The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase.
I sometimes fantasize about closed loop fully automatic solar PV panels factories that we can build on some remote area, just bring in the raw material and let it auto-expand using the energy it captures. As it grows geometrically at some point we can decide that we no longer want it to grow and start taking out the finished PV panels and installing them everywhere.
Storage for the night probably wouldn't be that much of a problem, not everything needs to work 24/7 and for these things that need to work 24/7 we can use the already installed nuclear capacity and as the energy during the day becomes practically unlimited we can just stor it however we like even if its quite inefficient. With unlimited energy space wouldn't be a problem, we can dig holes and transfer materials into anything we need with the practically free daytime energy.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
It's saying solar + batteries is enough to supply 97% of power cheaper than any other way in sunny locales.
It's possible to get 99.99% of your power with solar + batteries, you'd just need a lot of batteries. The news is that batteries have got so cheap that you're better installing enough batteries to hit 97% and leave your natgas peakers idle 97% of the time. That number used to be a lot lower, and that 97% number will be higher every year.
The other cool thing about that report is that it gives a number of 90% for non-ideal places. Sure solar is cheap in sunny locales, but that solar is cheap in places that aren't sunny is far more exciting to me.
A small amount of other power generation whose output isn't correlated with the sun overhead should do a lot to make the last few percent (which come up when there's many cloudy days in a row) cheaper.
Solar's just knocking it out of the park at this point. Building out anything else new (as in you haven't already started) doesn't really make sense.
That said, using it in aircraft (and a number of boots/submersibles) economically is an unsolved problem, but many other places can use it.
E.g. if a {1 kWh, 1000 cycles} battery costs USD 50 to make, and it's made using electricity that costs USD 0.1/kWh, (USD 50)/(USD 0.1/kWh) = 500 kWh. If it needed more energy than that, they would be getting sold at a loss. As a bonus point, this upper bound naturally includes the entire supply chain including the personal purchases of the people working in the factories that make the batteries, all the way up to any waste from e.g. unnecessary private jet flights made by unwise billionaire owners of the battery companies.
This example battery then allows you to time-shift 1000 kWh of electricity from day to night before it needs replacement or refurbishment.
But note the difference between "energy" and "electricity". This kind of calculation is made more complicated by the actual energies used being quite diverse in cost and type, e.g. Pacific-crossing cargo ships are mostly fossil fuelled, the stuff the mining company uses could be any mix of electric or fossil, the aluminium is extracted from ore electrically but any steel probably isn't, etc.
The ecological cost is also strongly dependent on how far the world has gone in greening itself before that battery was made. The first Li-Ion batteries were made in an industrial base that was mostly fossil powered, new ones in China are made in an industrial base that gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
Large grids, overbuilding renewables, diversity of renewables, short and medium term storage, and load shedding/dynamic pricing are all good starts but IMO won’t be enough— we should scale up nuclear too.
Where we're replacing fossil fuel heat with a heat pump we don't get that efficiency improvement from motors - burning fuel was 100% efficient per se, but the heat pump is > 100% efficient in those terms because it's not making heat just moving it.
Nuclear is much less popular than almost any generation technology, so you're fighting a significant political battle to make that happen.
Reaching current nighttime use with storage and wind and existing hydro looks infeasible, and we need a minimum of twice as much.
Power to gas (and back to power or to mix with natural gas for existing uses) is probably a part of this, but nuclear improves this (allowing there to be less of it and allowing the electrolysis cells to be used for a greater fraction of the day.
Its usage is technically accounted for in fossil fuel extraction numbers, but generally ignored when people are accounting for total electrical generation and the usage of fuels as heat sources.
I suspect you are quoting an EV-only number.
Alternatively, you might be looking at how much electricity demand is expected to increase if we maintain our current trajectory and don’t aggressively decarbonize.
Canada needs between double and triple the electricity generation of today. Canada may not be the best example but there is a lot of uncertainty, especially around climate. it is not unreasonable to expect that places like Europe and India will increasingly add air conditioning, pushing the required grid capacity to double today's.
What are the caveats of your 30% figure?
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-sources/powering-...
Even at the high end efficiency, this is enough that you can burn the gas centrally in a generator, lose 40-60% of it as heat as is standard with fossil electricity generation, lose a few percent more electricity in transmission and still come out ahead overall.
