Comment by pzo
5 months ago
but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany).
And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
A look at destatis tells me something else for Germany (in 2024): Solar has a share of 15 %, and wind 28 %. In total 57 % of the produced energy comes from renewable sources. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...)
They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).
They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.
In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.
An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.
I really want to see a heat pump being used to make a real world high temperature process more efficient and cut natural gas use by 40% or so, this might destroy the latest talking point
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I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.
60% of that energy is lost as waste heat and doesn't need replaced as we decarbonise and electrify.
For already developed nations predictions are for electricity to double but energy use to halve at the same time as they electrify end uses.
Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.
I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail
Apart from cities with crazy density, you underestimate how much solar we could put in the city outskirts, and it would be fine. We have already the power lines anyway to bring electricity from power plants that are far from those apartments you mention.
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Take all the land area that we currently devote to oil extraction, refining, delivery, etc.
Just that tiny amount of land is enough to supply the entire world's energy needs, if covered with solar panels.
Power line transmission losses are negligible. We don't need to put solar directly at the site, just as we don't need to put nuclear directly at the site of energy use. The round trip efficiency of energy storage is accounted for in the cost of the storage, whether that storage is hydro, battery, or hydrogen.
Solar really is the holy grail of energy: super cheap, super scalable big, super scalable small, and highly distributable or centralized. Pair that with the incredible cheapness of current batteries, and their falling prices in future years, and we are looking at a future of incredible energy abundance. As long as we are willing to accept it.
Nuclear by itself isn’t either. A balanced mix is needed.
Yes, but all that can be taken into account in the analysis, and renewables and storage have become so cheap they're now the superior option.
Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations. I wonder if some of the reactionary takes trying to promote nuclear are a consequence of that. I think you're average far right type is not going to be comfortable living in a relative energy ghetto.
> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.
Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).
Global solar potential atlas:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
Solar is the current cheapest and will be the biggest source of electricity in 2033 and continue to accelerate away from others for the rest of the century.
Offshore wind helps their situation somewhat.
I was talking about the situation once fossil fuels are no longer used ("in a renewable powered world" was the relevant phrase). We are not yet in that situation, so your observation there is beside the point.
During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.
Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.
I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
Existing nuclear, fine but new nuclear isn’t going to work, it takes way too long to build. Solar is just plug in and go.
Have you ever heard of batteries?
Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.
Which is why you don't use batteries (at least, Li-ion batteries) much beyond diurnal storage. Systems analysis for renewables that assumes batteries are the only storage mode requires massive overbuilding of solar/wind, and this strawman engineering makes the nuclear alternative appear more competitive than it actually would be.
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https://www.tesla.com/megapack
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Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.
Even if you can't get to 100%, it would still make sense to strive for as large a % of renewables as you could achieve. So, that's going to involve batteries necessarily.
For context I work at a company in Japan working on this problem. The entire reason the company exists is Japan's energy policy in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Batteries are severely underutilized in Japan at this point in time, so we can at least vastly improve on where we are.
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https://www.tesla.com/megapack
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