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.
The other thing the report isn't saying is that those numbers improve a lot if you have power transmission or other forms of power generation (say wind). They're calculating things as if you're a datacenter in a single location trying to yourself without any grid connection.
A small amount of other power generation whose output isn't correlated with the sun overhead should do a lot to make the last few percent (which come up when there's many cloudy days in a row) cheaper.
Solar's just knocking it out of the park at this point. Building out anything else new (as in you haven't already started) doesn't really make sense.
It is possible to get >100% from solar + batteries. All energy needs can be handled using only a small fraction of solar radiation reaching the planet’s surface.
That said, using it in aircraft (and a number of boots/submersibles) economically is an unsolved problem, but many other places can use it.
Using it in aircraft cheaply is an unsolved problem. We know how to turn CO2 and water into jet fuel with enough energy input. It's just an order of magnitude more expensive than the fossil alternative.
What a koinkidink, I just saw a news about a research platform for exactly that (okay, it's for ships but still) starting now, with the idea being to use surplus offshore wind electricity which otherwise would go unused: https://www.dlr.de/en/tt/latest/news/2025/synthetic-fuel-fro...
As with everything, an upper bound on the energy cost, how many n-kWh does it take to produce a battery that stores 1-kWh-per-cycle-times-m-cycles, is the $ cost of that {1 kWH, m cycles} battery divided by the $ cost of 1 kWh of energy.
E.g. if a {1 kWh, 1000 cycles} battery costs USD 50 to make, and it's made using electricity that costs USD 0.1/kWh, (USD 50)/(USD 0.1/kWh) = 500 kWh. If it needed more energy than that, they would be getting sold at a loss. As a bonus point, this upper bound naturally includes the entire supply chain including the personal purchases of the people working in the factories that make the batteries, all the way up to any waste from e.g. unnecessary private jet flights made by unwise billionaire owners of the battery companies.
This example battery then allows you to time-shift 1000 kWh of electricity from day to night before it needs replacement or refurbishment.
But note the difference between "energy" and "electricity". This kind of calculation is made more complicated by the actual energies used being quite diverse in cost and type, e.g. Pacific-crossing cargo ships are mostly fossil fuelled, the stuff the mining company uses could be any mix of electric or fossil, the aluminium is extracted from ore electrically but any steel probably isn't, etc.
The ecological cost is also strongly dependent on how far the world has gone in greening itself before that battery was made. The first Li-Ion batteries were made in an industrial base that was mostly fossil powered, new ones in China are made in an industrial base that gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
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.
We need a lot more. Right now only about 25 to 33 pc of our energy consumption is electric. Some of the rest will get significant efficiency benefit like you mention — cars, building heating, etc. Others, much less so— high temperature industrial heat, long distance transport, etc.
Reaching current nighttime use with storage and wind and existing hydro looks infeasible, and we need a minimum of twice as much.
Power to gas (and back to power or to mix with natural gas for existing uses) is probably a part of this, but nuclear improves this (allowing there to be less of it and allowing the electrolysis cells to be used for a greater fraction of the day.
Does that also account for industrial chemical processes that don't have a simple power-energy exchange? Stuff like making fertilizer or solvents and the like do take a lot of electrical power currently, but will require even more rarely accounted for energy to create base reagents without fossil fuels. Like fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity today, but if we want to create nitrogen fertilizers without fossil fuel sources, it takes up to a 10 times increase in energy requirements to synthesize from the air making it rise to near 10% of current electrical generation. Many oils are used in mechanical components are irreplaceable and have to be sourced, but to do it without fossil fuels and synthesize from organic materials also require a lot more energy than we use to purify or synthesize from fossil fuels. And the same is true of many solvents.
Its usage is technically accounted for in fossil fuel extraction numbers, but generally ignored when people are accounting for total electrical generation and the usage of fuels as heat sources.
Relevant question: fossil fuel dependency has two parts, the "peak oil" part, and the "global warming" part. As we don't have to solve these at the same time, are the things you raise more of a "peak oil" problem or a "global warming" problem?
US electric demand is 4 trillion kWh per year. Moving to EVs alone will be about 1 trillion kWh more. And that is leaving out transport, building heat, and industrial use.
I suspect you are quoting an EV-only number.
Alternatively, you might be looking at how much electricity demand is expected to increase if we maintain our current trajectory and don’t aggressively decarbonize.
Canada needs between double and triple the electricity generation of today. Canada may not be the best example but there is a lot of uncertainty, especially around climate. it is not unreasonable to expect that places like Europe and India will increasingly add air conditioning, pushing the required grid capacity to double today's.