And of course, that's a lower bound as you'd ideally be generating electricity from other sources like solar and wind and battery and keeping the gas generators for when needed, making use of the giant scale gas storage most countries already have.
The scale is such that if we imagine a future with fully electrified cars, the batteries in those cars are more than enough to load-balance the current uses of the grid, and still are enough for the current uses of the grid when those batteries have been removed from the vehicles due to capacity wear making them no longer useful in a vehicle.
The best time for more nuclear power was the 90s, the second best was 10 years ago; unless you have a cunning plan you've already shown to an investor about how to roll out reactors much much faster, I wouldn't hold your breath on them.
This assumes you can do just the condensation during the day— E.g. you are amortizing the electrolyzers capital cost over just times when there is surplus power instead of something closer to 24/7.
With a 5x higher LCOE and lead times of 15-20 years instead of 1-2 for solar/wind deployments, allocating money to scale up nuclear as well will just make the transition happen slower and at higher cost.
Cost is currently $35/kWh, dropping 20% per year.
Total installed system costs— not batteries alone— are estimated at $300B/TWh. So that is on the order of $30T at current prices (some estimates reach to $100T). And of course, these investments don’t last forever— we can’t be kicking 3pc of GDP to storage.
I expect this to improve, but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed.
Similarly, 100 TWh sounds like a huge number, and it is, but it's like the equivalent capacity of one base Model 3 per 6 people globally. It's a lot in absolute terms, for sure, but it's by no means a crazy unachievable quantity of battery for a family of 6 to use.
That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale. More likely is a moderate cost increase, but who knows? Putting all our eggs in the battery storage basket is not great.
Just a few percent more stable base generation in the mix would greatly reduce the amount of storage needed and open more options (e.g making power to gas more reasonable)
It may be cheaper overall; it may not be. But even if you think this is modestly costlier, reducing risk and volatility of outcomes is something that one often chooses to pay for.
Idk, it seems like even pretty pessimistic arguments with frozen costs and early retirements suggest this is cheaper than the numbers you gave.
> That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale.
This strikes me as odd to posit about a technology that has had a steady 23% cost reduction per doubling over the last 6 decimal orders of magnitude.
Replacing it all on a 20 year cadence seems like a reasonable assumption.
Arguments assuming a positive return to scale 4 orders of magnitude out may be true— or may be unduly optimistic. I don’t like to have too much faith extending the lines too far off the right of the graph. When that is required, I want whatever margin and ways to reduce risk as possible: which is why I would like more nuclear in the mix. A grid with 12pc nuclear and the rest renewable (so about 3-4pc of nameplate power nuclear) would require much less over provisioning and storage.
Replacing the whole system every 20 years still seems really wild to me, especially in worlds where price doesn't fall past the cost of maintenance, because the only wear part is the battery, and batteries are modular. We could, sure, I just showed the cost is a fraction of today's energy spend, it just seems really weird not to do something smarter instead.
Yes we can, indefinitely, and doing so saves money relative to fossil fuels (which are currently about $8T/year[0]) and nuclear (which is on the expensive side of electricity compared to fossil fuels anyway).
You're not considering cost.
>Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7
The exact opposite is true. Heating, cooling and car charging are just 3 examples of current loads that burn fossil fuels which are already being demand shifted on an electric grid.
>The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage
Did you assume it was all going to be achieved with batteries? This is a common fallacy perpetuated by nuclear industry propaganda.
350GWh are being built in australia right now with zero batteries, and studies show there is plenty of geography suitable to build plenty more of that around the world.
Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.
>but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed
and there is zero point if the cost is stupidly high (which it is) and we have the imagination to look beyond just batteries as a means of storing power.
Nuclear industry propaganda is alas not capable of such.
The costing mistake people always make is assuming p2g infrastructure can be operated at high duty cycle with an all renewable grid. If you need to amortize the infrastructure over a few hours per day it looks much less favorable. Of course, with a little more stable base generation in the mix, this assumption is less shaky. It doesn’t need to be a ridiculous amount.
More base generation simultaneously makes p2g more reasonable and reduces the total need for it (and total need to overprovision everything else)
And even if one disagrees that a small amount of additional nuclear reduces total system cost, it absolutely reduces systemic risk vs putting all of our eggs in the battery basket.
