Energy would be so abundant it’d be free, if we’d done Fusion 50 years ago.
Nah. They would be 50-60% cheaper if;
- They required the choice between two different administrators.
- They were ran as non profit (private equity is ruining utilities currently).
They required the choice between two different administrators.
Most US states have this. They mandate you can choose your energy provider.
Lol my state is one! Except it’s only offered to commercial customers. Both electric and gas offer no choice for residential.
L-o-fucking-l
Edit: seems a lot of states don’t offer electric choice for residential.
National Grid is still cheapest for me. Womp womp.
Wish mine was one.
Clearly this sub haven’t seen this video from Technology Connections. It breaks it all down for you step by step why the statement is true.
Its still crazy how great solar can be when doing the maths based off his states solar farms. Imagine how great the numbers would be if the sunny parts of the world did solar too
I’m not gonna watch the full hour and a half, but I skimmed through to make sure his message was at least mostly consistent. This guy is talking about renewable energy for cars and vaguely extrapolates that to all energy requirements.
Doing a quick Google search came up with 2.2-5.2 trillion watt-hours as the amount of energy needed if all US vehicles were electric. Currently the US generates ~11 trillion watt-hours per day so this would increase that amount ~20-50%. In this video the guy mentioned a 27 megawatt solar farm (~130-150 MWh/day), but a large coal plant generates 15-24k MWh/day (500-1000 MW instantaneous).
The US currently has ~12.5k utility scale electric power plants, to replace those with solar and switch all cars to electric you would need ~2-2.5 million solar farms the size represented in the video.
The industry standard is that each megawatt a solar farm is rated takes 5-10 acres. For nuclear that value is ~0.8 acres/megawatt and for coal it’s ~0.64 acres/megawatt. While large power plants generate ~500-1000 MW they vary in size dramatically so the actual average is closer to 50 MW per plant. By that math, the current total land for existing plants should be ~400,000 acres but the equivalent if we switched to 100% solar power would be 270-675 million acres of land.
I’m not saying that renewables are bad or that we shouldn’t pursue them, I’m also not arguing that we should all hold on to gas burning cars, but there is not compelling enough evidence that switching to 100% renewable energy would be cheaper.
EDIT: The estimates here don’t include things like the coal mines included in them but it also doesn’t take into account the production of panels, batteries, or the component materials in either of them such as lithium mines. I think solar probably wins out when comparing just that side, but their land usage alone likely tips things.
Okay, so I’ve double-checked all the most important numbers you’ve used. One thing I’ve noticed is that Alec compared the land-use of ethanol and solar power, but our fuel is only 10% ethanol. Even then though that doesn’t explain the whole number you got to.
By that math, the current total land for existing plants should be ~400,000 acres but the equivalent if we switched to 100% solar power would be 270-675 million acres of land.
With 270 million acres, and 1mW for every 10 acres, that’s 27 million mW (648 trillion Wh a day). Far more than what you say is needed for all cars to be electric. At some point you must have swapped to the goal of meeting America’s entire electricity demand with solar. Even then though …
America consumes 25,000tWh of energy per year (about 7Twh per day, or 3Tw). 27 million mW is 27tW.Even with 10 acres per mW, we’d only require about 30 million acres to meet the entire country’s energy with solar (which happens to be exactly the same as the amount of land we spend on ethanol).You should really double-check your math.
EDIT: 30-35 million acres is still correct, but my working is wrong. I made two mistakes that cancel each-other out. See https://aussie.zone/post/29798627/21519669
EDIT: I basically skipped over your 3rd and 4th paragraph, but what is that nonsense math your doing? I didn’t even bother trying to comprehend it because it was so nonsensical, but what in the actual hell were you trying to do there.
Okay, so I’ve double-checked all the most important numbers you’ve used. One thing I’ve noticed is that Alec compared the land-use of ethanol and solar power, but our fuel is only 10% ethanol. Even then though that doesn’t explain the whole number you got to.
