[belorn]

Sweden is currently going through an election year and its very clear how different the energy discussion is compared to HN. At one side you got parties advocating nuclear, and on the green/far left side the advocacy is wind and thermal power plants fueled by fossil fuels.

We used to have a battery developer, but they went instant bankrupt when the almost exclusive funding through government subsidizes stopped. They even rejected an offered loan from the government as not being what they wanted.

There is zero party platforms advocating for wind and batteries for weeks/months long storage. No party advocating a overprovisioning of solar either, possible because output during worst winter month generally reaching single digit percent.

The only political platforms that exist currently are either wind and thermal power plants to burn fuel during non-optimal weather conditions, or to expand the nuclear fleet, and it seems fairly similar when you look at other nearby European countries. Batteries are used as a grid balancer when switching between different form of production, but not as a replacement for the natural gas which is the primary form of fuel being burned in the thermal power plants. Election prediction is that voters are going to demand that construction of something is getting started as the Iran war is likely to trigger new spikes in fossil fuel prices, and thus this will be one of the major issues for the election. Other European countries will likely see similar election debates.

The consumption numbers for the worst month is a bit over 16 000 GW/h of electricity, with a steady growth each year (despite the transport sector being quite slow to electrify), and for a seasonal battery storage you would likely need capacity a few times of that. I would welcome it if a political party would adopt such strategy however, if nothing else because then we would have an alternative to the current two strategies being debated. They could calculations on what it would cost, either by buying it from china or building the production domestically.

[leonidasrup]

Have you looked into CAPEX and OPEX costs of seasonal battery storage? If it's more expensive than nuclear, then it's not an alternative.

[belorn]

Thats seems to be the logical conclusion and explanation why battery and solar are not an option for central/northen part of Europe, despite how panels and batteries are dropping in price. The reason why the only two debated options are nuclear or a combination of wind and natural gas, is that any other alternative is prohibitively expensive. With natural gas becoming a geopolitical and environmental impossibility, that then leaves only one option left for grid growth and expansion, but politically that is a hard pill to take so the debate rages on despite there being no other realistic option.

[leonidasrup]

It's politically a hard pill and debates rage because for multiple decades many German politicians said that the nuclear phaseout will not be coupled with large costs and the increased consumption of natural gas will be just temporary. It's very hard for an politician to say I made a grave error and you all will carry the consequences.

Germany has directly funded anti-nuclear groups in other European countries.

https://www.ege.fr/sites/ege.fr/files/media_files/German_Int...