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

In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

e360.yale.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 809 posts

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#621

Post by lambdaone »

buckle8017 wrote: post #380
softwaredoug wrote: post #288

It used to be the big worry among climate activists that you'd never get every country organize and move in one direction. Like you'd need some global body to clean everything up. That's very fragile. Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air,…

Oil the west doesn't use isn't magically staying in the ground. Middle and low income countries (most notably China) increased consumption is more than offsetting reductions from high income countries.

Although it looks like bad news in the short term, China is building even more renewables than they are coal stations, with the result that the fraction of fossil power consumption in China is actually decreasing: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#622

Post by PunchyHamster »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #581
neilwilson wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most sensible solution is synthesised natural gas. Then we can use the existing LNG storage and plant. It’s a lot easier to store and transport than hydrogen and the capital items already exist. Curtailment fees should be replaced with purchases of green LNG.

The problem with that is how dispersed carbon atoms are in the atmosphere. Another option is ammonia, which is quite nasty to deal with.

We can start with non-dispersed carbon atoms coming off industrial processes. Green hydrogen and CO2 into methane

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#623

Post by PunchyHamster »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #482
IshKebab wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with solar isn't the night. Getting enough batteries to cover that is totally doable. The issue is the winter. And not even because of fewer daylight hours - on sunny winter days there is usually still a good amount of solar. The problem is its often very cloudy in the winter. In the UK in winter we regularly have periods of 5 cloudy days in a row where solar output is virtually zero. I don't know what th…

Keep some of the existing natural gas plants around as an emergency reserve. Run them on hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives for zero carbon fuel, if the emissions are large enough to matter.

that costs a lot of money

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#624

Post by Borg3 »

holowoodman wrote: post #604
eigenspace wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage. Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards…

> Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation). Yes, but there are also future inefficient uses of renewables.…

Uh, can you provide any scientific papers that H2 can be used for Iron smelting? CO2 is very stable, even at high temperatures. Its hard to strip O2 from it (except photosintesis). Now, H2 itself is very violatile gas. When burn, it creates water. Water is not stable high temperatures. It become vapor and when temperature rise it can even break bond between H2 and O.

So, papers or are you hallucinating?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#625

Post by samus »

b3orn wrote: post #594
kokey wrote: post #47

Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc. This time, however, it looks like it'…

The largest "but" is that they only look at electricity generation, not energy in general. There's a lot of heating with natural gas and of course most cars still have internal combustion engines which burn petrol or diesel.

Heating with gas is difficult to phase out since it's a major investment. It would require large-scale build out of remote heating.

Replacing IC engines is a whole different story, and it's not clear whether electric cars are a complete replacement yet.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#626

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #623
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep some of the existing natural gas plants around as an emergency reserve. Run them on hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives for zero carbon fuel, if the emissions are large enough to matter.

that costs a lot of money

Not really. That is how the grid works today. Especially open cycle turbines, which are essentially stationary aircraft engines.

Lowest possible fixed costs, high operating costs.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#627

Post by samus »

torginus wrote: post #502
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #362

Earlier 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?

You are giving them too much credit.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#628

Post by dr_dshiv »

fundatus wrote: post #614
clarionbell wrote: post #600

Meanwhile European chemical manufacturing is collapsing under weight of record energy costs.[1][2] Most of other manufacturing is somehow tied to chemicals, you can't build things without material after all. So this will feed ongoing industrial collapse, which now affects even Germany.[3] Meanwhile, low income households are running into financial issues if they want to turn up the heat.[4] The whole process has been…

And the reason for that? Fossil fuels. Cited from one of your articles: > “Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release.

Netherlands is sitting on a massive, massive natural gas reserve. Off limits due to earthquakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#629

Post by etiennebausson »

anovikov wrote: post #579
owenversteeg wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. Y…

Overall renewables (including the "bad" ones like biogas, and the finite ones like hydro) are at around 27% of TFC in EU today (25.2% in 2024 and growing at around 1% per year). Not bad. But far from replacement. Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU though, it's just that the rest is imported.

And nuclear fuel is also imported (but refined locally), so not sure it should be counted as 'local' in this case.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#630

Post by hvb2 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #628
fundatus wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason for that? Fossil fuels. Cited from one of your articles: > “Our industry continues to face difficult market dynamics and challenging energy costs, with European gas prices around three times higher than the US,” Arnaud Valenduc, business director for Ineos Inovyn, the Ineos business that makes chloromethane, says in the press release.

Netherlands is sitting on a massive, massive natural gas reserve. Off limits due to earthquakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field

Sat, past tense. Yes there's still quite a bit in there but the Netherlands is VERY densely populated. And public opinion has swayed towards letting it sit there.

The real reason it's off limits is simply because of externalities. The NAM just doesn't want to pony up the the money to pay for repairs of houses. It's rare for that to backfire like this in the fossil fuel industry.

Might not be a bad call to leave it. I'm sure we'll find a novel use for natural gas decades down the line which might be way more valuable than just burning it.

Post reply on HN