As I said in my post, this guy is talking about fuel for cars, not the entire power usage
With 270 million acres, and 1mW for every 10 acres, that’s 27 million mW (648 trillion Wh a day). Far more than what you say is needed for all cars to be electric
I basically skipped over your 3rd and 4th paragraph
That is literally what I said in paragraph 3 “The US currently has ~12.5k utility scale electric power plants, to replace those with solar and switch all cars to electric you would need ~2-2.5 million solar farms the size represented in the video.”
America consumes 25,000tWh of energy per year (about 7Twh per day)
My research said the US produces 11 trillion Wh per day and said that if all US vehicles were electric it would require 2.2-5.5 trillion Wh more per day. Looking at consumption is important, but looking at production is more accurate. Some electricity is sold or wasted, but that’s to ensure demand is met when the grid sees a spike in usage.
27 million mW (648 trillion Wh a day)
You must have skipped paragraph 2 as well. A 27 MW solar plant is rated as such because that is the maximum instantaneous power outout, but most places only have ~16 hours of sunlight and won’t be running at 27 MW for all 16 hours. As such a 27 MW solar farm will only make ~130-150 MWh/day.
Okay, lets redo the math with your new numbers.
- 11TWh (+6TWh) per day production.
- Average of 1/5 of maximum output (27MW * 24 = 648 MWh per day. 648 / 130 = factor of 5).
- 1 MW per 10 acres of solar power (It’s 27MW on 120 acres at the DePue site)
- 270-675 million acres.
Now lets get all the units into average MW
- 700,000MW needed (17TWh per day = 0.7 TW average)
- 0.02MW per acre. (1MW / 10 / 5 = 0.02MW average)
That means 35 million acres. Now I’m going to post this immediately before double-checking my math previous maths, because this number should be about 10 times higher than my previous answer based on the numbers you’ve given me. Did I overestimate the land required in my first reply?
EDIT: Found my problem.
America consumes 25,000tWh of energy per year (about 7TWh per day, or 3TW)
7TWh per day is not 3TW, it’s 0.3TW.
I worked the problem a different way, first of all I evaluated both ends of both spectrum (2.2-5.2 trillion for adding cars to get the number of solar farms needed and 5-10 acres per MW rating, this is how I built my range). I believe I have an error in the number of solar farms needed (2-2.5 million farms in my original post), but I have not been able to replicate my math that got me the error. I made this post in sections and at some point realized that 27 MW doesn’t make 648 MWh, but I might have missed switching it out somewhere to get the math I got.
Rerunning the math I took the amount produced and needed (~17 trillion Wh) and divided it by the production for one 27 MW site (150 MWh) to get the number of plants and then multiplied that by 27x10.
17x10^12 / 150x10^6 x 27 x 10 = 30,600,000 or 30.6 million acres.
All that aside we are still talking about 75x more land usage before we talk about time zones, day night cycles, distribution of the panels, etc. The big counterpoint that people seem to have is batteries, but we already use batteries and the amount more we would need to provide 24 hour coverage with just solar would be astonishing.
Market forces push business decisions, the only way solar power would be cheaper for the consumer is if it was also cheaper for the business. If solar was realistically cheaper then power production facilities then corporations would be switching to it and probably not drop our end costs because that would just be extra profit. Whether it’s a lack of battery capability, unattainable capital costs, lack of reliability, or something else at play, solar power would not be cheaper for the end user or else corporations would be switching to it.
EDIT: Good work on your math.
As per the video, 30 million acres of land is used to grow ethanol that is mixed into petrol. We could replace every car in the country with electric, and power our entire electricity grid with solar power, with that land. Solar farms are less destructive to the land than corn farming so even if replacing all that farmland with solar panels only provided enough power for electric cars, it would still be a positive in terms of land use.
