[ike0790]

Looks like a G20 country is serious about the impending "climate emergency". Regardless of the motives and timing behind this, I think its great to see a country is actually being serious and practical. Anyone going on about the climate and refuses to put nuclear energy at the forefront of the conversation is unserious and is only interested in virtual signaling in my opinion.

[immmmmm]

For living in a neighboring country, speaking their language and following their policy quite a bit, i can tell you that, no, they are nowhere near serious.

Just as an example, the best performing company this year is Total with 15B and which is happily feeding the government with petrodollars and the other people with lies about "Net Zero " etc.

"Énergie Nucléaire" as they call it is a thing there because De Gaulle wanted a bomb after WW2, so they pushed the industry (which is btw in pretty bad shape).

There is exactly ONE person in France who is pro nuclear and say accurate things about climate and it's Jancovici. All the rest of the crowd is like in most countries corrupt by petrodollars or other polluting industry, and is saying crap about climate. and the rare times they are not saying crap they are lying about their intentions.

No, France is nowhere near serious about climate, like most countries they bet on a +5 degree futur. I think i have read enough papers to tell you that 5 degrees will be very very hot and a very very sad point in human history.

[yamrzou]

Jancovici is a legend. Listenening to him and reading his latest comic book (Le monde sans fin) made me very aware of climate issues and directly influenced my behavior.

He deserves to be better known by international audiences. Here are some of his talks in english:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA

[immmmmm]

oh thank you! didn't know he had talks in english!

i love how rude, physics based and down to earth he is, a legend indeed!

[gobip]

France is not serious about climate? If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.

Énergie Nucléaire was a thing of De Gaulle, but not for these reasons. France needed independence and needed to provide electricity, and the only way was nuclear (at the time).

Given the current situation, I think France didn't do too bad. Only one candidate in France on par with Jancovici tho, Fabien Roussel.

I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

[immmmmm]

I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Ok ok, De Gaulle was maybe more concerned about energy independence.

France doesn't do too bad? Any link? As far a i remember only a few African countries do "not too bad", but perhaps you were referring to former colonies as well.

> I live in France, never heard of this "Net Zero" you're talking about.

I then suggest some good climate information channel, Bon Pote is pretty good in French [0]

[0] https://bonpote.com/

edit: my country is terrible too, it is nothing against France in particular!!!

[rini17]

Swiss and Austrians are an exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions. In Slovakia much of whatever could be dammed already is and still hydro makes only up to 20% of the mix, despite being one of the more hilly countries. Were it not for 70% nuclear, I have no idea how to even go near carbon neutral electricity. Having German electricity prices to pay for renewables is completely impossible.

[immmmmm]

Agreed. I was answering the inaccurate sentence "your electricity is much more polluted than France's is."

[nix23]

>exception with the hydro and should stop rubbing it in all the discussions.

True, and it's not a exception, but geographically "luck", without mountains and the glaciers that comes with them, Switzerland would be as dry as Turkmenistan. It's just a matter of commonsense to use those altitude differences and water....but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.

[immmmmm]

agreed. we are doing hydro because of mountains AND lack of coal.

> but when all our glaciers are molten away, we for sure have to go back to nuclear-power.

this is inaccurate. you might want to go read more literature related to ice melting and energy transition.

[phicoh]

Ignoring storage, wind and solar are now very cheap. For example, companies now pay to rent pieces of North Sea to place wind parks there.

[pydry]

Pumped water storage also isnt that expensive.

[rini17]

Storage and transmission.

[enqk]

Wind and solar need a lot of resources from mining, which itself uses fossil fuel (for extraction, treatment and transport) and creates a lot of local pollution.

Wind and solar take a lot of space that could be used for agriculture, so they compete with important uses of the soil. (I don't know if it's clear how much offshore is a thing, but I suppose this increases also energy expenditure)

[renaudg]

> If you're in a neighbor country of France: congrats, your electricity is much more polluted than France's is.

Sorry but that statement is absolutely true, even of Switzerland.

As I write, France's consumption-based carbon intensity is 92g, Switzerland is 130 (importing 2.36GW of dirty electricity from Germany, 1.44GW from France)

https://app.electricitymap.org/map

[bvrlt]

> I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Hydro isn't the panacea. It's destroying ecosystems. Climate change is a problem but the biodiversity collapse another one.

https://eu.patagonia.com/fr/en/stories/telling-the-dam-truth...

[immmmmm]

i agree a 100% sir!

i was just replying to a comment saying that nuclear is cleaner

[mhroth]

I live in Switzerland too. That hydro comes from water pumped uphill at night by cheap French nuclear power. (/s. Mostly.)