A 4x efficiency bump is fairly easy (.9 efficient gas to 3.6 COP heat pump). Older non-condensing boilers (or modern condensing boilers run too hot) are more like .8 when new and messured at .6 in real life circumstances.
Even at the high end efficiency, this is enough that you can burn the gas centrally in a generator, lose 40-60% of it as heat as is standard with fossil electricity generation, lose a few percent more electricity in transmission and still come out ahead overall.
And of course, that's a lower bound as you'd ideally be generating electricity from other sources like solar and wind and battery and keeping the gas generators for when needed, making use of the giant scale gas storage most countries already have.
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.
> and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables
This assumes you can do just the condensation during the day— E.g. you are amortizing the electrolyzers capital cost over just times when there is surplus power instead of something closer to 24/7.
Batteries to have solar 24/7 will be dirt cheap soon. The question is: is it cheaper to build nuclear and run the electrolyzers at the same rate the whole year or use solar and run them much less during the winter. Where much less is a function of latitude
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.
You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels. Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7 and will require more storage. The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage and may not be enough.
Total installed system costs— not batteries alone— are estimated at $300B/TWh. So that is on the order of $30T at current prices (some estimates reach to $100T). And of course, these investments don’t last forever— we can’t be kicking 3pc of GDP to storage.
I expect this to improve, but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed.
3% GDP over a single decade is certainly not a trivial amount, but it's worth noting the comparison here is spending more than that every year forever.
Similarly, 100 TWh sounds like a huge number, and it is, but it's like the equivalent capacity of one base Model 3 per 6 people globally. It's a lot in absolute terms, for sure, but it's by no means a crazy unachievable quantity of battery for a family of 6 to use.
If I wasn’t clear: 3 percent of gdp is the ballpark perpetual capital cost with present technology and a 20 year storage system life. Just capital costs and just storage. Versus all of energy being roughly 5pc of global GDP now.
That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale. More likely is a moderate cost increase, but who knows? Putting all our eggs in the battery storage basket is not great.
Just a few percent more stable base generation in the mix would greatly reduce the amount of storage needed and open more options (e.g making power to gas more reasonable)
It may be cheaper overall; it may not be. But even if you think this is modestly costlier, reducing risk and volatility of outcomes is something that one often chooses to pay for.
I find this hard to believe. Let's math it. Let's put grid storage at $200k/MWh, or about 4x current battery prices. Let's keep it at that level for sake of argument. Let's very pessimistically say we need to replace 50% of storage every decade, and again for sake of argument let's say replacing the batteries costs the whole 4x (eg. no reuse of material or converters or grid connections). So the math there gives $1T/y for storage.
Idk, it seems like even pretty pessimistic arguments with frozen costs and early retirements suggest this is cheaper than the numbers you gave.
> That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale.
This strikes me as odd to posit about a technology that has had a steady 23% cost reduction per doubling over the last 6 decimal orders of magnitude.
Current prices of installed systems at peak scale are 150-350k/MWh.
Replacing it all on a 20 year cadence seems like a reasonable assumption.
Arguments assuming a positive return to scale 4 orders of magnitude out may be true— or may be unduly optimistic. I don’t like to have too much faith extending the lines too far off the right of the graph. When that is required, I want whatever margin and ways to reduce risk as possible: which is why I would like more nuclear in the mix. A grid with 12pc nuclear and the rest renewable (so about 3-4pc of nameplate power nuclear) would require much less over provisioning and storage.
You don't have to go all the way to battery prices scaling to 5% of the price they are today to consider it likely the price continues to fall at all.
Replacing the whole system every 20 years still seems really wild to me, especially in worlds where price doesn't fall past the cost of maintenance, because the only wear part is the battery, and batteries are modular. We could, sure, I just showed the cost is a fraction of today's energy spend, it just seems really weird not to do something smarter instead.
Yes we can, indefinitely, and doing so saves money relative to fossil fuels (which are currently about $8T/year[0]) and nuclear (which is on the expensive side of electricity compared to fossil fuels anyway).
>You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels
You're not considering cost.
>Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7
The exact opposite is true. Heating, cooling and car charging are just 3 examples of current loads that burn fossil fuels which are already being demand shifted on an electric grid.
>The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage
Did you assume it was all going to be achieved with batteries? This is a common fallacy perpetuated by nuclear industry propaganda.
350GWh are being built in australia right now with zero batteries, and studies show there is plenty of geography suitable to build plenty more of that around the world.
Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.
>but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed
and there is zero point if the cost is stupidly high (which it is) and we have the imagination to look beyond just batteries as a means of storing power.
Nuclear industry propaganda is alas not capable of such.
> Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.