75x land use is as compared only to power-plants. If I go swimming tomorrow I’ve 999999x’d my shark attack risk. And as a share of America it’s only 1-2% of the total area of the United States (to power the entire country) and can replace all the corn ethanol crops to a net environmental benefit.
As for batteries, they are recyclable (as the video goes into). They do add to the cost of renewables but not so much that they cancel out having to constantly mine coal and set it on fire to never be used again. There are wind turbines which even out the duck curve, but in this thought experiment the entire country is going solar powered only.
As for why business leaders aren’t investing in renewables, I need to make an important distinction. Renewables aren’t the “cheapest form of power generation”, they are the “cheapest form of new power generation”. It is cheaper to keep running existing gas-fired and nuclear power stations until they reach EOL than it is to tear them down prematurely and replace them with solar. A large number of power stations are rapidly reaching EOL and it’s very important that we don’t build any more coal-fired power plants right now (due to an explicit government policy of burning more coal, perhaps). Each one we build will last 50-100 years and be cheaper to keep running than replace with renewables.
30 million acres of land is used to grow ethanol that is mixed into petrol
The majority of ethanol based crop production comes from growing corn in the Midwest, specifically Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana. Ranked by population density that’s:
- Nebraska #43
- Kansas #41
- Iowa #36
- Missouri #28
- Indiana #17
- Illinois # 12
By percentage of the US population that’s
- Nebraska @ 0.5%
- Kansas @ 0.8%
- Iowa @ 0.9%
- Missouri @ 1.8%
- Indiana @ 2%
- Illinois @ 3.7%
There are practical reasons why we typically try to generate power close to where it will be used. Yes, theoretically you can realistically supply power up to 3000 miles away, but most power plants only provide power to around 500 miles away. Yes we could cover the Corn Belt with solar panels and then wire it to the coasts, but doing so has it’s own risks and drawbacks. Ethanol agriculture makes sense where it is because the population density is so low and both corn and ethanol can be shipped with relatively low loss.
As for batteries, they are recyclable (as the video goes into). They do add to the cost of renewables but not so much that they cancel out having to constantly mine coal and set it on fire to never be used again
I’m not arguing that they aren’t recyclable but rather they aren’t accessible at the volume needed. A quick google search said that current utility scale battery storage exceeds 26 GW (10^9), but only represents 2% of total generating capacity. To provide power for approximately half the day, based on our previous math, we would need need ~7x10^11 W.
Just so my math is clear from the beginning, 17x10^12 W / 2 (half the day) / 12 (hours per half day) = 7x10^11 W of battery which is 27 times more than we currently have.
Renewables aren’t the “cheapest form of power generation”, they are the “cheapest form of new power generation”. It is cheaper to keep running existing gas-fired and nuclear power stations until they reach EOL than it is to tear them down prematurely and replace them with solar. A large number of power stations are rapidly reaching EOL and it’s very important that we don’t build any more coal-fired power plants right now
I think this is a fair and nuanced point. In my opinion the solution is not one singular option, such as 100% solar, but a mix of options which might include some percentage of non-renewable energy. I think reduction of non-renewable should be the goal, but switching 100% to renewable does not seem feasible to me.
stop using chat gpt to argue
stop using chat gpt to argue
I’ve never used ChatGPT in my life, you can shove your accusations where the sun doesn’t shine.
This conversation chain is hilarious. The guy in the video does a great job, but you don’t want to watch 90 minutes - then watch the first 30 minutes at the very least without skimming. Okay, but then I see you go do long replies - how long did all of that take you in total? an hour? 90 minutes? for what? But it appears that you prefer it presented as a Coles notes version so maybe you learn differently.
To put it in simpler terms for those that still haven’t gotten it, if you were min-maxing for the long game, which one would ultimately come out on top? You must consider the cost of not only capital, but also environmental impacts and how this will affect the general economy as as a whole (agriculture for example rely on stable weather patterns). I am sure the long view is to go for the one that is long term sustainable with minimal drawbacks.