[immmmmm]

what the **** ** are you saying. not even 10% of hydro can pump in CH.

[lm28469]

> I live in Switzerland, 60% of my electricity comes from hydro.

Switzerland in an anomaly on virtually every metrics you can come by.

[immmmmm]

yes! and we are the worst on many other metrics!! for instance one of the biggest marketplace for worldwide oil. take any of the worst polluting company, most have their headquarters here.

[nopcode]

Reminds me of those smug Norwegians subsidising EVs with the profits of oil exports.

We’re all a bit jealous of course.

[popol12]

And whose country's electricity is pumping water up Switzerland's reversible dams during the night ?

[nix23]

I don't understand the down-votes you get..it's mostly Frances nuclear-power.

But little correction: During the Night IN Wintertime

[immmmmm]

My country's energetic policy is catastrophic. Don't get me wrong.

Saying that France is great is brutally inaccurate tho.

[phicoh]

For the energy transition, it is not enough to look at the way electrictity is currently generated. All use of fossil fuel needs to go, transport, industry etc.

A rough estimate is that the production of electricity needs to double.

I'm curious how France is going to double the production of electricty. The current plans for new nuclear power don't seem enough to increase capacity and retire old plants at the same time.

[loup-vaillant]

Well, now France is not being serious about climate, and has not been since at least 10 years, when we had Hollande on the throne. We've had talks about closing down nuke plants that are still in working order, the next one is taking forever, and we still have many people who want to shut it all down in the very name of the environment (overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy).

I think it is getting better, though. Environmentalists are slowly waking up to the fact that nuclear energy is not nearly as bad as we make it out to be, even compared to windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete.

Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.

[immmmmm]

Yeah things are getting better. The IPCC report was discussed for one 1 day in French medias.

> Oh, and we got a recent report from our national energy company (or something close), that laid out several plans to reduce our CO2 emissions, and most contingencies involved both nuclear and renewable, including the "nuke max" scenario. We'll definitely need renewables, but it's pretty clear shutting down nuclear plants is one of the riskiest plans — hopefully our politicians will wake up to that.

Great. Hope they don't forget what scientists say: we must use much less energy.

[Reason077]

> "windmills & solar panels, which requires many more times the ground surface and/or concrete"

There is no scenario where a comparable wind or solar farm requires more concrete than a nuclear plant. Not even close. A modern nuclear plant requires hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete (ie: over a million tonnes), as well as hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel.

Yes, a solar farm may require more land surface area, but it can be very quickly and easily deconstructed and removed when no longer required. Where as decommissioning a nuclear plant can cost tens of billions of Euros, and can take 60 years or more to complete.

[loup-vaillant]

Yes, a modern nuclear plant requires tons & tons of concrete. Yes, it costs tons & tons of money. It also gives you gigantic amounts of energy, and you can adjust its output. Windmill and solar panels only produce energy when there's wind or sun, so their actual energy output is much lower than their peak power output, and you can't decide to turn them on or off at will like you can with a nuke plant to adjust it to the energy needs of the country.

You want to be renewable only? Then you need to install several times the power output you need, and enough energy storage to have your energy at will: dams, batteries… This is going to cost a lot.

Also, shutting down a nuke plant takes about a minute, then you need very little water to keep it cool. Completely dismantling it takes much longer of course, but it takes so little surface compared to its energy output that you might as well just leave it there to rot.

[Reason077]

> "overall, the French people are woefully misinformed about the pros and cons of nuclear energy"

Not as bad as the Germans. The decision to build new nuclear plants is one thing, but to close down perfectly good and safe existing nuclear in the name of the environment is madness.

Especially when the alternative to those nuclear plants is to burn more lignite coal and build new pipelines to import more Russian natural gas.

[inter_netuser]

Do you have a link to their models w.r.t +5 degrees?

seems like an extraordinary number

[immmmmm]

You are correct, the 5 degree might be a bit high in this context. It's quite possible however in SSP5-8.5 and even SSP4-7.0 from IPCC's predictions for 2100 ([0] for instance). A more conservative 2-3 degrees might be more accurate for climate pledges [1]. This is based on quite a few assumptions tho and varies between authors. 2300 projections can go up to 12 degrees in IPCC AR5 WG1, Figure 12.5 [2] (for the old RCP8.5 scenario).

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13143-021-00225-6

[1] https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/long-term-climate-change-...

[inter_netuser]

Thanks for the links.

How did CO2 become such a big focus?

Seemingly to detriment of all else, including persistent pollutants or neonics, etc? Like those very real problems happening today, vs 2100.

