[macspoofing]

>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close.

So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't?

The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

By the time any new nuclear reactor is designed, built and turned on, we'll certainly have many new/more ways to store energy for longer time (e.g new battery chemistry, hydrogen…).

Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts.

It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…

[melling]

We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-...

Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

> We’ve been BEGGING for more nuclear power for decades.

Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%...

But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options.

I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty.

>The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.

>Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables.

>We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

[melling]

“we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables ”

If this were the case, we wouldn’t be starting all these coal plants.

“Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.”

Yes, so coal, with its large greenhouse emissions, is still used instead of renewables

[macspoofing]

>But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue.

Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?

What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

You write about "massive cultural pressure to move to renewables" but what about all the money to be lost by the fossil fuel industry? Billions of € coming every year in deep pockets weight definitely more than the "pressure" of a Greta, a few Extinction Rebellion members and some ecologists/socialists.

Let's look at the UK, between 2000 to 2021 Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart):

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

UK electricity component of the consumer prices index (in real terms 2010=100): 68.1 to 128.2 (source https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

Can't find the exact same series for France but you can compare the two between 2010 and 2020 here and see a comparable trend: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/d40f8154-...

We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!

[macspoofing]

>Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

Just to get our terms in-line, renewables typically include hydro-electric. Hydro-electric is a great power-source if you have the geography for it. My province of Ontario, between Nuclear and Hydro, pretty much only derives 5% of power from fossil fuels. The problem is, there aren't any more places to dam to generate hydro. So that's done.

And yeah, there is a ceiling on how much wind/solar you can handle as a percentage of your power-mix because you need to rely on base-load to bridge the intermittency of wind and solar. I don't know what that percentage is ... maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 60% - but it's going to be somewhere in that range.

>We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising.

It doesn't matter if they are free! You're not replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar because you still need to run your economy when the sun isn't shinning or the wind isn't blowing. You'll need base-load from somewhere else. Nuclear is actually terrible for that because it can't spin up and spin-down on-demand. Hydro and Natural gas are perfect for that, but like I said, if you don't have the geography for hydro, you're stuck with natural gas.

[photochemsyn]

The 20th century power grid structure - baseload, load-following, and peaker - is decrepit, and this should be more generally understood. It was designed around a few centralized power plants feeding into a large regional grid from which cities and industry would draw power.

Modern electrical grids are powered by a much larger range of primary energy sources, and increasingly have distributed storage and generation as key components. This requires some sophisiticated load-balancing technology, but we're not reliant on engineers throwing switches on a mainboard like it was 1950 and slide rules were in everyone's pockets, are we? For example see:

https://www.nrel.gov/grid/advanced-distribution-management.h...

For example, if solar input to a grid at noon greatly exceeds demand, or there's strong afternoon offshore winds, an advanced grid could instruct all battery storage linked to the grid (in the form of everything from electric cars to home battery systems) to switch to absorbing that output in real-time, while keeping the overall grid energized. The notion that you'd even want a steady state baseload system dumping power into the grid in that situation makes little sense. If the sun goes down and wind dies down, then switch all the battery storage to feed into the grid, on a real-time second-by-second basis. That's how future grids will operate in the absence of either nuclear or fossil fuel inputs.

[thesimon]

> if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?

Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian energy companies. And because Angela Merkel had her constituency in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the landfall site of the pipelines.

And LNG was always associated with fracking in the US, so for environmental reasons it was not very popular.

[macspoofing]

>Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian ene

Yeah - it's always corrupt politicians and big oil, big gas, big whatever. Alternatively, maybe it means that wind/solar cannot meet German energy needs.

And by the way, this isn't just Germany. It's every country that doesn't have access to hydro or nuclear.

[ikt]

> And by the way, this isn't just Germany. It's every country that doesn't have access to hydro or nuclear.

I don't believe Australia plans on going to Nuclear any time soon.

For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Of interest is SA which has a wind/solar/gas mix, Tasmania which is Hydro/Wind, and Vic/NSW/Qld who are all still heavily using fossil fuels.

