Earlier quoted context omitted.
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If the US did the attack wouldn't it be on the US?
Yes. First that, now Greenland. But brrrr, Putin/Gadaffi/Sadam/Khomeni/Kim bad... (they never attacked Europe like this)
In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
521–530 of 809 posts
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Resistive heating is indeed almost 100% efficient, but combustion is only about 90% efficient and that's using modern technology to scrape almost everything we can, which has a cost in terms of the product upfront cost and maintenance. The reason it's not much higher is that we must vent the exhaust gases. If you were OK with the burned gas vapours in your home you could get close to 100%, but they're poisonous and s…
Anywhere you use resistive heating you're better off with a heatpump which is far more efficient than that.
This is not true in all circumstances.
Where you need process heat for industrial applications, you’re almost always better off with resistive heat or fossil fuels, typically gas.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want. I pay low energy prices during night than day, that's normal, but I'm still not gonna do laundry at 9 pm, I'd rather pay the 10/20 cents more during the day.
A typical dishwasher load requires 1-3kWh, so you'll just use your home battery and do it whenever you want.
a lot of that energy could have been recuperated with a heat exchanger when the water is refreshed, also in laundry machines.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're in Europe and they produce a lot of batteries. The caveat is that 80% of the investment money came from LG, a South Korean company. https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/europe-has-solid-basis-batt...
There’s the former darling Northvolt. Took a lot of state money and then imploded https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/ev-battery-...
The comments on Reddit from folks who claim to have worked for Northvolt are pretty wild. I would take them with a grain of salt, but they're interesting to read. https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/1fl8d4y/c...
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better…
Resistive heating is indeed almost 100% efficient, but combustion is only about 90% efficient and that's using modern technology to scrape almost everything we can, which has a cost in terms of the product upfront cost and maintenance. The reason it's not much higher is that we must vent the exhaust gases. If you were OK with the burned gas vapours in your home you could get close to 100%, but they're poisonous and s…
> But few cared
Few cared that electricity price increases out passed general inflation.
I don’t think so.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating.
Yeah, in combined cycle plants you burn the natural gas first in a gas turbine first, use the waste heat from that to boil water and run steam turbine. Then condense the steam using your district heating circuit. You can say this is 100% efficient as you make some electricity and the rest does house heating.
100% efficient assuming a perfectly spherical combined cycle gas turbine with district heating circuit operating in a vacuum.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Canada already has lots of nuclear: https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent... The efficiency of solar does not matter in 2026. Panels are so cheap that just you don't have to think about it if you have abundant land. If solar is 4x less productive in the winter you just build 4x as many panels. Panels have to be angled more vertical the further north you go so the snow will just slide off. They…
Everything has tradeoffs - those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create, and getting both of those requires pollution, primarily in China where they have lower standards than western nations. So filling Canada with panels because they're cheap isn't likely the best environmental choice, on net. Though I admit I haven't done the math here, it's just an intuition that "just build 4x panels" isn…
Your intuition is flat out wrong. Building new nuclear takes too long. "Just fix the nuclear regulations" is a vibes-based statement. Even China built 100x as much solar as nuclear in 2025. Wouldn't they "lower standards" to build more nuclear if it made any economic sense?
As for
> those panels themselves take energy and rare earth minerals to create
You've swallowed Big Oil propaganda and are choosing to parrot it without thinking. The actual truth?
"Every year, [ICE vehicles] consume over 17 times more tons of oil (2,150 million tons per year) than the amount of battery minerals we’d need to extract just once to run transportation forever. Even when including the weight of other raw materials in ore and brine, one-off mineral demand would still end up over 30% lighter than annual oil extraction for road transport. And unlike minerals, oil products are promptly burned in internal combustion engines and must be replaced each year, forever
Admittedly this is about minerals for batteries. But solar panels are also recyclable.
Source: https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_b...
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how that works. Your breakers are sized to support your panel size. If you have 10kW panels that can push 10kW onto the grid when the grid is live, they can push 10kW when the grid is down. The limiting factor is the power your panels produce which in this case is also...10kW. You're probably right about linemen but there are a lot of other reasons not to feed power onto a dead grid.
Your main breaker isn't the only one. Your inverters have protection of some sort as well.
Yes, all of which is by definition specced high enough to handle the maximum amount of power your panels are able to produce.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response. Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose. It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obvio…
This is just a conspiracy theory of mine, but how credible is the notion that in Germany, the Greens who campaigned (successfully) for nuclear shutdown were in fact funded by Russia?
Whether true or not, it is almost entirely Greenpeace, and your local Greens party, who are to blame for us being in this mess.
Without them raising panic about nuclear we could all be paying something closer to $40 - $80 a month for all the electricity we could reasonably consume, much like mobile phone plans / prepaid service.
That would still leave transport and agriculture emissions to deal with, but they’d be easier to solve if we had virtually unlimited process heat to generate hydrogen > synth fuels.
Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intermittence really has always had the flavor of an engineering problem instead of a physics problem (it is about putting the energy when/where humans want it, rather than having enough of it). IMO load shifting seems like a cleverer and more engineer-y solution. Imagine a giant smart system where all of our appliances talk to each-other and can optimize the timings of their workloads. It’s a magnificent society-wid…
In engineering the simple solution is often the best solution. Creating a demand-side network of devices is not that. Plus, such a system would provide even more ways for nefarious actors to sabotage the grid, by influencing the demand side. For example, setting every appliance to run its load at the same time. The grid would be fucked.
I don't disagree with your broad comment but it's not hard to fix by slightly dispersing the control/responsibility.
1. Electricity moves for 5/10 min clearing intervals with defined caps at either end (currently in Western Australia it's simply 2 intervals, peak & off-peak). 2. Expose the pricing/market data via API 3. Develop existing home automation frameworks/tools/device IOTs/routers to access that. 4. End user grants permission/configures it on their smart phone when they set their dishwasher and washing machine on set up ("would you like to enable this smart-go button by connecting to Wi-Fi? It could save you $150 per year").
No control ceded to third parties to turn on equipment whenever they want, just allows the end user to cue jobs for when the PowerCo anticipates lowest prices.
PowerCo not any more of a honeypot for attack, at least not more than they are now with control over critical generation/tx/dx infra.