| > > Land use by all types of energy production is miniscule compared to agriculture, urbanisation and roads > Because until now we've been using power sources with high density. > The largest wind farm to date is Gansu Wind Farwm with planned capacity of 20 GW. I can't find it's total area, but it will have 7000 turbines. Wind turbines need to be about 5 rotor diameters apart, so... That's definitely more than the total area of all nuclear power plants powering France (at 60 GW). > Alta Wind Farm, is the largest in the US and produces 1GW of electricity. It covers an area of 130 square kilometers. Chooz, in France, produces 3GW of electricity, and covers... 2 square kilometers. It's funny how you use some anecdotes while several people have made the calculations for how much percentage one would need. Also if you look at the pictures from Alta Wind Farm for example, it's not like the land between the turbines is somehow lost, there is bushes and trees growing in between (not big ones though as the area seems somewhat like a desert.). Similar if you look at many of the turbines in Denmark or Germany they are on fields with cattle grazing in between. > Same goes for solar. > If you want to convert all of the world to renewables, the are they will cover will be anything but minuscule. > EDIT: and that's before we go into the problems of: > - base load for solar and wind is 0, and the amount of batteries you need to sustain the load is mind-boggling, to say the least The baseload myth again. Can we please just stop it? Yes we need overcapacity or storage, guess what this also applies to nuclear. This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and maintance. The problem of building overcapacity with nuclear is, they are capex driven, so if you don't have them run at max possible prices will be much higher, making nuclear even less viable. > - neither solar nor wind can be load-following Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way. With the current costs (and even more with future trends), it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity. > etc. |
We'll stop it the moment it stops being reality.
> Yes we need overcapacity or storage,
Yes, yes we do. And I've yet to see anyone calculate how much we need of that overcapacity.
When there's no sun, the base load of solar is zero. When there's no wind, the base load of wind is zero.
Worse than that is that it's not an either/or situation. It's not an "either 100% or 0%". It's any value in between. If your wind farm is generating just 20%, it's almost as bad as 0%.
So, you need to have overcapacity for solar (to compensate for no wind). And and overcapacity for wind (to compensate for no solar). And an overcapacity of batteries to compensate for both.
And literally no one is talking about this, and just brushes this aside with "yeah no it's fine".
> This summer France had 40%-100% (the numbers differ I saw 40% in writing but 100% on a French TV channel) of their nuclear power plants down due to heat and mainteance.
Key word: maintenance. This is something you can plan well beforehand (unlike the drops in wind and solar).
Will there be screwups in planning? Yes. Nuclear reactors being down due to heat is not too dissimilar to a hypothetical 10GW battery storage melting from the same heat
> > - neither solar nor wind can be load-following
> Yes and neither can nuclear in any economically feasible way.
I don't think you understand what load following means
> it is much cheaper to build double the amount of renewables than to use nuclear running on some fraction of it's capacity.
Double amount compared to what? Compared to what we have now or compared to the number required to cover all our rising energy needs?