[macspoofing]

>I don't believe Australia plans on going to Nuclear any time soon.

Yeah, so they'll use natural gas and coal as baseload.

>For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Expand the range to more than a day, and yeah, Gas+Imports(Coal?) is ~40%, so you're stuck on fossil fuels forever.

South Australia is also so small that it's almost pointless to use as a data point.

[rowanajmarshall]

To be fair Germany isn't especially sunny or even _that_ windy. Somewhere like Colorado or Morocco is far more reliable for renewables. Maybe not to the point of baseload, but enough to plan for. So location is really important here.

[kolinko]

Solar is so cheap now that even in Germany it ends up as a cheapest energy source.

[black_puppydog]

> why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come?

German here. Let me tell you that a lot of us have been asking the same question. :)

Your argument seems to be that "they built these pipelines so that must have been a rational decision" but looking at the track record of the conservatives (Merkel's party, "in charge" for 32 out of the last 39 years), their donors, and the just straight-up corruption cases routinely found-and-ignored in this party... I'd say you need to find better arguments.

EDIT: and yes, as siblings point out, their competitor SPD didn't exactly take a rational stance on this either...

[macspoofing]

The point is, it isn't just Germany. There is no country on Earth that actually replaced fossil fuels with wind/solar. The point with Germany is that you guys invested billions into this, and you still are building pipelines for natural gas and buying coal-derived power from your neighbors.

[kolinko]

Wind/solar no, but Iceland is running 100% geothermal - granted it won’t scale to other countries.

[black_puppydog]

"we guys" also had Peter Altmaier, Markus Söder, and all the other Conservative leaders who successfully legislated solar & wind to death.

[macspoofing]

Are you sure you're not just making excuses for the failure of renewables in Germany to replace fossil fuels?

Again, I mentioned Germany, but it isn't just Germany. No country in the world is running on wind/solar. There are no near-term plans for any country on Earth to replace fossil fuels with wind/solar. It isn't the fact that some conservative leaders put some extra taxes or regulations on solar and wind. It's that solar and wind cannot actually replace fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are diffuse, intermittent power sources, with no grid-scale battery technology available to bridge that intermittence. Therefore, you need natural gas to use a base load when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. This is also why natural gas companies tend to be one of the biggest supporters of solar and wind.

[black_puppydog]

Yes, I'm pretty sure. The conservative govts of the different regions introduced legislation that meant you can't currently build wind energy _at all_ in many of the places where it would make sense. That wasn't a fluke; the stated intent was to keep wind energy from "ruining our beautiful landscape". The new (SPD/green/liberals) coalition is just in the process of slowly unwinding these.

For solar, the ministries are by now steeped in a mentality that's hostile to renewables. Robert Habeck (greens) is now minister of economy and ecology, and even when he told his houses to come up with regulation improvements to solar, the results were... weird. One report stated that the proposals included rules like "if I use any of my own PV generated power in my home, I receive none of the regular public subsidies anymore for the power I send into the national grid." There was no technical or logical grounds for that; it was just that all the ministry mentality by now was "if there's a way to put stones in the way of renewables, the default is to do that."

Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are. Like I said in my first reply: find better arguments.

[macspoofing]

>Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are.

I don't take this as rudeness but rather a result of a different worldview.

The disconnect you and I have is that you believe that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. In a universe where that fact is true, the fact that wind/solar hasn't been rolled out would most likely be a result of bad government policy.

I don't believe wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. So the fact that wind/solar haven't succeeded in Germany is perfectly inline with expectations. It wouldn't matter what policies Germany put in, because it isn't possible for wind/solar to replace fossil fuels was never going to work. There was no policy that was going to change the reality of this.

[svnt]

Look up iron flow batteries and other developing solutions. Assuming no one has been working on this problem and that you know more than them is usually a poor choice.

The other countries know that if they hard stop energy flow their economies will suffer, and these projects take a decade to plan, a decade to sell, and a decade to implement. Anything Germany is building now was probably developed or announced in the 00s.