[rich_sasha]

Poland has cloudy winters with short days and no reliable offshore winds (nothing comparable to the trade winds on the North Sea for example). It is mostly a lowland country with no potential for pumped hydro, or for the most part, regular hydro.

I’m not, like many Polish people are, pro coal and climate change denier, just saying we can’t solve global warming on the assumption of Californian weather.

[berkes]

Would that not make a great argument for more European integration in energy infrastructure?

Where Spanish solar, Danish and Dutch North Sea Wind, Norwegian Hydro, or Swedish Geothermal, power Poland on the days when its own wind and solar is below whats needed?

I'm from the Netherlands, and many fellow countryman and politicians have similar excuses for not going renewables (there is little Sun, no space for windmills). Both of which are easily debunked. But even if true, easily solved with better integration.

[bigfudge]

When people worry about land-use of solar, I think about exactly this. There are large chunks of central Spain that would be largely improved by covering them in solar panels (joke, but only just in some places).

[berkes]

Or even better: cross the Gibraltar strait and put solar farms in Morocco, Algeria, Mali. Relative cheap maintainance and building, and vast surplus of sun in places where currently only dry sand grows.

And that requires both large and heavy networks towards Europe, but also, moving lots of electricity-heavy industry south. It makes zero sense to build a new coal-power-station in Eemshaven in the Netherlands for some data-center and Aluminium-enrichment-forge (which then ships the aluminium over Europe) when that aluminium-forge could be built in Algers next to a gigantic solar farm in the desert.

[rich_sasha]

I'd be up for that. I am concerned about how that works in practice.

Leaving aside technical issues (can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?), this is an economic project larger than the Euro or the vaccine roll-out. There will be weekly issues of power redistribution - who gets it when there's a shortage? Whose job is it to maintain trans-border infrastructure? Some countries, through resourcefulness or good fortune, will have more spare power, and thus powering, hmm, less powerful countries, leading to the usual "{country-X} power for people from {country-X}". What about electricity costs? Is there a flat rate in Europe? Etc.

I'm not sure how to actually make that work in practice.

[berkes]

> can you really push power from Spain to Latvia? Is it really true that total renewable power in Europe can always power the whole continent?

Both: yes. and no.

If "renewables" is only solar and wind: then certainly not. But the total mix: certainly.

And "distribution" is more than pushing electricity from Malta to Iceland (which is rather inefficient) but also "build the datacenter in malta (edit: next to the sea-cooled solar farm)" or "build that new aluminium-forge in iceland where there's a surplus (edit of free geothermal power), rather than in east-poland where it will be coal-powered".

Edit2: The entire "cost" and trans-border export/import is already in place and handled in EPEX: a free and open market for electricity: https://www.epexspot.com/en/market-data

[pydry]

Even in Poland renewables dominate new sources of electricity generation.

[rich_sasha]

Sort of. Poland has traditionally relied heavily on coal. Now for a variety of economic, ecological and political reasons, there are no new coal plants being installed, and old ones reaching EOL. There is no nuclear, despite half-hearted attempts to bring that about. Gas has mostly been imported from Russia, with constant concerns about continued supplies being used as a political tool, so no significant gas plants either.

So yes, once you factor out all other options, solar and wind is the only thing that you can make progress on. But that's a far cry from saying you could run the country on them.

[pydry]

You likely could eventually. All current projections point that way.

Poland already has a significant advantage with respect to intermittency being connected to an EU wide grid and being able to import/export power easily across a well oiled market. Hawaii may have sun but it can't do that.

The intransigence of the country itself (it loves its coal) is probably the biggest impediment, not Geography. If Germany can do it (and they can and do) so can Poland.

[rich_sasha]

Since pushing to use more renewables, Germany's CO2 emissions have increased.

Being able to import energy from elsewhere doesn't just solve the problem, you just have a bigger area to average over.

[pydry]

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

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