The only common ground that we can agree on is that the best we can do right now is to have a hybridized system. But we need to start transitioning where possible - and fast. The solar tech mentioned in the video has vastly improved since its inception. This isn’t going to happen overnight, nor in 5 years or 10 years. This is an ongoing project for humanity as a whole. Producing usable and store-able energy without killing ourselves in the long term is one of the biggest hurdles we have to face as humans.
Your maths is wrong.
Here is a video that corrects and explains why Solar is, even in the northern climate, far more economical then your incorrect calculations show
You literally just reshared the same video the guy I’m responding to shared in the post I am responding to. Obviously you didn’t read anything.
Ironic
- The video:
- The video literally goes over the numbers in worst case scenario for solar and still comes out ahead, while also going through a bunch of mistakes that people make and deconstructing the gotchas along the way.
- Your comment:
- Saying you weren’t going to watch the full video
- Skimmed some of it and took some numbers and made mistakes
- Someone else:
- Links to the video you skipped that would have gone through your mistakes before you commented.
- Your response:
- This is the same video
YES! It already goes over the mistakes you were making.
On a side note, this was probably the best video I’ve seen in the last 12 months.
I thought it would be a nice and nerdy breakdown of solar panels, but the more I watched the better it got.
For those who did watch it: wow what a whiplash!
Yeah, the video is 1.5 hours long. I don’t care how good you found it to be, I’m just not going to watch that long of a video, you need to convey what is important in the video through written dialogue or else you may as well not use it. While I did make a mistake in my math my fundamental point is still true, the video’s point was entirely based on scaling renewable power usage for cars to all power usage and the math just doesn’t provide a sound basis for it.
I’m just not going to watch
Or …. The extra electricity needed for EVs is zero or maybe even negative. Except for batteries, power is not dispatchable. Power plants can’t react to the amount of power needed at any time and they get inefficient trying. If we had a way to charge when supply is greater than demand, we can not only make use of previously wasted power but even make power plants more efficient by giving them steadier demand
The extra electricity needed for EVs is zero or maybe even negative
That’s unlikely to be the case, the US already does use batteries in power production and the amount more we would need to switch all US power to solar would be astonishingly high.
Power plants can’t react to the amount of power needed at any time and they get inefficient trying
They can’t react in the minute by minute basis, but they do react to usage. Most coal fired plants only operate at about 50% capacity most of the time and bring on reactors to match the predicted power usage curve. When building a power curve profile the power company typically takes into account constant power as a baseline (solar and hydro being always on during the hours it is active and the power output of a given number of reactors is relatively set). Power is then supplemented with smaller generation sites which might use natural gas or even petroleum products. The smaller sites are far less efficient and make less power, but the name of the game when making power is making sure you always have enough for demand.
Let’s say it’s peak day, 25 solar farms are making 675 MW right now, each coal plant reactor can make 500 MW and the demand right now is 1250 MW. You start up your natural gas turbine plant to make up the difference during peak day, but as the sun goes down you start up reactor 2 and 3. As reactor 2 and 3 get going the power usage goes up to 1600 as people come home and the solar farms stop generating power so you continue using your turbine plant but also start drawing from your batteries. Once reactor 2 and 3 are up and running you might stop using your turbine and keep drawing from your batteries, but when people go to sleep the power usage drops to 700 MW. Now power usage has dropped but you keep the reactors going for a while or begin to shut them down (they will still make some power as they shutdown) to recharge the batteries.
All these numbers are hypothetical, but it’s a description of how the process works.
That’s why republicans hate it.
It sounds evil and simplistic, and it is, but these are evil and simplistic people we’re talking about.
“Oh, new innovations in technology can help consumers pay less to power their homes? We can’t have that! It would affect the profits of my friends Oil Baron and Coal Baron.”
Where I live in Scotland about 73% of electricity generated come from renewables (mostly wind and hydro). I’m hugely in favour of this, but the bills keep rising.
