I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
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.
Actually, that report is stronger than you're implying.
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.
> I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
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.
Thats actually not that wrong, because there were contracts between Russia and germany for over then years, where Russia offered very cheap gas for the German industry (Nord-Stream I and II was build for that).
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].
I'm afraid I have to ask here for a citation for your very confident but to my knowledge wrong statement that Russia (I suppose you mean the USSR) financed the green movement in Germany. Russia is equally a builder and supplier for nuclear energy, so makes significant profit on that angle and has no reason to fight nuclear.
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.
Nuclear power is great if you have it. Not even the French seem capable of building new ones at a timescale or cost that is relevant in todays world dominated by renewables together with storage recently kicking into overdrive.
So blowing up their own nuklear power plant in 1986 was a Soviet-Russian plot to make the German Green party popular? I find that a bit hard to believe ;)
(because the German anti-nuclear-energy movement and the rise of the Green party all got kickstarted by the Chernobyl disaster)
Reducing carbon emissions means electrifying a lot of things that were not electric before. We are going to need a lot more base generation than we have now.
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.
More, but not as much more as people often naively expect because it turns out converting liquid fuel into motion by burning/ exploding the fuel isn't very efficient on a small scale whereas electric motors are very efficient, so 1TW year of "People driving to work" in ICE cars does not translate into needing 1TW year extra electricity generation if they have electric cars instead, let alone 1TW year of extra network capacity to deliver it.
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.
One of the bigger other sources of emissions is transport; transport requires some of the electricity is condensed into a portable form regardless of the specifics — batteries, hydrogen, chunks of purified metal to burn, whatever — and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables.
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.
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.
Currently not even the battery capacity is the limiting factor; transmission lines are. The average lead tine to connect your generator to an existing high-voltage transmission line in 12 to 18 months in most of the EU. Building a new line takes years.
Due to that, much of the solar generation can't but be highly local.
I see transmission lines mentioned a lot, but surely keeping the lines we have loaded 100% of the time is part of the equation and batteries can help with that too.
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.
How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.
If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.
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.
I'm more concerned with what happened in Spain recently when solar was peak and they couldn't correct for a voltage oscillation. Power companies keep building solar and wind with grid following inverters so there's very little frequency and voltage inertia if steam turbines aren't running. We need to start legislatively mandating grid forming inverters or flywheels or something that maintains stability or blackouts will be get more and more common as we switch over.
The Spain blackout was caused by a multitude of reasons. Lack of stability was one of the factors, but there were other causes, such as energy generation facilities disconnecting while the oscillations were still under a nominal range, or a generator ordered to become online to induce stability, that started driving the load in the wrong direction. All this was compounded by a distribution network unable to redistribute or at least isolate the problems to individual regions, resulting in a complete blackout.
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.
That is more or less the recommendation from the report, except it wasn't a shortage of intertia, more a shortage of grid voltage control, which current rules prevent renewables from participating in, even if they are capable of it (it's mostly a case of the inverters, not the panels/turbines they draw from. Same with inertia). The blackout was mainly due to a failure of multiple participants in the grid to do what they were supposed to (failing to provide the voltage control it was contracted to do, in one case potentially failing to not drive oscillations into the grid, and failing to remain online within the required voltage range). A lot of the recommendations in the report are 'we should check the plants are up to scratch'.
Yeah, I've seen this with our own solar installation - when the grid frequency dips even a bit, our house cuts itself off from the grid, including whatever power it was feeding back. It seems like a recipe for instability - grid is overstrained, so the frequency dips, and suddenly tons of distributed solar generation drops off and makes the grid even more strained.
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.
The root of the issue here is underinvestment in storage. The weather is unpredictable, but the Sun is not. It doesn't suddenly get vastly brighter. Oscillation occurs within a predictable range. But partially because storage keeps getting cheaper, countries are investing at the bare minimum right now. Why buy $100 worth of batteries today when you can get it for $80 in three years?
> I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
> 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.
I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun.
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.
We will take the day off I guess as we run the critical stuff on nuclear. I don't fancy nuclear because it's too involved, takes forever to build, its a big deal, needs long term planning. I also don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to take care of a nuclear infrastructure that powers the world for generations, disasters will happen. Let's use the quick, simple, safe and unlimited potential. Nuclear has its place for sure though.
> 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.
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.
> In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice.
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.