The costing mistake people always make is assuming p2g infrastructure can be operated at high duty cycle with an all renewable grid. If you need to amortize the infrastructure over a few hours per day it looks much less favorable. Of course, with a little more stable base generation in the mix, this assumption is less shaky. It doesn’t need to be a ridiculous amount.
More base generation simultaneously makes p2g more reasonable and reduces the total need for it (and total need to overprovision everything else)
And even if one disagrees that a small amount of additional nuclear reduces total system cost, it absolutely reduces systemic risk vs putting all of our eggs in the battery basket.
Pumped hydro is great for Australia, but the capability to increase hydro in most areas is much more limited. We are going to have to mostly do it with batteries and intermediate term storage with p2g.
The problem stems form new built western nuclear power costing $190/MWh if it can sell its power 24/7 all year around.
Adding that as a base input cost too all storage technology just makes the entire enterprise unfeasible.
You also have to answer why this P2G infrastructure should buy your extremely expensive nuclear electricity when renewables and storage delivers way cheaper electricity.
They should buy the electricity because it is better than leaving the electrolyzers idle when there is no surplus of renewable power alone, and higher utilization spreads capital costs over more production. It can be a tiny portion of the energy cost during the day, and a large part at night. Having a few percent of nameplate power being nuclear doesn’t push up costs too much when renewables are producing.
Having a few percent of nameplate power being nuclear means much less total nameplate power, and allows loads like p2g for longer term storage to run more of the day (and means you need to tap the p2g less often, so you can have a -lot- less electrolyzer infrastructure— better utilization and less need).
Diversity of approaches lower risks and may lower costs.
We can start worrying about storage once we reach 60-80% renewable and just keep using fossil fuels as backup. Nuclear doesn't replace storage (at least not if you don't want to run your nuclear plants at like half capacity)
> 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].
Don't forget that they have power shortages and strict rationing in that equation. So at the end of the day they have 75% solar but it is not adequate for the population.
Thats not true. It's 75% renewable. Means, biomass, wind, solar etc.. And in Winter it is 55% renewable. Shortages are compensate mostly with fast booting Gas, Coal and Hydrogen plants.
Also trading[1] in Germany is relatively even (in/out).
They might be mixing up Germany and South Africa i think. IIRC they do have times where they have planned outages in the different areas as the grid can't handle it if all were able to use it at the same time.
We do not have shortages or power rationing. As another poster said, you may be confusing Germany with South Africa, though that's not a common confusion usually.
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.
It's great for the companies that run the plants because they are highly funded by subsidies from the society in which they are built. Nuclear power simply does not work from a capitalist point of view. Former Governments just swallowed this pill, because they had no natural resources that produce enough energy and they tried to stay independent. Now you can do this with renewable energy.
Some of that is because people are so skeptical of it, it never got to economies of scale. You could say the same thing about pretty much any energy source prior to it being scaled up.
Tbf, perhaps that is still an instrinsic problem with nuclear, that it isn't easily ammenable to economies of scale the way solar pannels or fossil fuels are.
nuclear never got economy of scale? There were hundreds of nuclear power plants built across the world in the 1970s/1980s. Developed countries went from "no nuclear" to "~20..30% nuclear" or more in less than 20 years.
If that's not sufficient scale to be economical, then I don't know what would have been.
Historical evidence therefore rather suggests nuclear isn't economical at any scale once active subsidies are out.
Current nuclear power plants under construction in the US or Europe, or recently completed there add more than evidence for high cost and major overruns to the pile.
Of course, one can go all conspiracy and claim that's only because of the deep anti-atom lobby, and because the cheap SMRs have always been torpedoed, or because Thorium molten salt reactors have been secretly killed by the military-industrial complex or whatever.
Occam's razor makes me think though, could it just be that nuclear was, is, and likely, at least for quite a while still, will be just so friggin' expensive that pretty much any "alternative" is more economical?
(back-of-envelope calcs say that if ~1.5GW electric from a new nuclear power plant cost ~20..40G$ to build .. between ~13..28$/W ... solar is <1$/W, there's a lot of spare change for batteries in that. Ok, that's pub talk. Still, if I have influence where my money goes, I'd only grudgingly accept nuclear for base load, subsidised as needed. Economics say, build what's cheap capex to build and then gives zero-opex energy when "running". There's no economic alternative to the "alternatives")
So 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)
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.
The reason why we have been using fossil gas as peakers for decades are because they are about the cheapest we can build while offering acceptable running costs.
We also have an entire fleet of them, which lives are easily extended as long as we add for example capacity markets to ensure their survival as renewables push down their capacity factors.
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.