Pumped hydro is great for Australia, but the capability to increase hydro in most areas is much more limited. We are going to have to mostly do it with batteries and intermediate term storage with p2g.
Adding that as a base input cost too all storage technology just makes the entire enterprise unfeasible.
You also have to answer why this P2G infrastructure should buy your extremely expensive nuclear electricity when renewables and storage delivers way cheaper electricity.
Having a few percent of nameplate power being nuclear means much less total nameplate power, and allows loads like p2g for longer term storage to run more of the day (and means you need to tap the p2g less often, so you can have a -lot- less electrolyzer infrastructure— better utilization and less need).
Diversity of approaches lower risks and may lower costs.
No, you got this exactly the wrong way.
In fact, it was Russia who initially funded European (German) "green" movement, their main purpose was opposing nuclear (by far the greenest elective source of energy, as evidenced by France's carbon footprint), so that Europe (Germany) would get hooked on Russian gas.
The plan worked brilliantly!
But beside this, Germany was leading in the anti-nuclear movement, and finally shut down there last nuclear power plant two years ago. Currently, in Germany, renewable energy sources [1] are around 75% in the summer and and 55% in the winter month. Renewable are growing fast [2].
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart....
[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power_...
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.ht...
Also the initial green movement was not against nuclear power per se but rather a peace movement against nuclear weapons, the concept just expanded over time to cover also civilian nuclear power, notably after Tchernobyl.
In contrast Russia is indeed known to finance both the far left (which has a lot of 'Ostalgia') and far right (whereby nationalism works against Western unity and strength) movements.
Tbf, perhaps that is still an instrinsic problem with nuclear, that it isn't easily ammenable to economies of scale the way solar pannels or fossil fuels are.
Historical evidence therefore rather suggests nuclear isn't economical at any scale once active subsidies are out. Current nuclear power plants under construction in the US or Europe, or recently completed there add more than evidence for high cost and major overruns to the pile.
Of course, one can go all conspiracy and claim that's only because of the deep anti-atom lobby, and because the cheap SMRs have always been torpedoed, or because Thorium molten salt reactors have been secretly killed by the military-industrial complex or whatever.
Occam's razor makes me think though, could it just be that nuclear was, is, and likely, at least for quite a while still, will be just so friggin' expensive that pretty much any "alternative" is more economical?
(back-of-envelope calcs say that if ~1.5GW electric from a new nuclear power plant cost ~20..40G$ to build .. between ~13..28$/W ... solar is <1$/W, there's a lot of spare change for batteries in that. Ok, that's pub talk. Still, if I have influence where my money goes, I'd only grudgingly accept nuclear for base load, subsidised as needed. Economics say, build what's cheap capex to build and then gives zero-opex energy when "running". There's no economic alternative to the "alternatives")
So what? Capitalism doesn't work from any point of view.
(because the German anti-nuclear-energy movement and the rise of the Green party all got kickstarted by the Chernobyl disaster)
I guess you mean stuff like this https://gravitricity.com/ - I believe there's a few old coals mines in Scotland that have (/in progress) been retrofitted as gravity batteries to store renewables which is pretty cool (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yd18q248jo)
Due to that, much of the solar generation can't but be highly local.
I’d love to know how well loaded the lines are and a cost analysis of batteries at every sensible junction. Things like charging batteries close to solar and discharging them at night and having residential batteries to cope with peak demand.
You do t have to handle dubkelflauten because there is still gas capacity and gas can cover the 1% of times that it is necessary.
We also have an entire fleet of them, which lives are easily extended as long as we add for example capacity markets to ensure their survival as renewables push down their capacity factors.
Having some extra power generation capacity means you're not freezing to death in a cold snap or frying all the elderly in a heat wave.
https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schr%C3%B6der-sworn-...
Solar & wind need to be backed by dispatchable power. Nuclear & Coal are not a good fit as they need to run at the same output always. Batteries are good for predictable outages (night time) but not for long periods of cloudy days with no wind. Gas (which in europe comes from Russia) is the only real option.
All in all, it's several things that need to be reinforced. The distribution network needs to be smarter. The energy generation facilities need to be tested through their entire voltage range, so they can be counted upon. And there has to be more voltage inertia available in the network.
And with UPSes that beep when they kick on, it's become very apparent that this happens basically daily during the summer, when power demand for air conditioning is high.