To be fair, keeping your own resources in the ground as long as possible is often the strategically right move if your time horizon is long enough. It means they will still be there when other world regions run out.
One of the benefits of nuclear, it turns out, is it’s less likely to be bomber than panels, batteries, transformers and HVDC cables. I have no doubt that Europe will monoculture its energy balance again. But that also makes it uniquely easy to bully by military threat, overt or covert.
Why would they be less likely to be bombed? Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant got bombed in 2022.
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).
>In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice
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.
You chose oil for your example, but what about natural gas? If Europe needs natural gas, they can just buy it… and give money directly to their enemy, Russia. Just buying what you need isn’t without second order effects. The second order effects of solar and energy diversification are more palatable than directly funding an enemy.
“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.
> If Europe needs oil, they can buy it, it's completely fungible and sold at auction in huge volumes every day
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.
Energy independence. The US fought wars for oil before fracking. Supply chains are complex and disruptable. Dependence on Russia for fuel leads to... dependence on Russia. Or Iran. Or Saudi. Whatever country it may be, it's dependence, and dependence can always be weaponized. This is pure geopolitics. "You can just buy oil" is deeply foolish.
> The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument
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.
The LCOE of solar/wind is the cheapest but it does not seem to be common knowledge. The lack of common knowledge often is some kind of polarised political beliefs, from what I've seen
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.
LCOE is only fair with storage taken into account, which is hard because storage does not necessarily exist in capacities to make a comparison with non intermittent sources relevant.
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.
Just needs more storage. Europe benefits a lot from diversification and transfers but there are still some pretty wild swings happening.
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)
Important to note that solar achieved this despite having lower capacity factors (~15-25% in Europe) compared to other sources, meaning the installed capacity is likely 3-4x what the headline number suggests.
The transformation paths for Germany show, that they want to dismiss fossil energy sources until 2035. In Germany renewable energy share is around 70%. Last nuclear-power plant was shut down 2023.
The best part is that just a few years ago it was common knowledge that solar would only work in "sunny" parts of the world. Turns out everywhere is "sunny" when panels are cheap enough.
In the summer, yes. Winter... I'm in the UK and my entire roof is solar panels (6.5 kW). I get about 35 kWh a day typically in the summer which is plenty (don't have an electric car or heat pump so usage is 10-15 kWh).
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.
June and July have the most amount of sunlight so that makes sense. The numbers look a bit different in December.
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.
Truth be told, Europe has no energy and it was only with the Ukraine crisis that I realised this. Germany has been turning cheap gas from Russia into expensive cars, glass and chemicals for decades without me noticing that was all the deal was.
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.
> Germany has been turning cheap gas from Russia into expensive cars, glass and chemicals for decades without me noticing that was all the deal was.
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.
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
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.
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
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.
Europe might not have much oil and gas, but the future is in renewables anyways. Western Europe has a lot of wind potential at the coastlines. Northern Europe and the alpine region already mostly run on hydro. Southern Europe has good solar potential. And the continent is very compact, so distributing the electricity can be done quite cheaply, since the distances are small. That seems like a pretty good setup for a clean energy future to me.
I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
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.
According to this in many parts of the world solar + batteries is enough to provide 97-98% of all the electricity 24hr 365 days a year
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
Actually, that report is stronger than you're implying.
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.
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> I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
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!
Thats actually not that wrong, because there were contracts between Russia and germany for over then years, where Russia offered very cheap gas for the German industry (Nord-Stream I and II was build for that).
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_...
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I'm afraid I have to ask here for a citation for your very confident but to my knowledge wrong statement that Russia (I suppose you mean the USSR) financed the green movement in Germany. Russia is equally a builder and supplier for nuclear energy, so makes significant profit on that angle and has no reason to fight nuclear.
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.
Nuclear power is great if you have it. Not even the French seem capable of building new ones at a timescale or cost that is relevant in todays world dominated by renewables together with storage recently kicking into overdrive.
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So blowing up their own nuklear power plant in 1986 was a Soviet-Russian plot to make the German Green party popular? I find that a bit hard to believe ;)
(because the German anti-nuclear-energy movement and the rise of the Green party all got kickstarted by the Chernobyl disaster)
Whether or not this was true historically, its not really relavent now, where the primary green thing is solar which competes with russian gas.
My spidery senses after engaging with online anti-nuclear power propagandists in Sweden: they are still at it.