[greatpatton]

"Just as an example, the best performing company this year is Total with 15B and which is happily feeding the government with petrodollars and the other people with lies about "Net Zero " etc."

French government is not a shareholder of Total at any meaningful level, less than 30% of Total shareholders are French and Total is a multinational paying taxes in multiple countries, so I don't know from where your petrodollars are coming from.

There is a lot that can be say about French energy policy but mentioning Total is really the less relevant one...

[joconde]

I’m skeptical about that 5 degree bet. What’s your source?

[epistasis]

They will be serious if they actually build it, unlike Flamanville.

While you call non-nuclear options "virtue signaling," the attempts at building it in France and the US have been virtue signaling. We don't have the industrial capacity to build nuclear.

Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs.

Locking in the high costs of nuclear, for the 60 year lifetime of a nuclear reactor, after a 15 year delay for building, is not a serious solution for climate change.

[yason]

The cost of nuclear goes down if we build more of smaller standardized reactors rather than a huge, advanced plants every few decades where everything is new and untested each time, warranting long periods of validation and certification, and where the people building it have changed after each built power plant.

[sirk390]

I doubt that there are numbers to prove that. SMR might just be a buzzword. From the page below there don't seem too many operating or under construction (5 operating, and 4 under construction). https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...

[southerntofu]

france has a bunch of standardized reactors: doesn't mean they don't suffer from engineering issue, that they don't leak hot water or radiation every now and then, or that we even know how to tear them apart when they reach end of life.

You should probably do some reading about the many scandals of the nuclear industry in France, from colonial exploitation for uranium to jailing/crippling/assassinating anti-nuclear protesters, with a bunch of nuclear scandals and accidents in between.

[dgellow]

From what I understand small modular reactors are not ready for production. Macro announced government money to help their research. The goal is to a have a prototype end of 2020s.

[simion314]

>Meanwhile, we are deploying GW of solar, wind, and storage on time, on budget, ar ever decreasing costs.

That is the easier part, show me the battery deployments please , the ones that can backup the country/state for a week.

[epistasis]

We are just as of 2020 reaching cost effectiveness for batteries, and planning by utilities is often on five year time lines and uses outdated data, so they are slow to pick up new technology.

Nonetheless, storage is ready, and even in profit driven grids like Texas' ERCOT:

> Citing lower costs and increased renewables, momentum continued in the growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online, compared to 640 MW in 2020. ... with the next two largest systems in Texas, namely the 102-MW Gambit Battery Energy Storage Park and the 100-MW North Fork Battery Storage Project.

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

With how slow utilities are to adopt cheap new technologies, that will be a while. But cost-optimization strategies for carbon free grids tend to select a lot of excess solar and wind capacity, and almost no nuclear at all. Though I would say that those models are flawed in that they assume that nuclear can be built, when the last decades have shown that it can not really be built.

[simion314]

>If you want week long batteries, you'll first have to show the need for that, but something like that won't be built until it is needed: enough cheap solar and wind on the grid.

This is not realistic, you could build storage but if is super expensive who wants to pay for that.

We will probably have to have an excess of solar and waste energy rather then pay for ton of batteries.

[midasuni]

> growth of battery energy storage systems in 2021, roughly doubling with 1,262 MW online

That makes no sense. How much do they store?

[epistasis]

Grid assets are usually measured by the size of their grid connection. These are lithium ion batteries, and in the 100+MW power capacity, you will usually have 2-4 hours of duration, as the economic use case for something that big usually requires replacing gas peakers to some degree.

Prior generations of lithium ion on the grid were more used for frequency regulation, and would be far smaller and have far higher power/energy rations, like 15-30 minutes. Though this was an extremely profitable market for a while, once people figured out how easy it was to get batteries to do it the market was flooded and frequency regulation does not take a massive amount of battery to accomplish.

Though lithium ion is generally viewed to cap out at 4 hours of duration, I'm thinking that it may get cheap enough per kWh of capacity to install undersized inverters and go to 8-12 hours of capacity. This could compete with other emerging battery technologies targeting that length of duration. An early test of this will be the "long duration storage" component of the replacement package of Diablo Canyon; I dont think that a particlular vendor has been chosen, but most people seem to think that it will be non-lithium-ion that will win the bid. There are other early stage battery startups with ~100 hour duration chemistries. All of these vary based on round-trip efficiency, cost per kWh of energy capacity, and lifetime over cycling.

[midasuni]

If it can provide 100MW for 4 hours why can’t it provide 10MW for 40h?