(And a DC grid would be much more difficult to manage: the nice thing about frequency is that it has to be pretty much the same over the whole grid, so it's a useful signal for the balance between supply and demand, while voltage is really quite sensitive to local effects)
Price the ancillary services and you will be swimming in them.
That doesn't sound right to me. In the UK the legal requirement is to be within 1% so between 49.5 to 50.5 Hz.
In operation they aim for tighter than that at +/- 0.2 Hz, so 49.8 to 50.2 Hz, or 0.4%.
I can believe that other countries might have tighter limits but not that much!
> The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase.
What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures.
Yes, sure, nuclear takes 10 years to build, and 10 years ago, people like you were complaining about the same things, and same for 20 and 30 years ago. If we didn't listen to the "it'll take 10 years..." 10, 20, 30 years ago, we'd have a lot more nuclear power now, that also works at night.
And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.
And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.
It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
This largely means we have to build a bit more of each, and store some.
The chances of an entire continent being devoid of wind and solar for an extended period becomes vanishingly small pretty fast.
This needs a better cite.
Someone claiming, there was a day with no wind and no sun in whole north america in the last 30 years?
I wouldn't believe that. But concrete data to have, is of course better than assuming ..
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
[2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf
It goes dramatically up and down on a daily pattern, too.
...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.
Heck, there are companies cleaning up coal plants to use the connection for solar or wind, and that's a lot more expensive than cleaning up an old solar plant.
There are bioremedition techniques used to treat contaminated sites, just as there are similar techniques for toxic metals contamination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation_of_radioactive_...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...
The point being, there are biological processes that address toxic waste.
Further, there are waste issues with pretty much all human uses of energy and resources, including "green" technologies. It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
* https://hamiltonlocke.com.au/unlocking-clean-energy-the-cruc...
The sane approach is to address external costs from the get go, not assert that there are none.
Where do you get this idea from? (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Solar power does not leave us with radioactive waste.
Considering radiation and heavy metals as the same problem because they're both bad for you and involve remediation processes when things go wrong is like treating a lack of seatbelts in cars the same as sugar induced diabetes.
Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive" is lithium deposits come in salt flats, salt flats contain potassium, some potassium is radioactive. But that's already diffused everywhere on the planet making *all life* radioactive well before we arrived in the pre-neolithic.
a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc. Several million line kilometres of environmental radiometric surveying, covering both exploration and industrial settling ponds across many countries. Had a 42 litre crystal pack and spectrometer airborne in Northern India over the 1998 Pokhran-II test series.
> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Try archive.md et al.
See second link:
Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?
Without an abundance of rare earth minerals, renewable energy technologies would not exist in their current form or would be highly inefficient when compared with traditional generation methods such as oil, coal and gas.
Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?
China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.
All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).
I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.
Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.
Even when it's cloudy there's still light, it's not as if it's pitch black when there's clouds, what do you think is illuminating everything still?
But efficiency in solar panels needs to increase, which is happening.
We have plenty of oil and gas (normal and fracking). We have just convinced ourselves its better to leave it in the ground and pay foreign countries instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The energy crisis in Europe is a self-inflicted wound.
Europe is deindustrializing. Especially Germany, the EU economic engine, has been hit hard. So yes, the word crisis is used correctly here.
> For instance, BASF, a global chemical giant, recently announced plans to downsize its operations in the country with the reason being unbearably high energy prices in Germany. Now, the company is shifting its focus toward expanding its production efforts in China and the U.S. to access more stable energy costs. Germany’s prime power- the Automotive industry, is also struggling due to immense pressure caused by rising energy costs. A recent study revealed that energy costs for Germany’s automotive sector increased by 20% in 2022 and a similar trend followed in 2023. https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/
Ok, I'll bite, name 3 collapsing industries - on the verge of extinction due to rising energy prices - that could be fixed by building highly-polluting power generators ASAP?
Steel.
Anything chemical. We already lost half our production. :o
You should read some financial newspapers. Things are really bad.
There's no strong deterrent there. These plants don't blow up like nukes, or even Chernobyl. Nuclear disasters require very precise conditions to sustain the chain reaction. Blowing up a reactor with conventional weapons will spread the fuel around, which is a nasty pollution, but localized enough that it's the victim's problem not the aggressor’s problem.
