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

You may believe that copy pasting sources that have been given to you by a sicophantic chatbot and that you didn't read makes you look smarter.

But this is also wrong.

I was a bit confused about the Mitterand gov't claim, that seems to be a Hollande gov't thing from 2014. In particular after 2011 (with Fukushima on the minds of Europeans... not to debate how much those concerns made sense), and part of policy alignments with the socialist party and the greens

Found this 2023 article with Hollande not feeling the need to apologize for this policy[0]. I would like to point out that here Hollande at least points out the following:

- at the time polling showed 65-80% of people wanting an off-ramp

- this was kinda premised on the idea of leaning into renewables, which feels fine. If you can build a wind farm or solar in some spots might as well! There's not much morally wrong with the tech

There's definitely an argument to saying that its the responsibility of politicians and gov'ts to convince people to make the right decisions, but if 80% of people are like "we want to move our electricity grid to rely more on renewables" it's hard to argue to _not_ do it. And 50% is still 50%!

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

This is the thing I'm not quite sure about. Like Fessenheim (which, IIRC, was the oldest) ended up working for 40+ years. Now... I'm not sure but if this plant was the oldest, then France was decomissioning older plants right? So either all of these politicians are being too "scared" to run the plant for 80 years.... or the lifetime of these plants really are less than 50 years.

I don't know how much of the reduction of nuclear share played a role in everything. We're talking about Hollande, a one-term president, establishing this in the wake of Fukushima. It wasn't the state of things in 2010, right?

I do get the argument of "don't lose the muscle memory" for cost control cases alone. I don't think that "build some renewables because wind is also quite nice when you can use it" is an unreasonable ask either (don't need water to cool wind turbines!).

I do appreciate the color on EPR though. I knew EPR was a bit of a mess but I get what you're saying about building 14 of the same thing vs just one of em.

[0]: https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/aucune-raison-de-faire-u...

To be clear, I'm in favor of nuclear, but people attack it saying it does change the local ecosystem (heating up water for cooling and pumping the warm water into rivers, and of course the nuclear waste).

Here we just had someone say that hydro is fine because it only changes the local ecosystem so I jumped on that line of reasoning. I would argue with you that nuclear changes the local ecosystem way, way less than a dam does and so it's even better.

You're not going to read them, so why bother since you live in a parallel universe. But if you wanted, you could ask your chatbot so you don't have to put the efforts to read anything.

HVDC (and even the grid in general) doesn't transmit all that much power. The largest currently existing line - Changji-Guquan UHVDC link in China - transmits 12GW. It's significantly more than what an average long-range link of current grids transmits, yes. But is it a lot?

Looking from consumption side, my home city of ~1 million people has several coal-fired plants, producing 1.5 GW of electricity and about 5GW of heating. Plus an hydropower station producing 6 GW. Most of that is consumed by an aluminium plant, but nonetheless, it's also part of the city. So that's roughly 12GW on a cold winter day (I suppose we do want to make heating cleaner as well), and probably 6 GW in summer. Heat pumps could be used to reduce power consumed by heating, but even the air-source pumps are not cheap, and they don't provide much efficiency gain in the cold. Ground-source pumps are extremely expensive and reqiure heat replenishment or the ground will freeze - such is the balance here.

So, the world's largest link to power just one city, out of tens of them. It quickly gets prohibitively expensive.

The only realictic answer, it seems, is annual-scale storage. I hope that "dirt pile storage" works well enough and succeeds, batteries are just too expensive and material hungry, hydrogen is problematic to store well either and we don't seem to have good enough scalable direct carbon capture to synthesize methane or propane.