Sure, but that can happen with too much efficiency, too. See, for example, supply chains during COVID. We had a very good handle on how much (for example) toilet paper we needed in normal times, and produced almost exactly that much.
Having some extra power generation capacity means you're not freezing to death in a cold snap or frying all the elderly in a heat wave.
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.
It wasn't nothing to do with them, but it was mostly not to do with their intrinsic characteristics, and a lot to do with how they were managed on the grid, and how some of them were not actually acting as they should (which was also true of some non-renewable sources). Saying 'nothing to do with renewable energy sources' when the report spends half its time talking about renewable energy plants and how they contributed to the problem is really not helpful (as unhelpful, IMO, as going on about how it proved renewables intrinsically make a grind unstable, because it gives credence to that argument).
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?
Batteries are also inverter based sources so they typically don't add any inertia to the grid either. It's not really about the supply of power, it's about maintaining the 50hz frequency to a 0.002% accuracy (yes really) and keeping the voltage similarly exact, otherwise things start quickly disconnecting and tripping in a chain reaction. DC sources would work much better with a HVDC grid... if we had one.
grid-scale batteries generally do add inertia, because that's the most valuable service for them to provide at a small scale. Inverters attached to batteries can do it way better than spinning generators, but they need to be set up to do that.
(And a DC grid would be much more difficult to manage: the nice thing about frequency is that it has to be pretty much the same over the whole grid, so it's a useful signal for the balance between supply and demand, while voltage is really quite sensitive to local effects)
> 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.
> I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
There is a paper floating around showing that for both US+Canada and the continental EU there has never been a single hour where there has been no wind and no sun somewhere in a 30 year period.
Here's the CAISO wind graph. This is the total wind energy from four large states. Note that the low point is 1/7 that of the peak, which is around noon.[1] Here's the PJM wind graph.[2] Low point is about 1/4 the peak, again, around local noon.
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
Every night there is no sun, and there are many times where there is not enough wind for all of our needs.
...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.
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.
Solar efficiency degrades over time. When these sites are no longer economical their owners will turn to bankruptcy, we'll have thousands of hectares of green fields covered in disarrayed broken blue panels, overgrown, unmaintained, a public nuisance of massive proportions in the making.
Those locations have a large grid connection, which is valuable enough to pay for the decomissioning / cleanup costs so something else can use the connection.
Heck, there are companies cleaning up coal plants to use the connection for solar or wind, and that's a lot more expensive than cleaning up an old solar plant.
So we shouldn't bioremediate radioactive or heavy metals contaminated sites then?
The point being, there are biological processes that address toxic waste.
Further, there are waste issues with pretty much all human uses of energy and resources, including "green" technologies. It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
> It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
Where do you get this idea from? (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Solar power does not leave us with radioactive waste.
Considering radiation and heavy metals as the same problem because they're both bad for you and involve remediation processes when things go wrong is like treating a lack of seatbelts in cars the same as sugar induced diabetes.
Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive" is lithium deposits come in salt flats, salt flats contain potassium, some potassium is radioactive. But that's already diffused everywhere on the planet making *all life* radioactive well before we arrived in the pre-neolithic.
a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc. Several million line kilometres of environmental radiometric surveying, covering both exploration and industrial settling ponds across many countries. Had a 42 litre crystal pack and spectrometer airborne in Northern India over the 1998 Pokhran-II test series.
> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Try archive.md et al.
See second link:
Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?
Without an abundance of rare earth minerals, renewable energy technologies would not exist in their current form or would be highly inefficient when compared with traditional generation methods such as oil, coal and gas.
> Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive"
Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?
China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.
All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).
I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.
Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.
Good thing it only takes a couple dudes with impact drivers and a truck to tear that down in under a week. Even a hand truck is good enough to cart a few of them away at a time.
Just absolute nonsense. Modern panels are often guaranteed to produce 90% of their nameplate capacity for 25 years and then degrade at something like 0.35%/year afterwards. A panel installed today will likely be generating more than 60% of it's capacity by 2100 and will have done so for 75 years.
> 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.
Gas price are still twice as high as four years ago. Whole industries are collapsing because electricity is too expensive for factories. Personally, just heating my home has become very expensive.
Europe is deindustrializing. Especially Germany, the EU economic engine, has been hit hard. So yes, the word crisis is used correctly here.
> For instance, BASF, a global chemical giant, recently announced plans to downsize its operations in the country with the reason being unbearably high energy prices in Germany. Now, the company is shifting its focus toward expanding its production efforts in China and the U.S. to access more stable energy costs. Germany’s prime power- the Automotive industry, is also struggling due to immense pressure caused by rising energy costs. A recent study revealed that energy costs for Germany’s automotive sector increased by 20% in 2022 and a similar trend followed in 2023.
https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/
Ok, I'll bite, name 3 collapsing industries - on the verge of extinction due to rising energy prices - that could be fixed by building highly-polluting power generators ASAP?