Reducing carbon emissions means electrifying a lot of things that were not electric before. We are going to need a lot more base generation than we have now.
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.
More, but not as much more as people often naively expect because it turns out converting liquid fuel into motion by burning/ exploding the fuel isn't very efficient on a small scale whereas electric motors are very efficient, so 1TW year of "People driving to work" in ICE cars does not translate into needing 1TW year extra electricity generation if they have electric cars instead, let alone 1TW year of extra network capacity to deliver it.
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.
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One of the bigger other sources of emissions is transport; transport requires some of the electricity is condensed into a portable form regardless of the specifics — batteries, hydrogen, chunks of purified metal to burn, whatever — and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables.
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.
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>we should scale up nuclear too.
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.
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> we can dig holes and transfer materials into anything we need with the practically free daytime energy.
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)
Currently not even the battery capacity is the limiting factor; transmission lines are. The average lead tine to connect your generator to an existing high-voltage transmission line in 12 to 18 months in most of the EU. Building a new line takes years.
Due to that, much of the solar generation can't but be highly local.
I see transmission lines mentioned a lot, but surely keeping the lines we have loaded 100% of the time is part of the equation and batteries can help with that too.
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.
Batteries can’t cover a dunkelflaute that lasts weeks. Like what happened last year (or the year before, not really sure).
How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.
Let's take the worst case scenario and use it as an Argument.
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.
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If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.
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Campaigning for renewables is a literal Russian priority.
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.
Efficiency always matters. There’s always capex, ROI, and alternative opportunity costs for capital
It's OK to be inefficient sometimes.
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I'm more concerned with what happened in Spain recently when solar was peak and they couldn't correct for a voltage oscillation. Power companies keep building solar and wind with grid following inverters so there's very little frequency and voltage inertia if steam turbines aren't running. We need to start legislatively mandating grid forming inverters or flywheels or something that maintains stability or blackouts will be get more and more common as we switch over.
The Spain blackout was caused by a multitude of reasons. Lack of stability was one of the factors, but there were other causes, such as energy generation facilities disconnecting while the oscillations were still under a nominal range, or a generator ordered to become online to induce stability, that started driving the load in the wrong direction. All this was compounded by a distribution network unable to redistribute or at least isolate the problems to individual regions, resulting in a complete blackout.
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.
That is more or less the recommendation from the report, except it wasn't a shortage of intertia, more a shortage of grid voltage control, which current rules prevent renewables from participating in, even if they are capable of it (it's mostly a case of the inverters, not the panels/turbines they draw from. Same with inertia). The blackout was mainly due to a failure of multiple participants in the grid to do what they were supposed to (failing to provide the voltage control it was contracted to do, in one case potentially failing to not drive oscillations into the grid, and failing to remain online within the required voltage range). A lot of the recommendations in the report are 'we should check the plants are up to scratch'.
Yeah, I've seen this with our own solar installation - when the grid frequency dips even a bit, our house cuts itself off from the grid, including whatever power it was feeding back. It seems like a recipe for instability - grid is overstrained, so the frequency dips, and suddenly tons of distributed solar generation drops off and makes the grid even more strained.
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.
The investigation has shown it was in fact nothing to do with renewable energy sources despite the noise made at the time - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-...
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The root of the issue here is underinvestment in storage. The weather is unpredictable, but the Sun is not. It doesn't suddenly get vastly brighter. Oscillation occurs within a predictable range. But partially because storage keeps getting cheaper, countries are investing at the bare minimum right now. Why buy $100 worth of batteries today when you can get it for $80 in three years?
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> I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.
> 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.
I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun.
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.
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We will take the day off I guess as we run the critical stuff on nuclear. I don't fancy nuclear because it's too involved, takes forever to build, its a big deal, needs long term planning. I also don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to take care of a nuclear infrastructure that powers the world for generations, disasters will happen. Let's use the quick, simple, safe and unlimited potential. Nuclear has its place for sure though.
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> 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.
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.
> In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice.
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.
I hope someday the word 'crisis' gets a breather. That poor, abused, overworked and misunderstood word :(
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To be fair, keeping your own resources in the ground as long as possible is often the strategically right move if your time horizon is long enough. It means they will still be there when other world regions run out.
One of the benefits of nuclear, it turns out, is it’s less likely to be bomber than panels, batteries, transformers and HVDC cables. I have no doubt that Europe will monoculture its energy balance again. But that also makes it uniquely easy to bully by military threat, overt or covert.