I firmly believe the utility companies should be nationalised. I’m not against capitalism per se, but the current setup is a racket.
Water is essential to living.
Electricity is mostly essential.
Why these two utilities are privately owned is beyond me.To pay dividends to shareholders whilst you let the utility degrade to the point where the government steps in to bail you out anyway. Perfect investment.
I really should have started a monopoly, that is 0 risk 100% reward. I mean just take the money from the government, give myself a huge bonus, and then when there is no infrastructure upgrades done, say whoops, its too expensive, get more money from the government, rinse and repeat!
If the state of the Scottish energy grid is comparable to mainland Europe, then the prices go up due to increasing cost of infrastructure.
Renewables are a lot cheaper per kWh, but require a substantialy higher up front cost in infrastructure due to their decentralized nature.
Before renewables, the electricity only ever flowed in one direction, from the power plant down to the consumers. A few centralised main powerlines could deliver most of that.
With the increase in renewables that suddenly isn’t true anymore. Smal villages often are net positive, we’ve reached a point where even the medium voltage grid of entire regions is net positiv and the energy has to be transported somewhere else, sometimes even outside the country.
All this requires substantially more powerlines (or at least thicker ones, so still new cables). But more importantly, devices to measure the current load of the grid at all times and modernized equipment that can remotely be operated to respond to variing load.
Not to say that we should stop building renewables. All this infrastructure will be needed eventually eather way, but at least in the short term, investments will be needed regardless.
Also the ‘price cap’ in the UK mainly just guarantees a minimum percentage profit added on top of what is otherwise a bunch of assumptions largely provided by the energy companies.
Then some how their costs almost always come in under the assumed numbers increasing their profit further, they don’t need to innovate cos their money is guaranteed.
Also the profit percentage added went up recently, because…
Wind power is paid for if it is used or not.
It could be a lot cheaper up in Scotland where it is often wasted. If it’s cheaper up there more industry will move up there and use more of that cheap electricity and it will mean less is wasted.
But this would benefit Scotland at the expense of England so it’s not going to happen. As such electrical prices are same around country which keeps jobs down south and electricity expensive.
Public necessaries like energy, water, public transport etc should never have been handed over to companies to begin with in my opinion.
Yeah honestly even if we were at 100% renewables, the price has been set and people are used to it now. No company is going to voluntarily start discounting unless more competition enters the market to start a price war. So far most of the energy “competition” has gone bust.
You know why right?
The grid is constraint and because of this it makes prices really high where the congestion is. Now the logical thing is to allow a different price where there is free energy like in Scotland verse where it is constraint.
But! The issue is where it is constraint and that’s south east England. And as everyone in the country knows no one gets anything in the UK unless south east England has more of it for less.
So higher prices in SE England is not going to happen. If it was the other way around I’m certain the government would say fuck the Scots they should have more wind power if they wanted cheap electricity.
Government should be for the people not for the corporations
In many cities in America, private companies threaten cities demanding that they get paid to expand, or else they’ll leave.
Comcast demanded they get city investments to expand wifi to more of the city and even promised free wifi to public places. And after millions of city dollars given, they said, “nevermind”.
But your not thinking of the poor poor oil execs whom won’t get their return on their
bribeinvenstment made to their super PAC.Super PACs are so 2012. In 2024 SCOTUS ruled that officials are allowed to accept “gratuities” so long as they don’t directly say it’s a bribe.
Unless it’s for the President. Then they can just say it’s a bribe.
I forgot about those rulings. This SCOTUS is really set to mess up a lot in the coming decades. Hopefully, it can be reigned sooner rather than later
Hopefully, it can be reigned sooner rather than later
Is that a regional way to say guillotined?
It should be but here we are.
How do you want them to be for the people and not for corporations if you want them to subsidize an industry? At the end of the day that will be paid to corporations, and you are giving corporations more incentive to get into your congressperson’s office to help them figure out how to divide it up. Why would you want more cash exchanged between them and more face time between them? Bad idea if you want corporations out of politics.