[ksec]

I wonder if a country will just mandate every household to have a Tesla like PowerWall installed within x years. Or some sort of incentives to have it installed. You can then have additional Grid Battery as backup. It is quite hard to store a week long electricity needs without some redundancy.

[simion314]

This won't be possible in all homes, batteries are a security risk so for sure you need safe conditions and space to install similar on how you need to pass inspections for gas. The only way I could see it working is introducing an increasing electricity tarigf. First 50Kw are cheap, next are 25% more expensive, next 50% etc (this are random number I don't stand behind them)

[pydry]

China has about 40 GW of pumped water storage.

A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare.

[simion314]

We would need to build much , much more storage, and I hope you know water dams are not easy to build(a lot of humans and wild life needs to be moved), if you don't already have them probably is impossible to create them.

>A week of no solar power or wind is unheard of. A week of no wind is very very rare.

You don need no solar or no wind, you need a few weeks of super low solar and wind, like say in winter, solar efficiency is much lower in winter.

[pydry]

We would need much much more of anything to make our power fully renewable.

It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all < 7 year lead time) than building nuclear plants (up to 20 years).

This is not even accounting for the nearly free insurance granted to nuclear plants putting taxpayers on the hook for costs like the $800 billion cost of dealing with fukushima (which involved burning a lot of coal and gas).

The economics of nuclear power as green energy only really make sense because it lets you share some of the rather high costs of maintaining a nuclear arsenal. The environmental movement is being coopted/guilted into supporting its subsidization.

[simion314]

>It's still cheaper and faster building pumped storage, wind and solar (all < 7 year lead time) than building nuclear plants (up to 20 years).

Any numbers on that pumped storage? how much is needed to store 1 week of France energy needs ? How much it costs then?

[MrPatan]

And a week of less solar and wind than usage?

[sendben2]

Yes. This. Storage is still expensive. Also France is already a world leader in nuclear grid energy. They already have a long history of building and maintaining nuclear plants.

[hardlianotion]

The nuclear grid in France is ageing, as is the expertise needed to construct and maintain. The decision seems to come at a critical time to maintain France's nuclear capability.

[natmaka]

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

[simion314]

"urope could make much better use of its wind resources if capacity was spread out instead of being concentrated around the North Sea."

It does not claim that wind and solar can replace gas and coal 100% just the super obvious conclusion that we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines and also in the grid (the disadvantage is how you balance the surplus, like companies from country A and B and C have too much electricity most of the time but only 25% could be sold so who gets screwed and has to turn off it's production? If they get screwed then why invest ?

[natmaka]

Nothing can replace gas 100%. Hyper-nuclearized France always produced (and now produces) between 7% and 12% of their gridpower thanks to fossil fuel (gas/petrol/coal). This is not about 100% but about obtaining a baseload.

"we could do more if we invest more in wind turbines" is not obvious when it comes to continuity of production.

Selling anything (even only 25% of your production) can be a financially wonderful operation if done when many customers need it.

Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.

[simion314]

>Turning off production is only necessary if you cannot store more of it.

Storing is not cheap and batteries are also diry. not green. My idea is that we need to work on all in parallel, solar, wind, research better and cleaner batteries, nuclear, fusion, invest in the grid and try to connect over larger distances. There will not be 1 solution that fits every place in the world.

[southerntofu]

> That is the easier part

No, that's the hard part. The easier part is to reduce energy consumption and adapt to production. The problem is some people think we can live in eternal abundance and not think about it, and these people are making billions of dollars of tax money on "green new deal" types of contracts.

But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

[simion314]

>But the truth is degrowth and lowtech are the only option for climate change. Look what "green capitalism" has done for us since the 60s: yes things keep getting worse, and it's not gonna change as long as money and industry are involved, as they are the problem not the solution.

You can't just close coal plants and petrol industry and replace it it with dreams, even if you reduce word wide consumption you still need to replace existing dirty fuels with cleaner ones.

We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism so energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life.

sure we can invest in better isolation, tax dirty industries and services but is not enough. Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

[southerntofu]

> We were burning coal and wood here in Romania before capitalism

Sure, but on what scale before capitalism (16th century)? Yes, some cultures have disappeared due to over-using their resources, but none threatened to take away humanity and millions of other species along with it. Or did you mean before the collapse of USSR and so-called socialist countries (which are arguably State-capitalist and very similar in terms of industry).

> energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life

Yes, but what energy and on what scale? Clever engineering enables crazy optimizations. When you see people building wooden houses that can be heated with simple candles, it's quite a feat of engineering. Or passive heating from the sun or underground heat. Same goes for the heating system: using a thermal mass with a little wood to burn is orders of magnitude more efficient than electric heating or a commercial woodstove.

