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In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

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721–730 of 809 posts

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Putin that cut off gas supply to Europe almost completely in autumn 2021 in preparation of the invasion and then completely shut it off during 2022. That was before the pipelines were blown up.

That's not true. Russia continued to supply gas after 2021.

They unilaterally cut supply through NS1 though and before the invasion deliberately kept gas storage in Germany empty.

It's not all of europe but maybe this is what the the other person is referring to.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#722

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

You also need to extract and refine the oil before you can put it into a car.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.

Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun. The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply. Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blocka…

You're forgetting about the supply chain. Who manufactures all the solar panels and wind turbines? Honest question - are we increasing the risks of becoming energy dependent on China? Or does Europe have the ability to manufacture its own?

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#724
post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, in face of OP’s tone I allowed myself some sarcasm. Obviously there needs to be additional energy. You’d have some equilibrium with those reactions and OP didn’t make any argument why that can’t be controlled in favor of reducing Fe2O3. It’s also borderline unbelievable OP never heard of hydrogen in future steelmaking, if they are at all invested in the topic. You’d need a special kind of ignorance to think pe…

Yeah, I did not thats why I asked. Water and Steel doesnt like each other. But thanks for the info.. It seems it can be done in controlled way. Now I wonder how cost effective it is :)

Well, actually, thermolysis for water occurs at 2200°C. Thermolysis of CO₂ starts at 1400°C, of CO at 3700°C. The melting point of iron is around 1500°C, similarly its oxides.

So water as a product is actually more stable than CO₂, and doesn't undergo thermolysis at the relevant temperatures for smelting iron. Whereas when going the CO₂ route, there is the risk of producing relevant amounts of CO, which is not as desirable and less efficient because it only absorbs half the oxygen.

Cost is a big question, but it will for sure be more expensive to use hydrogen. Back of the envelop calculation (250$/t coal price, need 1/3t of H_2 for the same effect, so H₂ may cost up to 750$/t, need 40kWh/kg for H₂ electrolysis at 100% efficiency) gives a breakeven electricity price of 1.875ct/kWh. While this happens from time to time due to overproduction, those prices will even out as soon as there is a market for that excess electricity through batteries, storage and electrolysis. Which means that cost-wise, the H₂ route will never be more effective than coal. To make it viable, coal use needs to be made more expensive through taxes and tariffs.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#725
post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where heating is needed, and where heating is done by electricity, changing to LED lighting indoors don't make any difference whatsoever. Unless your main heating source is a heat pump. In my home there's a heat pump upstairs, but not downstairs. All the lights downstairs are now LED, but the only effect that has is monetary - LED lights are way more expensive, and contrary to claims, don't last longer either. But th…

Is this really a lot of people that use resistive heating? Also at least it saves electricity during summer when you don't want to dump even more heat into the room. As a side, from my experience LEDs last significantly longer than incadescant LEDs. Maybe it's something to do with the power grid fluctuating more in certain areas?

I haven't been able to find reliable LED lighting, except when compared to particularly low-quality incadecent lights. Cost-wise it's a no-brainer, LEDs are more expensive. They are, however, getting better. They used to be totally terrible, at least that's changing. However, they're still advertising "N hours", where the "N" counts only 3 or 4 hours (typically) per day, so (and get this) the calculation is something like this: "20000 hours = 833 days, if you use them 3 hours only, of those days". Whereas the incadecent light bulbs "1200 hours" is 1200 hours of actual use.

As for your question, living in a country where 100% of domestic power is electric (save the occasional wood heater which is more for decoration but can be useful in certain very cold areas during winter), yes there's indeed a ton of resistive heating. All the heating in my home is resistive, except for the heat pump in the living room. And the living room is upstairs. The house is very well insulated though, even for a house many decades old, so it's not that expensive to heat.

In the summer? Well, this far north it doesn't get that hot, and we don't actually need to use electric lighting at all during the better part of summer, unless the room is windowless. 24 hour daylight.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's the consumption numbers. 55% of total final consumption of energy in EU comes from imported sources.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just over build the solar. Build out solar so demand in winter is met. Use the excess power in summer for some kind of industrial use.

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.

This assumes prices for the solar panels and batteries continue to fall as this build-out happens. I don't think it should or could happen in a single year, but slowly over the next 5-10 years.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#728
post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And the Grand Old Pedophile party will ensure that fossil fuels remain the cheapest by killing all alternatives before they reach scale.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear fuel is around 2-3% of electricity cost, and there is too much worldwide supply for it to be of any concern, so it doesn't really matter where it comes from. For energy balance calculations it is accepted that nuclear energy is counted as produced where the reactor itself is.

Strategically, if nuclear power experiences a resurgence, procuring uranium could become difficult because the superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) will want to reserve it for themselves, and corresponding efforts have already begun. The majority of nuclear-producing nations (Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) will immediately comply. Wind and sun, however, cannot be confiscated or withheld by blocka…

Nuclear power resurgence is bullshit and it will always remain a drop in the bucket, especially for large countries. US has too much natural gas, China too much renewables, Russia well, it's of virtually no economic impact worldwide and whatever they might do is irrelevant (unless they nuke us).

Any country that starts a new nuclear power plant construction today won't finish it before electricity will be comprehensively solved by renewables. It pertains even to dictatorship where public opinion does not exist and there's no red tape (Belarus: 14 years from decision to first reactor start) let alone not in free countries. It puts them into 2040+. In EU let's say there will be certainly no fossil fuel electricity at all, maybe apart from few percents of natgas for prolonged quiet periods in winter, and whatever nuclear power remains will be easy to replace. China? go figure, they have a problem of removing coal generation and that's essentially same as nuclear from standpoint of its behaviour on the grid, and there is so much more coal, nuclear will be squashed simply as a byproduct of whatever solution (which will likely be solar+batteries) they come up with.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#730

The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a f…

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…

Space based solar is a scam

It's not a scam, it's a weapon. The same proliferation arguments that have been used against nuclear also apply to space-based solar.

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