More money for [industry x] literally means the government working for some corporations. Doesn’t matter what industry x is.
Not really, I live in a country where green energy keeps going up but so does the electricity prices. You have to believe in Santa if you think the savings ever reach the consumer.
That’s called artificially inflated prices
Of course it’s artificial, but knowing that doesn’t change the reality for the people who have to pay the bills.
Competition and choice lowers prices. Government “investment” usually raise prices.
Correct. The system is supposed to encourage investment in efficient energy production so that it can sell energy at the level of the most expensive energy that is brought to market. Resources for the Future explains it like this:
The capacity market auction works as follows: generators set their bid price at an amount equal to the cost of keeping their plant available to operate if needed. Similar to the energy market, these bids are arranged from lowest to highest. Once the bids reach the required quantity that all the retailers collectively must acquire to meet expected peak demand plus a reserve margin, the market “clears”, or supply meets demand. At this point, generators that “cleared” the market, or were chosen to provide capacity, all receive the same clearing price which is determined by the bid price of the last generator used to meet demand.
Merit order used to be a perfectly good and fair system. But renewable tech throws a monkey wrench into that system. Also shifts cost to be less demand dependent.
I live in Minnesota and the majority of the power produced in my area is Wind Turbines that are all pushing 5-10 years of use. The company operating them is well past the break even point and pure profit for every watt they get now but the price of energy is higher than ever.
Public companies or private?
Would also be cheaper if the government owned the energy infrastructure and ran at cost.
but that’s communism!!!
Ikr? What else is it? A good idea that would benefit people broadly instead of specific people narrowly?
You want elected officials to be competent and follow the will of those whom they represent?
that’s woke nonsense
Pfft caring about anything but myself, what a suckers game.
Empathy? what woke bs is that, as a true Jesus loving Christian I hate my neighbors
China does subsidize their electricity, and are self declared communists. It seems like if it goes to corporations it would be more of a Corporatocracy however.
How would it be cheaper?
How is it so expensive?
That’s not an answer. In my city for example, the water and trash service are public and price duplicated from 2024, water pipes, sanitation and all that is public infrastructure maintained by the city, the only thing private in this whole thing may be the trash trucks.
Energy is also heavily subsidized and we still have to pay a lot.
In my experience government doesn’t make utilities cheaper.
If it was private, you would pay more for the same service, because the private company has all the same costs as now, but also needs to make a profit. So if you keep it public, it will cost less.
Not necessarily, it could also be better run, more efficient with less employees.
For example maybe instead of 4 sets of at least 2 trash containers around my street there would only be 2 or 1 with all the pertinent colors (the company does more stuff than water)
But I guess this is the bad side of living in a country with more public employees than private.
That would be a reduction in the service quality, which is the other thing that always happens when utility services are privatised. So you get to pay more money for less service. The company has no incentive to provide a good service, because what else are you going to do?
The government has no incentive to provide a good service because what are you going to do? Stop paying?
What’s more important? Cheap power for the whole country? Or the pockets of the people in charge?
just in case
/s
Well maybe, but only if they owned the infrastructure themselves.
As it stands, the price paid to renewable energy suppliers tracks the amount paid to fossil fuel suppliers.
There’s a reason every farmer wants to fill their fields with solar panels, and it’s got little to do with making electricity cheaper for the end user.
That said, there’s no reason not to do it anyway, at least if we want more than a few more hundred years of humanity. A tough ask in a time where every decision is made based on an election that happens in the next 4 years by people who won’t live another 20.
New data centers should have to pay on a sliding scale based on energy availability in the local grid. And if they want to build out generation it should be solar and wind only.
New datacenters should be heavily regulated for emissions (including sound) and water consumption and should provide their own power as much as possible (renewables and SMRs come to mind).
