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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)

#451

Post by pfdietz »

littlestymaar wrote: post #444
pfdietz wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the sole victim of the Fukushima nuclear accident This is a misrepresentation. There is a single person who the courts have established was (to their satisfaction) killed by nuclear exposure from Fukushima, although even that is quite debatable. But that doesn't mean there weren't any victims, just that they could not (or could not yet) be identified. The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be l…

> The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored In comparison to the 19000 persons who died directly from the Tsunami? Yes it can be neglected. That's two orders of magnitude smaller! > Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regula…

What nonsense. Of course we cannot ignore the 200 estimated deaths from radiation, just because people die from other reasons. You might make a cogent case that the value of 200 lives isn't all that great compared to the benefits of nuclear, but whether 19,000 people died in a tsunami is irrelevant to that argument.

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

#452

Post by pfdietz »

wat10000 wrote: post #440
pfdietz wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, the deaths from (say) coal are much higher and would contribute significantly to cost.

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

#453

Post by littlestymaar »

pfdietz wrote: post #450
littlestymaar wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is irrelevant when you need most of your electricity in a season when there's barely any sun. Most of the European population leave on places that are more northern then Montreal, we have less than 8 hours of daylight per day, and a significant fraction of it is cloudy. There's no storage solution that can store the excess summer solar exposure (when we get more than 16hours on sun per day) to reinject it into…

Even taking into account intermittency and seasonality, nuclear would have a very hard time surviving in a $0.01/kWh PV world.

Again, price is irrelevant if there's no electricity available at all when you need it.

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

#455

Post by tracker1 »

harrouet wrote: post #337
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…

100% Writing such an article without mentioning nuclear power is a sign of dishonesty. Wind and solar can't live alone, since they only operate when nature wants it. Perfect match for hydro, but we don't all live in the Hymalaya. Most (e.g. Germany) burn gas and coal to supplement. Nuclear is the only tech suited for decarbonation, and once you have it, you don't need solar and power because 95% of the cost is in the…

I'm with you... beyond that, there's a lot of other costs involved with solar and in particular wind. Least of which is disposal/recycling on top of the materials and transport for assembly. I think that especially in areas that don't have extreme storms or earthquakes, that nuclear is the most sane answer for electricity generation.

I think another pressing issue would be a resurgence of natural airflow usage from underground exchanges instead of relying solely on air conditioning.

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

#456

Post by pfdietz »

littlestymaar wrote: post #453
pfdietz wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even taking into account intermittency and seasonality, nuclear would have a very hard time surviving in a $0.01/kWh PV world.

Again, price is irrelevant if there's no electricity available at all when you need it.

The implication that the energy couldn't be available when you need it is utter codswallop.

At $0.01/kWh, PV electricity, if converted to resistive heat, would be below the cost of Henry Hub natural gas heat. And this heat would be very storable in artificial geothermal at maybe 600 C, where it would lose Would this have low round trip efficiency if converted back to electricity? Sure. But if the PV electricity is that cheap, so what?

When levelized cost is low enough, there's plenty of room for engineering to work around intermittency and seasonality.

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

#457

Post by Dylan16807 »

mrroper wrote: post #329
Dylan16807 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really big and generic article. What are you saying this loan guarantee cost?

Comparing two numbers because you have them is like looking for your keys at the nearest lamp post because there's light.

I'm not focused on some random attribute. The cost of this specific plant was a big part of this conversation, so I'm asking what number I'm supposed to use for it.

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

#458

Post by mrroper »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #457
mrroper wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing two numbers because you have them is like looking for your keys at the nearest lamp post because there's light.

I'm not focused on some random attribute. The cost of this specific plant was a big part of this conversation, so I'm asking what number I'm supposed to use for it.

I did not make the claim that Georgia and California are comparable energy markets. The cost of that one subsidy is between 1 and 4 billion. The Federal government's handling of the two states is entirely different and the states themselves have entirely different priorities so the cost of something government manipulates heavily is not about production costs from when projects started and certainly not about production costs if new projects started today.

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

#459

Post by QuercusMax »

hparadiz wrote: post #199
mpweiher wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most expensive electricity in the contiguous United States. By quite a margin. By contrast, Georgia, which has to pay for the "disastrous" Vogtle 3/4 nuclear construction project, pays less than half that. Remember: disastrous nuclear projects are significantly better than renewable successes.

That's part of why the shift to renewables. I have a 12kw system on my roof and I pay $220 in December and get $150 back in July. The economics are getting interesting cause now you can get a 2kw hr battery for like $350 and plugin 400 watts of panel into it and run at least a laptop and basics peripherals forever so the draw on the grid is gonna diffuse over time.

For peace of mind I'd like to be able to run my EV (24kwh battery) and spare fridge / freezer off home solar. Anything more than that is gravy, and I'd rather invest in things like Oregon Community Solar.

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

#460

Post by littlestymaar »

pfdietz wrote: post #451
littlestymaar wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The estimated ~200 cancer deaths from Fukushima will mostly be lost in a sea of cancers from other causes. This doesn't mean they can be, or should be, ignored In comparison to the 19000 persons who died directly from the Tsunami? Yes it can be neglected. That's two orders of magnitude smaller! > Regulation is not like criminal law; one does not have to prove a technology is guilty beyond reasonable doubt to regula…

What nonsense. Of course we cannot ignore the 200 estimated deaths from radiation, just because people die from other reasons. You might make a cogent case that the value of 200 lives isn't all that great compared to the benefits of nuclear, but whether 19,000 people died in a tsunami is irrelevant to that argument.

Of course it is relevant: the “nuclear accident” was caused by the tsunami in the first place!

It has never been a nuclear accident to begin with, it was just a negligible (Also nobody died from radiations. The additional cancer is caused by contamination, which is an entirely different health hazard for all intent and purpose.

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