Why do you even mention transformers and cables as an implied alternative to nuclear power plants? Power plants absolutely require power distribution infrastructure, which is vulnerable to attacks.
From the perspective of resiliency against military attacks, solar + batteries seem the best - you can have them distributed without any central point of failure, you can move them, and the deployments can be as large or small as you want.
(BTW, this isn't argument against nuclear energy in general. It's safe, and we should build more of it, and build as much solar as we can, too).
I recall hearing in school that 9-11 masterminds had considered planes against nuclear power plants but abandoned it after doing the math and realizing that it would do little damage. Not sure how true that is admittedly.
this argument relies on the false-but-widely-held idea that "natural resources" are commercial wealth and if you don't hold them you are poor. Look at Japan, has very limited natural resources and not hippies but has built a world-class economy on knowledge work. Look at resource rich 3rd world countries, why are they poor?
If Europe needs oil, they can buy it, it's completely fungible and sold at auction in huge volumes every day. The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument, not the "we don't have our own oil" fallacy.
“Look at Japan”. Ok, let’s look. They attacked the US in 1941 because of the US oil embargo. Their current situation is predicated on the US continuing to be the world’s policeman, ensuring that shipments get from point A to B. There will come a time when that assumption will not hold.
Things change.
That didn't end well when the oil and gas supplier decided to invade Europe. They even run clips showing how Europe will freeze in the winter and be poor if keep supporting the invaded ally.
Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvdBzZVVovc
If EU wasn't heavily invested in green tech and efficiency, the Russians film might have had become a reality.
Just use the fusion in the skies.
I think we cannot buy oil and gas only from sane countries or we would already.
How can you regain sovereignty? Installing solar and heat pumps is part of this process.
I hate this argument. Why should one care about global warming in order to switch to solar? It just makes sense economically. Even if you think that the world is flat, solar energy is still cheaper than anything else.
You say "OK, Joe thinks the Earth is flat but he should still use Solar" and Joe doesn't follow. Joe's number one news source is "Jenny Truth Sayer" on TikTok and Jenny just told him that the solar panels attract Venusian Space Clowns, and he has to smash them with a hammer or else his genitals will explode
There are greedy assholes for whom it doesn't matter why the line is going up. But it turns out they don't like wind or solar because they're too democratic. Those assholes are - like most capitalist asshole, used to a system where you own stuff (a mine, a well, a pipeline, a ship) and you get infinite money, but newer systems aren't about owning stuff. You can't own the sunlight, or the wind, well then it's no good is it? The big oil companies stepped back from "We're part of the transition" and doubled down on fossil fuels, because that means more money for them, and if we all die well, too bad.
Marginal pricing seems to be a large part of the problem when the general public do not see the benefit of this green revolution that's been going a long time.
In the UK part of the payment is for social/environmental factors. It's about time the state awarded people that have already done that instead of paying marginal prices.
The joke is that the LCOE of solar is "Infinity / kWh" at night if the battery is empty, "-Infinity / kWh" at noon if the reservoir is full, and "NaN / kWh" when there is not enough câbles.
That being said, the answer to "which carbon -light electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
I, too, long for the days where we have batteries massive enough to not even care any more.
This is no longer true.
Storage has become a lot cheaper very rapidly. The LCOE of solar with storage covering the night is now competitive.
Solar+storage : from 50$/MWh to... 131$/MWh !
Go make a decision with something like that.
The trend is clear, for sure, and it will make sense to extrapolate... Up to a point, as usual. (baring one of the "breakthroughs" that make it to the HN top page on e in a while and never materialize... Sigh)
“For the first time, solar was the largest source of electricity in the EU last month, supplying a record 22 percent of the bloc’s power.”
Great result, but not “biggest source of power” yet.
For example, you can run a boiler to do electricity and/or district heating. Very common in Sweden for example.
EU is ahead of China and US.
EU June Solar power generated 22.1% of EU electricity (45.4 TWh)
China April solar power generated 12.4% of electricity (96 TWh)
US March solar power generated 9.2% of electricity
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/wind-and-solar-gener...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/fossil-fuels-fall-be...
e.g. The UK grid fluctuates between 25% and 75% renewable. That only works because there is significant gas capacity on hand plus France nuclear and Norway hydro can cover about 15% with interconnects.
Only way to get this even more renewable is with plenty storage (or nuclear if you're of that persuasion)
It ”just” needs to be a magnitude or maybe two more economical.