Except for AI, fuck those.Agree entirely about the regulation, that’s lagging everywhere.
SMRs are a distraction. Lots of little, less effective nuclear generation doesn’t fix the problems nuclear faces - the waste (yeah, smrs still make nuclear waste!) and cost / approval / certification timelines. by the time we waste years fiddling with SMRs we could buildout huge swathes of renewables that work today.
Newer designs eat waste, don’t they?
Not exactly, they reuse waste which reduces the amount of waste but makes the remaining waste more radioactive.
That isn’t a reason to not use nuclear though since either: the waste can be made worse (which also makes it better because it doesn’t last as long) and can be buried only for 200 years which is easy to manage, or the waste can be used as an ingredient in betavoltaics which gets rid of the waste (and might get us to the point where we need to spin up nuclear reactors just to make more waste to use).
Either way it doesn’t matter, green generation and storage are now to cheap for nuclear to be considered economical anymore.
maybe one day. maaaaybe. there aren’t enough samples out there in use to say if it’ll work. also, the flow of said waste - how does that work, is it reprocessed or just whatever? where does the depleted material it’s being swapped out with go?
what spartan says is 100%: we don’t need this - we have better already.
Yes but how would the fascists get kickbacks and bribes then? That’s a big chunk of their income. Won’t someone think of the oligarchy???
Why not nuclear?
You can double check it but I think solar is cheaper now. I was shocked as well, I thought nuclear was the cheapest still.
But solar is unreliable. Night day, snow cover, dust cover. It also has to be local and supplemented by other sources
Energy production being local is a benefit.
Just like the fediverse being unaffected by some servers going down. Deliberately or accidentally, doesn’t matter, the rest will keep up.
Smaller production is also easier to scale up. You can erect a solar farm in a month or shorter, while a nuclear power plant takes a decade to build.
Batteries.
Batteries plus solar is still cheaper than all other power systems. It’s remarkable but true.
Batteries plus solar is still cheaper than all other power systems.
Several of my friends live in states with energy provider choice. Buying from the 100% green power providers is more expensive. Natural gas is extremely cheap after all.
Natural gas is extremely
cheapsubsidized after all.
But solar is unreliable.
Which is why you add storage and wind to the mix. Overproduce energy when it’s available and store the leftovers for when you under-produce.
At this point, saying Solar doesn’t work at night is kind of like saying cars don’t work without wheels. No one is getting solar without storage, just like no one is driving a car without wheels.
Yep, the unreliability is exactly why buying from 100% green energy providers is more expensive than buying from natural gas providers. Batteries are extremely expensive, natural gas is cheap.
Source: Several of my friends live in states with energy provider choice; the green providers cost more.
Why do you think solar has to be local?
Most expensive way of heating water
Russia is doing it and their electricity costs are cheapest on the planet
Yep, France has cheaper energy than Germany. France went nuclear, Germany went solar/wind (and even had to re-online some coal plants due to shortages).
The pushback on nuclear from anti-fossil advocates never ceases to amaze me.
France is heavily subsiding nuclear power.
Without it, it would be the most expensive one.
I am all in for nuclear power, as long as it is waaaaay cheaper than it is right now.
Even buying the uranium is today more expensive than building a solar plant. (compared to resources per power generation)
Additionally, why it is stupid to build new nuclear plants (keep the old ones as long as the maintenance is not too high).
If you now decide you need 1 GW in 10 years Then you can plan your nuclear power plant and start to build it. However as we know it will now take 30 years to build it and costs 10 times as much, while your demand is now 4 GW.
Also what do you do in the meantime? Hope that the power is enough for 10 years?
Nuclear is expensive, not scalable, and takes way too long to build.
It is pretty safe. Especially new reactors. Also the atomic waste should be recycled in different nuclear reactors, which can use it as fuel, but those are still in research.
