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In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

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Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#651

Post by youngtaff »

a_paddy wrote: post #603
black_puppydog wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice link, thanks! Still, the renewables (I'm not counting nuclear and biofuels, but counting hydro and "other renewables") make up 21.1% of the total energy consumption as well, up from 13.3% in 2015. That's still quite marked. Also after clicking the "settings" button to show absolute values, I was surprised to see that total energy consumption peaked in 2006 (hey, that's 20 years ago!) at ~18,900TWh, and is now at…

Do not underestimate the impact of transitioning from incandescent to LED lighting. An average home could be consuming 1Kw for lighting alone at busy times.

Or the EU's push for more energy efficient appliances

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#652

Post by eigenspace »

lambdaone wrote: post #636
eigenspace wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is likely going to have to be hydrogen, but there's a pretty difficult catch with hydrogen: it makes zero sense to invest in any hydrogen electricity storage infrastructure until the grid is already like 80+% renewable. There's simply no sense in turning electricity into hydrogen so that it could be used in 6 months (losing 50+% of the energy along the way as heat!) when you could just sell that electricit…

Syngas makes a lot more sense than hydrogen, in the short term. But what really makes sense in the longer term is massively scaled Carnot batteries. Slightly less efficient than batteries, but really cheap to build (it's a combination of resistive heating and old-fashioned thermal power station technology) overbuilding renewables is cheap, and you can charge your Carnot battery [almost] all year long.

I think there's a lot of question marks hanging over a lot of these things. I don't want to sound more confident in hydrogen than I actually am, and I don't want to sound more dismissive of syngas and other long term storage options than I really am. I'm really just not sure at the end of the day.

Another option that I think is under-discussed is just seasonal storage of biogas. Germany currently derives around 10% of total electricity production on any given day from the burning of biogas. If we could replace all of that daily usage with renewables + batteries, then we could potentially just save up all that biogas in reservoirs and burn it during periods of low renewable output. No new technology, and very minor new infrastructure needed.

It's hopeless to scale biogas production up to a point where it provides for the whole grid, but it might just be enough to deal with week-to-month scale renewable shortfalls.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#653

Post by matsemann »

cm2187 wrote: post #647
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.

Not sure about that. If you plot energy cost and % of wind power by country, it is highly correlated.

The causation is the other way. High energy prices have made wind and solar more viable.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#654

Post by jijijijij »

youngtaff wrote: post #481
owenversteeg wrote: post #300

Earlier 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…

> Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use Does that 26% include the energy that's involved to ship the fuel in tankers? Something like 50% of marine fuel usage is shipping fossil fuels around the world

Marine transport is stupidly efficient and probably won’t influence those numbers much. For the same reasons it’s absolutely okay to eat avocados from overseas. I believe the processing of oil to gas is quite energy intense tho.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#655

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

direwolf20 wrote: post #371
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be interesting to try charging vehicles relative to the road damage they do as it's proportional to around the fourth power of weight. It would likely change the nature of logistics as it could mean that large trucks would be more expensive that using two or three smaller trucks. Similarly, buses would benefit from being smaller and lighter.

Trucks already have lots of axles and wheels for this reason, because it's weight per wheel that matters.

I suspect the number of axles and wheels is to generally improve the strength/weight ratio rather than to minimise road surface damage.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#656

Post by natmaka »

eigenspace wrote: post #265
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…

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…

There are quite good explanation published at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-definitions and https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#657

Post by ZeroGravitas »

cm2187 wrote: post #647
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.

Not sure about that. If you plot energy cost and % of wind power by country, it is highly correlated.

Not if you compare states with similar levels of economic development, like US states or EU countries.

Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma have around 50% wind and 10 cent electricity.

When comparing EU states, the correlation is more about who taxes electricity and who builds wind. Comparing pre-tax prices has a very slight downward trend as the country has more wind.

You see a lot of propaganda graphs online that have the EU states clustered in the top right and a cluster of unlabelled Petro states and dictatorships who subsidize electricity in the other quadrant.

The intended implication is that you should emulate the countries they are afraid to name because it would make their graph ridiculous.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#658

Post by eigenspace »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #582
owenversteeg wrote: post #300

Earlier 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…

in cold weather an ice is not close to 30%, that's an achievable warm weather figure when everything's working efficiently. Many ice journeys are so short in cold weather that efficiency never peaks above 10%

Well, EVs also lose a lot of efficiency in cold weather as well. You'll also note that the 70% figure I gave for power plants is more or less a best case scenario for modern, well designed plants. A lot of currently existing power plants do much worse than 70%

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#659

Post by natmaka »

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.

> Renewables plus nuclear is now at around 70% of all energy (by final consumption) that is produced in EU

I'm probably misunderstanding because:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-source-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#660

Post by phtrivier »

sahilagarwal wrote: post #634
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't propose what you think is a better alternative we don't know what we are agreeing with by upvoting. Is it: 1. Let Russia take most of eastern Europe in exchange for gas 2. Make Europe Great Again i.e. complain loudly about current politicians then do everything even worse with no plan or logic 3. Fully automated Luxury Communism 4. Ask Harry Potter to make chemical inputs with his magic wand. 5. Nuclear,…

Better management?? Easier processing for residential solar panels? How about government subsidies on solar panels for lower income homes? Hell, maybe create a unified portal when companies buy energy - show the cost difference side by side.

The poster is implying that solar+wind are somehow making it worse for the industry, so they're probably not thinking of "more solar" as a solution.

As an other commenter said, we don't know what they think has been mismanaged.

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