When i say low-tech i explicitly don't mean primitivist. I mean our understanding of sciences has progressed enough that we now know that our industrial way of life is not efficient and we can do much with less resources.

> Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?

Then again, depends on what scale. Personal cars for people in remote areas is not the main source of pollution. And i'm personally glad we've got some stuff like hospitals which may be a major source of pollution but i personally think are worth the trade-off.

But there are bigger sources of pollutions we could do without. How do you explain there's more smartphones on this planet than human beings yet we keep making more? Why do we keep building more cars and make it impossible to repair the old ones? All environmental studies point out that over the lifecycle of an object, production has the most environmental impact; disposal/recycling is also something we don't know how to do (apart from shoving it down the surface to pollute everything else).

These polluting schemes were invented by the industry to keep profits going after WWI when there was massive overproduction of goodsI'm. They do not benefit humanity or the public, or the exploited workers, or the polluted communities. They benefit only shareholders and politicians who get to shake hands with them.

I'm not saying i alone have the best answers to our problems (far from it). But if we want to build a breathable future for our children, there's certainly quite a few radical changes we could envision that would not damage the way of life of common people but would certainly trade shareholder's profits for humanity's survival.

[simion314]

Reducing consumption is part of the solution and only on some countries. Solar panels are also part of the solution but batteries might be more toxic/dirty then nuclear plants.

[visarga]

Once a few years, we get a few weeks without much wind and solar. What do we do then? Solar and wind can't store enough energy to last for weeks.

[epistasis]

However we do it, it looks like nuclear won't be it, because we can't build nuclear. Some of the more likely routes, with clearer cheaper cost curves than advanced nuclear or SMRs:

1) advanced geothermal (using drilling tech developed within the last decade, not the older ones)

2) flow batteries

3) chemical storage of electricity, whether as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol, or whatever tech path becomes cheapest.

4) for cold climates: district/neighborhood heating with massive seasonal storage

All of these are being developed, and experiencing falling prices on the tech. In contrast, building the same nuclear reactor design gets more expensive successive time it is built. This is true even of France's builds in 70s.

If we are betting on future tech, nuclear is not in the cards. It would have been great it nuclear had put coal out of business in the 1980s, rather than having a ton of build delays in the 1970s that jacked up nuclear's price. But it's ship has sailed, until nuclear can build.

If France completes a single reactor by their planned 2035 date, I will be seriously impressed. However, 1GW in 13 years is not a climate solution.

[BurningPenguin]

I'd say it's very unlikely that there will be no wind or sun all over Europe. There is constant exchange of excess energy between the countries anyway. Regardless of that, there are other options too. Like water or geothermal depending on the country. Sometimes there even will be too much energy. I can imagine this being used to make some hydrogen for later use.

[polskibus]

Lack of enough wind and sun is basically what happened in EU end of last year and caused energy and gas prices to sky rocket. It is not as rare as you think, moreover it happens over large areas at the same time which exacerbates stress on the grid.

[misja111]

This is nonsense. The crazy gas prices had two main causes: insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona, and Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe.

[thow-58d4e8b]

> insufficient gas buffers during the uptick of the economy after Corona

this is true

> Russia closing part of its huge gas supply to Europe

this isn't, afaik. Russia doesn't sell on spot market, they prefer long term futures contracts, on which they reliably deliver. They delivered on their 2021 commitments a bit earlier, hence they closed off the valves

Basically, the gas supplies were low during summer, but the spot prices were significantly above long term average, so energy companies delayed their purchases, hoping the price will come back down soon. It didn't, reserves dried up, and everybody was forced to buy at the same time

[cocoggu]

The gas prices spike has also other causes, like gas-powered electricity plants replacing or partly replacing nuclear facilities like Fessenheim in France. Gas-powered electricity plants are flourishing everywhere in the world, including China to diversify from coal, obviously at some point the available offer is not going to be enough.

[polskibus]

Some businesses have a choice whether to use gas or electricity for example for heating. High prices of one caused them to switch too. I agree that effects on gas demand were secondary relative to energy, nevertheless my point stands that it is not unusual, and also we can’t count on gas when wind and solar farms are quiet.

[tjoff]

... very slight difference between excess energy and let's import a contries worth of energy. The cost of transmission will be insane, the grid is not meant for those kinds of transfers.

[phicoh]

The cost of nuclear is also insane at the moment.

For example, the Netherlands has plenty of space for wind on the North Sea. But sometimes of course there is no wind. If there is no wind in the Netherlands, there is a good chance there will be wind north of Scotland.

