[mschuster91]

> And I am not sure the renewable build-up is fast enough to replace hydrocarbon burning, especially since it also has an availability problem.

It absolutely is. Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind combined, so over a year the equivalent of a dozen average large scale NPPs.

Even accounting for the availability problem, aka capacity factor (wind ~0.3-0.5, solar .25), that's the equivalent of four NPPs a year. The rest? Can easily be covered with a combination of hydro, geothermal, massive grids and dynamic load management (both on the demand side aka load shedding and on the source side aka powerwalls with feedback capability).

[nickpp]

> Germany is building about 1.5GW a month of solar and wind

I root for them to succeed. I do love renewables. But I know that in my country at least the waiting time today for panel purchase, installation and grid connection is over a year. However they are subsidized by the state so that adds time and bureaucracy.

The rest… I have my doubts: it’s all ideas but little reality. We’ll see in about 5 years time, I guess.

[hef19898]

The demand side became pretty proficient regarding load shedding as well, making literally millions off of it.

[mschuster91]

Meh, a lot of heavy industry is still running on machines from the 60s. Incentivising them to upgrade their old crap to modern times would cost them billions (which is why they've been dragging their arses so long), but it would bring a lot of consumption savings and flexibility to the grid.

[hef19898]

I personally knownof three energy hungry places, two former employers and and one nearby, that runs those really old machines (chemical plants from before the war, WW1 in one case, graphite production of the same age and paper machines at pretty old sites) that are perfectly able for almost a decade now to adapt their production, within certain limits of course, to provide load balancing. They even go as far as adapting production to electricity prices in the spot market and speculate with their long term contract volumes. Litterally making millions, to the point production for zhe waste bin is almost profitable (which renders the whole sustainability angle moot, but I digress).

Morw of that, some storage, bio gas and hydrogen peaker plants, geo thermal and renewables and we are good to go.

[mschuster91]

> plants from before the war, WW1 in one case

JFC. I get why this is profitable, these machines have been written off financially a century ago and have been money printers ever since for that reason, but this kind of behavior should be seriously penalized - it makes competition for new companies really hard (because they have to pay down the value for new machines), and it's bad for the environment as a whole because if they're still running the same motors and control units from back then, then they are wasting a lot of electricity, most likely also emit a lot more toxic effluents than a plant with modern emission controls and mitigations would, and most likely run at lower yield rates than modern processes so they're wasting more raw materials.

[hef19898]

The machines were old, control equipement was / is newish. The same stuff would be impossible to produce on new plants in Germany, environmental restrictions are too strict. Kazachstan, India and China are the places to go. And even China didn't want that dirty shit anymore. The old sites work because they operated for ages.