Isnt Germany’s costs are absolutely outrageous? Like the most expensive in Europe
Yeah. A series of fucktarted decisions caused Germany to fuck themselves:
- Germany turned off all their nuclear plants (why?!)
- Germany turned off all their coal plants (good)
- Germany vastly increased natural gas imports and tied themselves at the hip to Russia (they were publicly told this was a bad idea. Germany laughed it off)
- Germany ramped up solar/wind production (good)
- Germany did not invest in grid-scale storage to go with that solar/wind (Just going whole-hog on trusting Russia)
- Russia invaded Ukraine and held natural gas exports to Germany’s throat (boy, who would have guessed Russia would fuck over Germany?!)
- Germany had to emergency expand their LNG imports amid record-high prices and with hastily-built LNG terminals (LNG is also the most expensive way to import natural gas)
- Germany had to online coal plants due to shortages (boy, those nuclear plants would have been damn helpful!)
- Germany now has some of the highest priced electricity anywhere
They really, really, really should have kept those nuclear plants like France…
Yeah Germany fucked it really hard.
Going away from nuclear without a good plan b to replace the power was stupid.
We basically replaced nuclear power with wind and solar, but the new power demand that was coming since the turning off of the nuclear plants, was achieved by building gas turbines. So fossil fuels again.
And now our energy minister is a lobbyist from the gas energy sector…
Every German energy problem is entirely down to political self owns
There was a time when investing deeper into nuclear would have made a lot more sense. That moment has passed, though. The economics are not on the side of nuclear and the numbers are getting worse by the day - nuclear is getting more expensive over time while renewables and batteries are trending in the complete opposite direction.
It’s basically impossible to get any nuclear built without heavy subsidization because of how poorly they function economically, not to mention how impossible it is to buy insurance for such a venture. This is not inherently bad, but it does definitely displace other areas we could be subsidizing instead. I would be in favour of this if nuclear didn’t have a completely natural replacement in renewables and batteries.
Only in us I think.
Because of decades of fear-mongering and under-investment (that gets redirected to fossil).
Radioactive waste storage.
I do think that goal power plants need to be turned off before nuclear ones, but neither is sustainable.
The amount of high level nuclear is overstated and over-exaggerated it’s common for people to refuse the actual figures.
This is what 20 years’ worth of spent nuclear fuel looks like safely stored at the former Maine Yankee nuclear plant.
The plant generated 119 billion kilowatt hours of reliable power from 1972-1996, which is enough to power half a million homes each year.20 years for half a million homes. And that’s an old generation reactor which is less efficient with fuel usage and not even considering that something like 98% of it can be reprocessed into useable fuel if the incentive was there. The reason its not is the same reason old solar panels aren’t reprocessed into new panels: It’s cheaper and easier right now to just produce new ones.
This pic doesn’t include the less active waste and the hulidng materials of the reactor, thus it’s misleadig to claim this is everything that needs to be stored.
Nuclear waste is a problem for the most like any other. Given enough investment it can be solved, and no I’m not talking about finding better ways to store it. China has made major advances in this regard, their newest reactors generate waste that is much less long-lived (hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years), and they can reduce the volume of that waste through recycling.
I’m not saying nuclear waste is not a hard problem to solve, it is and we must be careful as a society to make sure it is managed well. In the meantime, we have a climate catastrophe which is much more pressing. Coal plants, which provide base-load electricity, are a prime target for conversion to nuclear, because their steam turbines can be reused. This could decarbonize a large part of the electricity mix of many countries.
The nuclear waste that lasts for thousands of years isn’t going to be a problem.
It can be used to make betavoltaics.
We might actually run into the problem where we don’t have enough nuclear waste and we might need to spin up a reactor or two to keep making RTGs (for space) and betavoltaics.
Cheaper utilities was never the goal
Call me pessimistic. Companies say they switched from paper bills to digital bills for “the environment”, and none of that trickles down back to the customer.
Technology Connections has a video on it…
But i doubt bills would go down; it’s just that line would go up.