With the current prices for nuclear power plants, you can easily run cables from the Netherlands to the north of Scotland and still be cheaper than nuclear.

At the moment new nuclear is insanely expensive. So we can do a lot of really weird stuff and still be cheaper than nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper? Who knows.

What we do know is that the EU has targets for 2030, 2040, etc. We don't have time to wait for nuclear to get cheap. We need to act now.

[hardlianotion]

In 2021/22 year there was low levels of wind powered generation in the whole system.

[natmaka]

Such long-distance backbones and interconnections between nations are quickly gaining speed in Europe since the 1980's, as they reduce the risk of blackout and enable savings (a temporarily useless production unit here is used to feed a another nation).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects

[MrPatan]

How about less sun or wind than is necessary, instead of the strawman "no wind or sun"?

[visarga]

You got me. You're right, of course.

[phicoh]

We have plenty of storage options. We can produce various chemicals, hydrogen, methane, ammonia. Production scales, storage scales.

But, it is very expensive. At the same time new nuclear reactors are also very expensive.

So we just don't know. Countries like France should build nuclear reactors and see if they can get the price down.

Countries that are opposed to nuclear, like Germany, should investigate storage solutions and see if they can get the price of that down.

[thow-58d4e8b]

We fire up coal/gas/biomass plants. Nature doesn't care about the ideological purity of the electricity grid - all that matters is total cumulative emissions

People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid

[makomk]

Most developed countries have net zero goals that are not consistent with continuing to pump out 20% of current electricity-related CO2 production forevermore. Also, keeping those coal and gas plants operational isn't exactly cheap either, though it is probably still cheaper than storage.

[mrep]

Yes you can. Methane is already stored and used for electrical grids on a massive scale and you can make methane with electricity [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas

[chha]

That depends on how you want to store the energy. There have been some talk in Norway about using excess energy to pump water from ground level to fill up existing lakes as a form of energy storage. There seems to be quite a few power plants based on hydro power other places in Europe as well, so it could be a feasible strategy there as well [1, page 5]

[1] - https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/hydropower_press...

[lagadu]

In Portugal and Spain we have pumping stations doing exactly that. I couldn't find a link in English but maybe you'll find this useful: https://www.iberdrola.com/sustentabilidade/central-hidreletr...

[chha]

Nice! It turns out we have a few (12) pumping stations here as well, but there is little information on how often they've been used. The high electricity prices we've seen lately have reactualized this, with spikes of around $1 USD/kWh.

Current water levels are at approx 47% capacity [1], compared to around 64% same time last year. Unless we get a wet spring and summer it could get exciting come next year...

[1] - https://www.nve.no/energi/analyser-og-statistikk/magasinstat...

[lagadu]

Same, we're also facing issues with water level this year, to the point that several of the dams were ordered to stop producing electricity in order to save the water.

[innermate]

Batteries can store enough energy to last for a few weeks.

[azinman2]

Industrial-scale batteries are far from a solved problem, and require a lot of excess energy production to fill them that doesn't already get depleted at night.

A far more realistic solution is to be able to flex with things like gas plants that don't need to be always running and can function on demand.

[epistasis]

We are going to have massive amounts of excess energy production as renewables gain higher penetration on grids. The rea problem will be transmission capacity, or alternatively phrased, making sure storage is close enough to the generation.

California usually curtails large amounts of renewable energy in the spring, but even their smallish installs of 1-2GWh of storage recently has massively reduced that wasted energy. And they aren't even at super high penetration yet for renewables.

We will probably keep lots of backup gas turbines for a decade or two, but by the time significant nuclear could come online, other tech will probably have solved it.

And unfortunately in the US, our nuclear fleet is really close to retirement, and we are going to be losing a ton of nuclear generation capacity soon, with no way to rebuild it. We need other solutions fast.

[AtlasBarfed]

Sodium Ion is supposed to commercialize this year if you can believe CATL, with high temp range, good safety, good charge cycles, all supposed to be better than LFP at ?half? the cost (we'll see when it hits the market).

I think sodium ion batteries will be the game changer in utility storage, like good-density (200 Wh/kg) LFP will for mass EV/PHEV electrification (sodium ion will help there too in hybrid batteries).

If we get sodium ion grid storage, another 50% drop in wind/solar utility LCOE, and residential solar gets on par with natural gas LCOE, and good-density LFP batteries deliver 100 mile PHEVs and 250-300 mile EVs in 10 years, then we might actually have a cslim hance of handling global warming

It isn't a solved problem, but there is already industrial scale deployments happening, and what that means is there is a massive market to chase and the ball is rolling fast. It's not like fusion where we are waiting on tech hurdles before the economics are even tackled.