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).
Nuclear plants and their cooling towers tend to be made of reinforced concrete. That makes them harder to bomb. If you want to take out power you bomb the transmission or substations instead as they are far less durable.
I recall hearing in school that 9-11 masterminds had considered planes against nuclear power plants but abandoned it after doing the math and realizing that it would do little damage. Not sure how true that is admittedly.
>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.
Because it's a fact. When your interlocutor doesn't care about facts there's no particular reason they should care it's cheaper, that's just another fact.
You say "OK, Joe thinks the Earth is flat but he should still use Solar" and Joe doesn't follow. Joe's number one news source is "Jenny Truth Sayer" on TikTok and Jenny just told him that the solar panels attract Venusian Space Clowns, and he has to smash them with a hammer or else his genitals will explode
There are greedy assholes for whom it doesn't matter why the line is going up. But it turns out they don't like wind or solar because they're too democratic. Those assholes are - like most capitalist asshole, used to a system where you own stuff (a mine, a well, a pipeline, a ship) and you get infinite money, but newer systems aren't about owning stuff. You can't own the sunlight, or the wind, well then it's no good is it? The big oil companies stepped back from "We're part of the transition" and doubled down on fossil fuels, because that means more money for them, and if we all die well, too bad.
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.
The trend is clear, for sure, and it will make sense to extrapolate... Up to a point, as usual. (baring one of the "breakthroughs" that make it to the HN top page on e in a while and never materialize... Sigh)
Night, sure. Doesn't work in winter though. (Not that that means we should stop building solar - we're still far from the point where it wouldn't make sense to build any more solar because we can't store the energy.)
I live in the UK. The ratio between solar output on a typically sunny summer day and a typical cloudy winter day is about 20. So your "a bit" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
Right but it's not exactly the latitude that's the issue. On sunny days in winter I get plenty of power. The issue is the weather - only about 1/3 of the days in winter are sunny.
Yeah, my comment was a simplification - like most things trying to describe local effects globally are. The UK doubles as unusually cloudy weather and relatively short days.
I'm not sure this makes sense? If you have a solar system setup at home, with a battery, electric heating and also ev charger, then it's all the same thing. Or am I misunderstanding something?
Electricity is a type of energy, but all energy isn't electricity. The total amount of energy is electricity + non-electricity energy, and solar doesn't yet equal to greater than 50% of that total.
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)
I just dislike lavish handouts to an industry that has spent the past 70 years living on them experiencing negative learning by doing and still expects the public to pay for their insurance.
The plan is essentially locking in energy poverty for generations due to the costs.
Are you not worried about pissing away one of the largest advantages Scandinavia has in cheap electricity? And instead of investing in the future we’re going all in on a dead end industry.
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.
This is where energy mixes and economics come into play.
Dams provide most parts of the globe a lot of seasonal storage. It takes the same water if they average 10% over the year or 5% over 9 months and 25% over 3. Similarly, locations for wind farms often vary in the season they provide the most power. So the economic maximum around high solar productivity ends up compensating for it’s lower winter output.
"Dams provide most parts of the globe a lot of seasonal storage"
Is this true? I think it's the opposite, that dams and pumped hydrostorage of energy works in a few areas where the geography supports it, but (for example) in the plains of the USA it's not really possible.
Why haven't we built a huge solar farm around the Hoover Dam to pump water back up to Lake Mead insted of letting it flow downstream.
There are contracts around how much water needs to flow downstream, so they can't just hold it back like that. California and Arizona both have allocations that they pull from the river downstream of the dam. Mexico too in theory I think, although I don't know if they actually get their allocation any more.
Given how oversubscribed the river water already is, how the river flow rate is steadily diminishing due to increasing temperatures, and the politics involved, even a small or temporary additional reduction in downstream flow would encounter huge opposition.
With multiple dams you can release water early at one point in the system and have zero impact on users below the second dam.
The northeast and northwest has an abundance of water. Managing total water usage is a large problem for the southwest but there’s many opportunities to do things like evaporation reduction.
Hydro generation is pretty geographically limited, but pumped storage only requires two reservoirs vertically separated. If you allow building one of the two reservoirs then there are millions of potential locations.
It’s not universal, smaller dams don’t have nearly as much storage as large ones but they also produce vastly less power. At the other end the Great Lakes are effectively storing years worth of electricity, and have significant flexibility in delivery.
0.05% of the world's population live north of the arctic circle. Solar panels don't work for them, but their diesel generators are not a significant portion of the world's CO2.
