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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

#671

Post by mlrtime »

crote wrote: post #588
danny_codes wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out. What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce el…

Easy: the GOP doesn't care about future competitiveness. They are currently getting lobbied by oil executives, who are trying to maximize short-term profit while they still can. The wider industry doesn't have the long-term vision to preemptively outlobby them, so the GOP is doing what oil wants. Dealing with competition in a post-oil world is a problem left for the next generation: the current GOP will be long-dead…

Not true, energy is cheap in the US. Politicians rise and fall with energy prices, fossils fuels are still cheaper. America (outside of California which is not governed by the GOP) has some of the cheapest energy costs of competitive countries.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#672

Post by pfdietz »

Moldoteck wrote: post #575
pfdietz wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's not renewables fault, it's that you're no longer getting away with distributing your negative externality over the world for free. I'm sure my sewer bill would be a lot lower if I could just pipe my sewage into your garden.

Co2 tax is less about externality and more about putting this extra money into renewables. When ren are underperforming but bidding low prices, they will still be compensated by the merit order which is artificially bumped even higher with CO2 tax. And the worst thing is other regions like US or China don't have such a tax, causing industry offshoring. It's a noble case to want to subsidize ren sector, but this metho…

They could put the money into renewables, but there's nothing mandatory about that policy choice. The idea of a Pigouvian tax is to eliminate the market distortion negative externalities create. In general, you want to tax things you don't want, like pollution, not things you want, like productive work.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#673

Post by natmaka »

triceratops wrote: post #340
embedding-shape wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because you get far higher ROI for the large-scale installations. Right, but as always, ROI is hardly the most important thing in life, there is more considerations than just "makes more money". For example, as someone affected by a day long country-wide electricity outage where essentially the entire country was without electricity and internet for ~14 hours or something, decentralizing energy across the country s…

Grid-scale solar installations can be much more decentralized than nuclear or natural gas power plants. Decentralizing through subsidies at the homeowner level is maybe not the best use of money.

> Decentralizing through subsidies

Consider the lower production cost of renewable electricity: in the long run, it offsets the investment. Bonus: no risk of accidents, no hazardous waste, no dependence on a fuel source, no weapons proliferation...

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#674

Post by pfdietz »

lambdaone wrote: post #611
pfdietz wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can lead to a solution, but at high latitude it becomes infeasibly expensive. Insolation varies too much from summer to winter. Low round trip efficiency long term storage becomes much cheaper than doing (just) this.

Syngas (infinitely better than hydrogen, which was always a stupid idea), or huge-scale Carnot batteries (the square-cube law is your friend) would do the trick nicely in both cases.

Syngas has the problem of where do you get the carbon. With hydrogen, the exhaust (water) just gets released to the atmosphere. Syngas would require capturing and storing the CO2 of combustion for reuse in making more syngas, which adds to the cost.

But yes, resistively heated ultra low capex thermal storage ("hot dirt") is very attractive.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#675

Post by ZeroGravitas »

youngtaff wrote: post #651
a_paddy wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just transitioning from coal to gas for electricity production has a big impact.

The graph is adjusted to compensate for the efficiency of the power plants, but it's an average and one they need to update every so often as plants get more efficient.

But we're phasing out the oldest and least efficient coal plants and replacing them with gas plants that are twice as efficient (33% vs 64%).

The graph under discussion assumes 40% as discussed here:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-substitution-method

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#676

Post by mlrtime »

monero-xmr wrote: post #363
danny_codes wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this is a classic case of underestimating how far manufacturing improvements can get you on the cost scale. You see a promising technology in the lab and it’s hard to imagine a 1 million x reduction in price, yet we see that time and time again as tech gets scaled out. What’s wild to me is how the US is leaving itself in the dust. How the GOP imagines we’ll be competitive when the rest of the world can produce el…

I mean where are all the factories making batteries in Europe? It’s not like the US is purposefully preventing battery tech. It’s why all of the government-funded solar companies imploded as well. The manufacturers do not compete

US has Gigafactory Texas and Lithium Refinery now too.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#677

Post by pfdietz »

neilwilson wrote: post #559
pfdietz wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just shows batteries shouldn't be the only storage technology, at least at high latitude. There needs to be a complementary long term storage technology with low capacity capex, even if its round trip efficiency is bad. Examples: green hydrogen, ultra low capex thermal storage. To see the effect of including such, go to https://model.energy Using a long term storage technology (in addition to wind/solar/batterie…

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.

It's more expensive than hydrogen because you need to capture and store the CO2 of combustion. Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as part of the cycle would be even more prohibitively expensive.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#678

Post by natmaka »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #638
triceratops wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason Nuclear takes so long is that people are neurotic about it and so the regulations are totally excessive. If we had a standardised reactor, it wouldn't be that difficult to churn them out.

The nuclear industry rightly fears excessive standardization because the more units of a given reactor model are built, the more drastically production is reduced by the discovery of a serious bug that leads to their immediate shutdown.

This is one of the major design problems of SMRs (along with the abandonment of economies of scale).

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#679

Post by pfdietz »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #602
zdragnar wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you live somewhere that (air, e.g. in an EV) heat pumps can't function at high efficiency. Tonight and tomorrow night will be -20F/-28C. Always good to have a backup plan, no matter what your primary heat source is.

My Vaillant air to water heat pump is "effective" down to -28C, and has a resistive heater element as a backup in case the COP value flatlines (as in if COP is 1, it doesn't matter). My cheap air to air heat pump in the summerhouse (Panasonic HZ25ZKE) is effective down to -25C and has a COP of 2.22 there. Even at -25C it still delivers twice as much heat energy as the electricity consumed. https://www.aircon.panasoni…

The bigger issue may be the heat rate of the heat pump at low temperature, not the efficiency.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#680

Post by natmaka »

Moldoteck wrote: post #307
doublerabbit wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is stupid about nuclear? It's a huge amount of clean, secure energy. It's not the stupidly of the reactor producing. I don't agree with it personally, but hey whatever, it's a thing. The stupidly of it is that we are small island. Claim what you wish about how safe they are but like anything: errors and malfunctions. Cyber sabotage and all that. If an reactor were to implode we're eff'd. We don't have landmass…

even accounting for fukushima/chernoble nuclear is between solar and wind in terms of human deaths. And new units are safer than both. EPR went 'just add one more thing' to be more expensive, AP1000 went passive safety way but westinghose imploded and they needed to ask Korea for help

An accident spreading hazardous substances over a large geographical area that are difficult to contain (or waste of this type) is unique to nuclear power; no renewable energy source poses such a threat.

Another problem is the urgency (due to the impacts) combined with the difficulty of modifying power plants as required by "lessons learned," in other words, bug fixes. Modifying or repairing solar panels or wind turbines is easier than working on a reactor and results in a smaller reduction in the plant's output. The effects of this are significant.

The number of victims (and more generally, the health impacts) of nuclear power depends on the method of analysis, which is controversial. This is true for Chernobyl and Fukushima, where the evacuation triggered by the nuclear accident officially caused 2,202 deaths (2019 count), and 2,313 according to the International Nuclear Association.

Even the maximum potential impact of an accident is debated.

The full impact of nuclear power will at best only be known after all dismantling is complete and the last cold waste is disposed of (before this deadline any mishap or stray waste can be costly), in a few thousand years.

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