Gas plants will have to do for flexing, much better than coal. It's not like politically they'll all get shutdown (I mean, they should or get a two year warning, but that won't happen).

I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized. That way the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid, it gets used directly, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

I would also like a good synthetic fuels strategy that isn't a creep marketing conspiracy to keep fossil fuels business running (hydrogen "green/blue/gray" color BS falls into this category), that could handle aviation, long haul shipping, and home heating at at least carbon neutrality.

[kwhitefoot]

> the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid

Transmission losses are really not a significant problem. Average US transmission losses are less than 6%, Norway just over, and UK about 8%.

Large solar farms are much cheaper to build per kW and are still quite local to where the energy is consumed so the losses for them will be much less than the current national averages

Mind you I'm not arguing against subsidizing rooftop solar, just that transmission losses are not a major factor in the argument.

[pfdietz]

> I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized.

I don't. The grid has to be sized for the worst case load, not for the average load, so reducing the latter with residential solar doesn't reduce the cost of having the grid around. And utility-scale solar is much cheaper per unit of power than residential solar.

[natmaka]

There is a way to tackle part of this challenge by using distributed generic resources ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ), especially thanks to a smart grid ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid ).

Gas plants can burn hydrogen (or methane...) produced thanks to electricity overproduced (produced when the grid doesn't need it) by renewables.

There are many ways to store energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Methods ).

[guiriduro]

Isn't pumped hydro-electricity a solved problem for off-peak energy storage? Granted, only for countries with hills/mountains (not the Netherlands etc.)

[ohgodplsno]

You still require a place to pump that water into. Forming a lake isn't exactly a very ecology-friendly thing, and as much as you'd love to drown <city>, requires absurd amounts of work.

[atlantas]

Then we need to remove the 15 year delay. It's not a law of the universe that it needs to be that slow.

[fulafel]

It's a relatively new development that solar and wind are so cost effective, even though nuclear had a decades long head start and enormously more taxpayer subsidies over decades and decades. Maybe it's not a law of the universe, but there is a lot of experience showing it's slow, risky and expensive.

[Archelaos]

> Anyone going on about the climate and refuses to put nuclear energy at the forefront of the conversation is unserious and is only interested in virtual signaling in my opinion.

In my eyes, this is a very indecent way to express ones own position. The discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear energy is not conducted lightly. Nuclear energy has a long list of casualties and severe environmental damage. Nevertheless, I do not imply a priori that anyone who argues in favor of nuclear energy is frivolous; and I expect the same respect in reverse.

[hutrdvnj]

> Anyone going on about the climate and refuses to put nuclear energy at the forefront of the conversation is unserious and is only interested in virtual signaling in my opinion.

I think it is unserious to call every other solution other than nuclear energy unserious in a climate discussion. Germany, for instance, has very serious discussions on climate neutrality without nuclear energy.

[shawabawa3]

Germany has been burning more and more coal since shutting down their nuclear plants in favour of renewables

What a great green strategy that was

[Archelaos]

This is not true. The agreement between the federal government and the energy supply companies to phase out nuclear energy dates back to 14 June 2000. The first nuclear power plant was shut down permanently in Nov. 2003. At this time the power generation from coal (both hard coal and lignite) was around 300 TWh/year. It almost halfed to 162.6 TWh in 2021. The all time low was in 2020, though, due to the pandemic.

For details of Germany's energy production and consumption since 1990 see: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

[yreg]

You are right to correct the GP.

Imagine the lives that could be saved if they replaced the coal with renewables first and phased out nuclear second.

[shawabawa3]

sorry you're correct i was inaccurate.

Coal has only increased in 2021, but fossil fuels have increased since 2002 (from 69.9GW to 78.9GW), i misremembered that statistic as coal instead of fossil fuels

[Archelaos]

The consumption of natural gas itself has indeed increased. But the sum of natural gas + coal has still decreased a lot. From aprox. 350 TWh per year in the early 2000s to 251,6 TWh in 2021. The partial replacement of coal by natural gas is at least in part caused by the transition to renewable energies. Until the transition is complete, natural gas is the best fossil fuel option to even out fluctuations in the production of renewable energy, because gas power plants can be switched on and off very quickly at peak times (in strong contrast btw to nuclear power plants) and they can be built relatively decentralized, each with a small volume. Therefore it is not likely that we will see a major drop in natural gas consumption in Germany in the next two decades.