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.
The other thing the report isn't saying is that those numbers improve a lot if you have power transmission or other forms of power generation (say wind). They're calculating things as if you're a datacenter in a single location trying to yourself without any grid connection.
A small amount of other power generation whose output isn't correlated with the sun overhead should do a lot to make the last few percent (which come up when there's many cloudy days in a row) cheaper.
Solar's just knocking it out of the park at this point. Building out anything else new (as in you haven't already started) doesn't really make sense.
It is possible to get >100% from solar + batteries. All energy needs can be handled using only a small fraction of solar radiation reaching the planet’s surface.
That said, using it in aircraft (and a number of boots/submersibles) economically is an unsolved problem, but many other places can use it.
Using it in aircraft cheaply is an unsolved problem. We know how to turn CO2 and water into jet fuel with enough energy input. It's just an order of magnitude more expensive than the fossil alternative.
What a koinkidink, I just saw a news about a research platform for exactly that (okay, it's for ships but still) starting now, with the idea being to use surplus offshore wind electricity which otherwise would go unused: https://www.dlr.de/en/tt/latest/news/2025/synthetic-fuel-fro...
What's the energy and ecological cost of producing and transporting the batteries?
As with everything, an upper bound on the energy cost, how many n-kWh does it take to produce a battery that stores 1-kWh-per-cycle-times-m-cycles, is the $ cost of that {1 kWH, m cycles} battery divided by the $ cost of 1 kWh of energy.
E.g. if a {1 kWh, 1000 cycles} battery costs USD 50 to make, and it's made using electricity that costs USD 0.1/kWh, (USD 50)/(USD 0.1/kWh) = 500 kWh. If it needed more energy than that, they would be getting sold at a loss. As a bonus point, this upper bound naturally includes the entire supply chain including the personal purchases of the people working in the factories that make the batteries, all the way up to any waste from e.g. unnecessary private jet flights made by unwise billionaire owners of the battery companies.
This example battery then allows you to time-shift 1000 kWh of electricity from day to night before it needs replacement or refurbishment.
But note the difference between "energy" and "electricity". This kind of calculation is made more complicated by the actual energies used being quite diverse in cost and type, e.g. Pacific-crossing cargo ships are mostly fossil fuelled, the stuff the mining company uses could be any mix of electric or fossil, the aluminium is extracted from ore electrically but any steel probably isn't, etc.
The ecological cost is also strongly dependent on how far the world has gone in greening itself before that battery was made. The first Li-Ion batteries were made in an industrial base that was mostly fossil powered, new ones in China are made in an industrial base that gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
way less than for transporting similar amount of energy in coal, oil, natural gas or building nuclear power plant.
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.
We need a lot more. Right now only about 25 to 33 pc of our energy consumption is electric. Some of the rest will get significant efficiency benefit like you mention — cars, building heating, etc. Others, much less so— high temperature industrial heat, long distance transport, etc.
Reaching current nighttime use with storage and wind and existing hydro looks infeasible, and we need a minimum of twice as much.
Power to gas (and back to power or to mix with natural gas for existing uses) is probably a part of this, but nuclear improves this (allowing there to be less of it and allowing the electrolysis cells to be used for a greater fraction of the day.
People have run the numbers. We need about 30% more. Which is a lot, but it's spread over 20-30 years, so it's not a lot each year.
Does that also account for industrial chemical processes that don't have a simple power-energy exchange? Stuff like making fertilizer or solvents and the like do take a lot of electrical power currently, but will require even more rarely accounted for energy to create base reagents without fossil fuels. Like fertilizer already uses 1% of global electricity today, but if we want to create nitrogen fertilizers without fossil fuel sources, it takes up to a 10 times increase in energy requirements to synthesize from the air making it rise to near 10% of current electrical generation. Many oils are used in mechanical components are irreplaceable and have to be sourced, but to do it without fossil fuels and synthesize from organic materials also require a lot more energy than we use to purify or synthesize from fossil fuels. And the same is true of many solvents.
Its usage is technically accounted for in fossil fuel extraction numbers, but generally ignored when people are accounting for total electrical generation and the usage of fuels as heat sources.
Relevant question: fossil fuel dependency has two parts, the "peak oil" part, and the "global warming" part. As we don't have to solve these at the same time, are the things you raise more of a "peak oil" problem or a "global warming" problem?
They are related in that we use different petroleum products for different purposes and today extracting petroleum means burning most of it.
US electric demand is 4 trillion kWh per year. Moving to EVs alone will be about 1 trillion kWh more. And that is leaving out transport, building heat, and industrial use.
I suspect you are quoting an EV-only number.