Why would they be less likely to be bombed? Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant got bombed in 2022.
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).
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Solar plants are fairly resilient to bomb damage: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant...
Bombing solar infrastructure works about as well as bombing a farm. Solar is way too cheap to be worth bombing.
That is true, but I'd rather deal with a busted solar farm than a busted nuclear reactor
>In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice
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.
You chose oil for your example, but what about natural gas? If Europe needs natural gas, they can just buy it… and give money directly to their enemy, Russia. Just buying what you need isn’t without second order effects. The second order effects of solar and energy diversification are more palatable than directly funding an enemy.
“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.
> If Europe needs oil, they can buy it, it's completely fungible and sold at auction in huge volumes every day
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.
Energy independence. The US fought wars for oil before fracking. Supply chains are complex and disruptable. Dependence on Russia for fuel leads to... dependence on Russia. Or Iran. Or Saudi. Whatever country it may be, it's dependence, and dependence can always be weaponized. This is pure geopolitics. "You can just buy oil" is deeply foolish.
We now see it's not sensible to depend on other countries be it for oil, ore, nuclear umbrella or cloud computing providers.
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.
> The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument
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.
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The LCOE of solar/wind is the cheapest but it does not seem to be common knowledge. The lack of common knowledge often is some kind of polarised political beliefs, from what I've seen
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.
LCOE is only fair with storage taken into account, which is hard because storage does not necessarily exist in capacities to make a comparison with non intermittent sources relevant.
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 was true a couple of years ago.
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.
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As is usual in this kind of articles, the headline says “power” where it means “electricity”. FTA:
“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.
I must be missing something, what other type of power would they be referring to when talking about solar?
Power used to drive the wheels of cars & trucks, energy used to heat houses.
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Ember source: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-bigges...
Ember is a better source.
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...
It's crazy that the US generates so little from solar, given the vast sunny deserts they have available.
I think the month matters for this comparison.
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Just needs more storage. Europe benefits a lot from diversification and transfers but there are still some pretty wild swings happening.
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)
> Just needs more storage.
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.
Rebuilding nuclear?
You mean like OL3 or the political noise with hundreds of billions in subsidies needed to get the projects started?
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Important to note that solar achieved this despite having lower capacity factors (~15-25% in Europe) compared to other sources, meaning the installed capacity is likely 3-4x what the headline number suggests.
It also was the hottest June on record for Western Europe: https://climate.copernicus.eu/heatwaves-contribute-warmest-j...
The Copernicus centre is funded by the EU.
The transformation paths for Germany show, that they want to dismiss fossil energy sources until 2035. In Germany renewable energy share is around 70%. Last nuclear-power plant was shut down 2023.
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power_...
[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart....
Still a cherry-picked result, unlike California: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44512968
But it's a good step along the way to a headline like the above.
The best part is that just a few years ago it was common knowledge that solar would only work in "sunny" parts of the world. Turns out everywhere is "sunny" when panels are cheap enough.
In the summer, yes. Winter... I'm in the UK and my entire roof is solar panels (6.5 kW). I get about 35 kWh a day typically in the summer which is plenty (don't have an electric car or heat pump so usage is 10-15 kWh).
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.
The only thing that turns in this conversation is Earth and solar output in December would slightly differ.
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June and July have the most amount of sunlight so that makes sense. The numbers look a bit different in December.
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.
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Truth be told, Europe has no energy and it was only with the Ukraine crisis that I realised this. Germany has been turning cheap gas from Russia into expensive cars, glass and chemicals for decades without me noticing that was all the deal was.
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.
> Germany has been turning cheap gas from Russia into expensive cars, glass and chemicals for decades without me noticing that was all the deal was.
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.
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
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.
Absolutely, and buying fossil fuel has definitely been working, and it'll probably continue to work.
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.
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?
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.
Europe might not have much oil and gas, but the future is in renewables anyways. Western Europe has a lot of wind potential at the coastlines. Northern Europe and the alpine region already mostly run on hydro. Southern Europe has good solar potential. And the continent is very compact, so distributing the electricity can be done quite cheaply, since the distances are small. That seems like a pretty good setup for a clean energy future to me.
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The title should say electrical grid power. I'm willing to bet diesel was still the number one generator of all power.