[MagnumOpus]

> gas power plants can be switched on and off very quickly at peak times (in strong contrast btw to nuclear power plants)

Not true - from the wiki: Modern nuclear plants with light water reactors are designed to have maneuvering capabilities in the 30-100% range with 5%/minute slope, up to 140 MW/minute. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and so participate in the primary and secondary frequency control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant

[phicoh]

That's wrong. Germany was significantly reduced the amount of electricity from coal over the last decades.

Renewables have picked up both the reduction in coal and the reduction in nuclear power.

[shawabawa3]

Sorry I misremembered the statistic. They've been reducing coal usage slightly over the last 20 years, but burn 50% more natural gas. overall energy generation from fossil fuels is up over the last 20 years (since their first nuclear plant was shut down)

[phicoh]

According to https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

total amount of fossil fuel use for electricity went down.

[shawabawa3]

I was looking at capacity not generation

So capacity of fossil fuels went up, but I suppose natural gas shuts down while renewable generation is high so it doesn't use its capacity all the time - my bad

[vaughan]

Discussions…Germany is 10x worse CO2g/kWh than France.

[Archelaos]

The factor for CO2g/kWh in 2017 is lower: between 6.0 and 7.3, depending on what exactly is measured.[1]

However, the absolute numbers for Germany are declining fast as renewable energies are taking hold:[2]

  2017: 485
  2018: 471
  2019: 408 (preliminary)
  2020: 366 (estimated)
  

(In a hurry, could not find newer numbers for France.)

If one looks at the CO2 emissions per capita the gap is not so large. I could not find any new numbers for this either, but in 2018 the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[3]

  France 5.0 
  Germany 9.1  
  For comparison: United States 16.1 
  

If one looks at the timelines, the gap between France in Germany seems to close more or less fast/slowly everywhere.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...

[2] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

[yreg]

Germany is serious at talking about climate but what Germany says (and does) makes little sense unfortunately.

[malka]

yes thanks you so much germany for your wonderful "green" gas plant.

[ZeroGravitas]

How is "people who don't do solution X for climate change are unserious" different from climate change denial exactly?

You're claiming entire governments are proposing and committing to expensive and sweeping actions, but because they've not done X (for possibly several different reasons) you are openly accusing them of not wanting to solve the problem. Why wouldn't they want to solve it? We are spending that money to avoid paying more later aren't we? It is a real problem, right? You think that, and you think they think that, correct? Because if you didn't this would just be climate change denial.

Why can't you just say, "I think X is an important part of solving the problem of climate change". Why does the conversation have to revolve around attacking other people who are trying to solve a problem you appear (on the surface) to agree is a problem?

Oh, just noticed the scare quotes around "climate emergency" in your comment so I guess you don't think its a real problem, you just really want them to use nuclear to solve the problem you don't think exists, which seems odd, but at the same time not unexpected.

[southerntofu]

> Why wouldn't they want to solve it?

Because they're rich as fuck and will never have to care about finding clean water to drink? Because they're profiting directly from destroying our planet, being part of the capitalist establishment? Because the hundred of millions of climate refugees will mostly be from poorer countries, and France will only have to relocate a few coastal cities and deal with more hurricanes? Because they're hopeful their descendants will go pollute Mars thanks to assholes like Bezos/Musk after they're done fucking up Earth?

I'm not defending nuclear energy, far from it. But pretending governments around the planet (except for a few smaller ones) care at all about planet change when all they've done since the 70's (the time we've know this is the most massive/pressing issue for humanity as a whole) is giving away money to the people who destroyed the planet in the first place (green new deal kind of stuff)... that's political denial if you'd like to call it that ;)

We need degrowth immediately. Heavily criminalize planned obsolescence. Outlaw industrial farming. Tax concrete industry 1000% and legalize eco-housing (illegal in France due to housing regulations). Reduce energy/resource waste on all levels and all fronts. That's the only way you can fight climate change. Keeping the same capitalist recipe that produced the disaster and hoping for a different outcome is either naive or manipulative.

[adrianN]

Six new nuclear power plants are most likely not even enough to replace those that will be shut down due to old age in the next decade or two. It's not anywhere near enough to reach climate targets.

[natmaka]

> country is serious about the impending "climate emergency".

France gridpower-related emissions are low, however there was no progress for quite a while: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/court-rules-france...

[tim333]

Serious I'd think would involve a global solution that actually makes a difference. I haven't seen much of that yet. A lot of talk and local restrictions that don't do much while CO2 emissions go up and up.

[tinus_hn]

This is not about climate, it’s about geopolitics and Russian gas.