Alternatively, you might be looking at how much electricity demand is expected to increase if we maintain our current trajectory and don’t aggressively decarbonize.
30% more is just wrong.
Canada needs between double and triple the electricity generation of today. Canada may not be the best example but there is a lot of uncertainty, especially around climate. it is not unreasonable to expect that places like Europe and India will increasingly add air conditioning, pushing the required grid capacity to double today's.
What are the caveats of your 30% figure?
https://natural-resources.canada.ca/energy-sources/powering-...
Building heating won’t see much increase in efficiency from going electric compared to a high efficiency gas furnace.
A 4x efficiency bump is fairly easy (.9 efficient gas to 3.6 COP heat pump). Older non-condensing boilers (or modern condensing boilers run too hot) are more like .8 when new and messured at .6 in real life circumstances.
Even at the high end efficiency, this is enough that you can burn the gas centrally in a generator, lose 40-60% of it as heat as is standard with fossil electricity generation, lose a few percent more electricity in transmission and still come out ahead overall.
And of course, that's a lower bound as you'd ideally be generating electricity from other sources like solar and wind and battery and keeping the gas generators for when needed, making use of the giant scale gas storage most countries already have.
Hrm? Heat pumps are multiples more efficient than gas.
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.
> and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables
This assumes you can do just the condensation during the day— E.g. you are amortizing the electrolyzers capital cost over just times when there is surplus power instead of something closer to 24/7.
Batteries to have solar 24/7 will be dirt cheap soon. The question is: is it cheaper to build nuclear and run the electrolyzers at the same rate the whole year or use solar and run them much less during the winter. Where much less is a function of latitude
>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.
I don’t think we can scale up storage enough at any reasonable cost.
We need about 30TWh of batteries to decarbonize the world's grid. China has 1TWh per year of capacity, increasing 50% per year.
Cost is currently $35/kWh, dropping 20% per year.
You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels. Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7 and will require more storage. The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage and may not be enough.
Total installed system costs— not batteries alone— are estimated at $300B/TWh. So that is on the order of $30T at current prices (some estimates reach to $100T). And of course, these investments don’t last forever— we can’t be kicking 3pc of GDP to storage.
I expect this to improve, but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed.
3% GDP over a single decade is certainly not a trivial amount, but it's worth noting the comparison here is spending more than that every year forever.
Similarly, 100 TWh sounds like a huge number, and it is, but it's like the equivalent capacity of one base Model 3 per 6 people globally. It's a lot in absolute terms, for sure, but it's by no means a crazy unachievable quantity of battery for a family of 6 to use.
If I wasn’t clear: 3 percent of gdp is the ballpark perpetual capital cost with present technology and a 20 year storage system life. Just capital costs and just storage. Versus all of energy being roughly 5pc of global GDP now.
That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale. More likely is a moderate cost increase, but who knows? Putting all our eggs in the battery storage basket is not great.
Just a few percent more stable base generation in the mix would greatly reduce the amount of storage needed and open more options (e.g making power to gas more reasonable)
It may be cheaper overall; it may not be. But even if you think this is modestly costlier, reducing risk and volatility of outcomes is something that one often chooses to pay for.
I find this hard to believe. Let's math it. Let's put grid storage at $200k/MWh, or about 4x current battery prices. Let's keep it at that level for sake of argument. Let's very pessimistically say we need to replace 50% of storage every decade, and again for sake of argument let's say replacing the batteries costs the whole 4x (eg. no reuse of material or converters or grid connections). So the math there gives $1T/y for storage.
Idk, it seems like even pretty pessimistic arguments with frozen costs and early retirements suggest this is cheaper than the numbers you gave.
> That is assuming we can hit that scale in the next couple decades and that nothing happens to push up costs with increased scale.
This strikes me as odd to posit about a technology that has had a steady 23% cost reduction per doubling over the last 6 decimal orders of magnitude.
Current prices of installed systems at peak scale are 150-350k/MWh.
Replacing it all on a 20 year cadence seems like a reasonable assumption.
Arguments assuming a positive return to scale 4 orders of magnitude out may be true— or may be unduly optimistic. I don’t like to have too much faith extending the lines too far off the right of the graph. When that is required, I want whatever margin and ways to reduce risk as possible: which is why I would like more nuclear in the mix. A grid with 12pc nuclear and the rest renewable (so about 3-4pc of nameplate power nuclear) would require much less over provisioning and storage.
You don't have to go all the way to battery prices scaling to 5% of the price they are today to consider it likely the price continues to fall at all.
Replacing the whole system every 20 years still seems really wild to me, especially in worlds where price doesn't fall past the cost of maintenance, because the only wear part is the battery, and batteries are modular. We could, sure, I just showed the cost is a fraction of today's energy spend, it just seems really weird not to do something smarter instead.
