doesn't stop at night, hydro doesn't stop at night etc.

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

Maybe it's a UK thing with nuclear reactors operating beyond their initial design life - but there was a situtation last year where the majority of them were down at the same time and the UK had to make high use of our interconnect with france ( using their nuclear capacity ). In the UK the 2025 nuclear output was 12% down on the previous year due to outages.

The point here is that a grid that expands beyond national boundaries - helps in general, not just specifically for renewables. And before you go on about energy sovereignty - where do you think the Uranium comes from?

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

#435

Post by don_esteban »

renaudg wrote: post #244
jdlshore wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier.

The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x.

Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation.

Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.

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

#436

Post by graemep »

donkyrf wrote: post #428
graemep wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct its only one but its gone from zero in 2010 to about half of what hydro produces now, and the proportion from renewables has gone down quite considerably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sri_Lank...

It is bizarre that you are citing a project that was planned in the 90s, broke ground in 2006 and ended in 2015 as a recent development.

I did not use the word recently, and what matters here are long term trends.

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

#437

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

mpweiher wrote: post #417
kalleboo wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nice thing is Sweden has lots of hydro, which works as natural long-term energy storage. Every bit of solar you generate means water is kept in the dam for use later in the year. You also can't ignore wind power which should be part of any plan to "overbuild".

So why are the Swedes investing heavily in nuclear energy again, after nixing the nuclear exit they had on the books?

Sweden isn't investing in nuclear power. The current right wing government is creating a culture war issue while not wanting to accept the costs, nor creating a deal that will survive through elections by creating a more comprehensive coalition backing it.

They've moved "We'll start building this electory cycle!!" to "large scale reactors" to "SMRs!!" to now targetting the final investment decision in 2029.

The latest step in the saga is the state owned power company refusing to get their credit rating tarnished by being too involved in the nuclear project. The latest move is them owning 20%, the industry owning 20% and the government owning 60%.

The industry still haven't comitted to their 20% due to the absolutely stupid costs involved.

With the government as a first negotiation move stepping in with a direct handout of €3B. On top of credit and construction guarantees, a CFD and adjusting it all depending on how costly the build is to guarantee a profit.

But it is quite easy to understand why. Taking what one of the nuclear reactors earns in Sweden and then applying solely the interest from a new build leads to a loss of ~€1.5B per year. Then you also need to run, fuel and maintain the plant.

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

#438

Post by arbitrary_name »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #242
jdlshore wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear. Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and Jan…

why are you ignoring wind power in this argument thread?

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

#439

Post by colechristensen »

XorNot wrote: post #261
colechristensen wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about pumped hydro.

The you're talking about a geographical limited, extremely finite resource with a substantial ecological footprint.

Yes... countries with extensive existing hydro using less of it by displacing it with solar, ultimately enabling the dismantling of some of the dams.

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

#440

Post by wat10000 »

pfdietz wrote: post #427
wat10000 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We definitely should look at the entire supply chain for all of them, assuming the goal is maximum benefit for minimum suffering.

> maximum benefit If we do that, we need to assign a value to a statistical human life. This is usually taken to be something like $12M (adjusted for age). And having done that, we discover the contribution of lost lives to the cost of solar and wind (and nuclear, without accidents) is lost in the noise. So the problem ends up choosing the source that is directly cheaper; differences in deaths per TWh can be ignored.

I’m assuming you mean when choosing between solar/wind/nuclear? I don’t imagine all others are so benign.
Post reply on HN