Context: Nordics, generally electric residential heating via heat pumps, week-long periods of very little sun + wind, typically when it’s the coldest.
In the meanwhile we are rebuilding nuclear.
You mean like OL3 or the political noise with hundreds of billions in subsidies needed to get the projects started?
The plan is essentially locking in energy poverty for generations due to the costs.
Are you not worried about pissing away one of the largest advantages Scandinavia has in cheap electricity? And instead of investing in the future we’re going all in on a dead end industry.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power_...
[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart....
But it's a good step along the way to a headline like the above.
In the winter though... In February there were 7 days where the average we produced was about 2 kWh/day, so I need about 5 times more roof areas and £50k. And that's without a heat pump.
Fortunately we have wind... But even so it's hard to see how we can get away from gas completely without either a lot of nuclear or some crazy changes to the market.
Dams provide most parts of the globe a lot of seasonal storage. It takes the same water if they average 10% over the year or 5% over 9 months and 25% over 3. Similarly, locations for wind farms often vary in the season they provide the most power. So the economic maximum around high solar productivity ends up compensating for it’s lower winter output.
Is this true? I think it's the opposite, that dams and pumped hydrostorage of energy works in a few areas where the geography supports it, but (for example) in the plains of the USA it's not really possible.
Why haven't we built a huge solar farm around the Hoover Dam to pump water back up to Lake Mead insted of letting it flow downstream.
Given how oversubscribed the river water already is, how the river flow rate is steadily diminishing due to increasing temperatures, and the politics involved, even a small or temporary additional reduction in downstream flow would encounter huge opposition.
The northeast and northwest has an abundance of water. Managing total water usage is a large problem for the southwest but there’s many opportunities to do things like evaporation reduction.
Looking at the US most of it is family close to large scale hydropower, except Florida, but it’s a little under 7% of annual power nationwide. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2011.06.10/hydro_pa...
Still, diversity of energy production is a good thing. There's no one silver bullet. Solar + Wind + Nuclear + Fossil + Hydro all have their pros and cons.
In particular, during hot and dry months, Solar will shine while Hydro will be a trickle of power (no pun intended), also affecting Nuclear and Fossil power plants near rivers.
Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
So it is no surprise that renewable energy is showing up as significant these days, particularly when so much manufacturing industry is closed down and exported overseas.
The thing is that China and elsewhere in East Asia are burning those hydrocarbons now, so it is just globalization of the emissions.
Regarding nuclear, the French have been kicked out of West Africa so no cheap uranium for them, paid for with the special Franc they can only print in Paris to obtain as much uranium as they need from Africa.
The solar panels come from China so it is not as if Europe is leading the way in terms of tech.
All Europe government bodies also want the bicycle these days, with dreams of livable neighbourhoods and cycling holidays for all.
I doubt they care for solar panels or the bicycle, however, after the Ukraine crisis in 2022 it must be clear to some in Europe that there are no energy sources in Europe apart from a spot of Norwegian gas. When paying 4x for fracked LNG from Uncle Sam it must be an eye opener to them.
You're overstating this a bit; there is a lot of coal in Europe (natural gas only got ahead of coal in Germany over the last years).
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
Finished products (like cars), some services, bit of tourism? What exactly is the problem here?
Uranium mining in Europe would be perfectly viable, but no one wants to, because modern practices basically ruin groundwater quality for a long time (in-situ leeching). This applies to a bunch of other things, too; hard to justify mining cadmium in the Alps when you can just buy the finished product for cheaper while keeping your local environment intact.
> The solar panels come from China so it is not as if Europe is leading the way in terms of tech.
They used to produce lots of those in Germany-- it's just become way cheaper to buy them from China, especially after local subsidies ran out. You could make an argument that the germans shoulda tried to keep the industry somewhat alive for strategic reasons, though.
It's called "money". Numbers on a screen that you can exchange for goods and services. The people with the oil are typically quite happy to give Europeans that oil in exchange for some European money - and the Europeans don't have to give anything back at all. The exchange has been made.
But if in the future we don't have to buy as much fossil fuel as we do today, it'll probably have sizable effects on our economies.
That's called manufacturing, the best skills in the world. Yeah it's tough work and pay is not brilliant, but when shit happens that's the thing that is going to save EU.