> we can’t be kicking 3pc of GDP to storage.
Yes we can, indefinitely, and doing so saves money relative to fossil fuels (which are currently about $8T/year[0]) and nuclear (which is on the expensive side of electricity compared to fossil fuels anyway).
[0] https://www.precedenceresearch.com/fossil-fuels-market
>You’re again not considering electrification of current loads that burn fossil fuels
You're not considering cost.
>Unfortunately, a lot of these loads are closer to 24/7
The exact opposite is true. Heating, cooling and car charging are just 3 examples of current loads that burn fossil fuels which are already being demand shifted on an electric grid.
>The IEA net zero scenario assumes 100TWh of storage
Did you assume it was all going to be achieved with batteries? This is a common fallacy perpetuated by nuclear industry propaganda.
350GWh are being built in australia right now with zero batteries, and studies show there is plenty of geography suitable to build plenty more of that around the world.
Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.
>but having some clean, always-on generation greatly reduces the amount of storage and overprovisioned production of other types needed
and there is zero point if the cost is stupidly high (which it is) and we have the imagination to look beyond just batteries as a means of storing power.
Nuclear industry propaganda is alas not capable of such.
> Power2gas+solar+wind is still cheaper than nuclear power even though it's quite expensive.
The costing mistake people always make is assuming p2g infrastructure can be operated at high duty cycle with an all renewable grid. If you need to amortize the infrastructure over a few hours per day it looks much less favorable. Of course, with a little more stable base generation in the mix, this assumption is less shaky. It doesn’t need to be a ridiculous amount.
More base generation simultaneously makes p2g more reasonable and reduces the total need for it (and total need to overprovision everything else)
And even if one disagrees that a small amount of additional nuclear reduces total system cost, it absolutely reduces systemic risk vs putting all of our eggs in the battery basket.
Pumped hydro is great for Australia, but the capability to increase hydro in most areas is much more limited. We are going to have to mostly do it with batteries and intermediate term storage with p2g.
The problem stems form new built western nuclear power costing $190/MWh if it can sell its power 24/7 all year around.
Adding that as a base input cost too all storage technology just makes the entire enterprise unfeasible.
You also have to answer why this P2G infrastructure should buy your extremely expensive nuclear electricity when renewables and storage delivers way cheaper electricity.
They should buy the electricity because it is better than leaving the electrolyzers idle when there is no surplus of renewable power alone, and higher utilization spreads capital costs over more production. It can be a tiny portion of the energy cost during the day, and a large part at night. Having a few percent of nameplate power being nuclear doesn’t push up costs too much when renewables are producing.
Having a few percent of nameplate power being nuclear means much less total nameplate power, and allows loads like p2g for longer term storage to run more of the day (and means you need to tap the p2g less often, so you can have a -lot- less electrolyzer infrastructure— better utilization and less need).
Diversity of approaches lower risks and may lower costs.
We can start worrying about storage once we reach 60-80% renewable and just keep using fossil fuels as backup. Nuclear doesn't replace storage (at least not if you don't want to run your nuclear plants at like half capacity)
> 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_...
Don't forget that they have power shortages and strict rationing in that equation. So at the end of the day they have 75% solar but it is not adequate for the population.
Thats not true. It's 75% renewable. Means, biomass, wind, solar etc.. And in Winter it is 55% renewable. Shortages are compensate mostly with fast booting Gas, Coal and Hydrogen plants. Also trading[1] in Germany is relatively even (in/out).
[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.ht...
This is the first time I hear that there is strict (or any) electricity rationing in Germany and I've lived here all my life.
They might be mixing up Germany and South Africa i think. IIRC they do have times where they have planned outages in the different areas as the grid can't handle it if all were able to use it at the same time.
South Africa has outages but it's more down to corruption and mismanagement than grid issues.
We do not have shortages or power rationing. As another poster said, you may be confusing Germany with South Africa, though that's not a common confusion usually.
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.
It's great for the companies that run the plants because they are highly funded by subsidies from the society in which they are built. Nuclear power simply does not work from a capitalist point of view. Former Governments just swallowed this pill, because they had no natural resources that produce enough energy and they tried to stay independent. Now you can do this with renewable energy.
Some of that is because people are so skeptical of it, it never got to economies of scale. You could say the same thing about pretty much any energy source prior to it being scaled up.
Tbf, perhaps that is still an instrinsic problem with nuclear, that it isn't easily ammenable to economies of scale the way solar pannels or fossil fuels are.
nuclear never got economy of scale? There were hundreds of nuclear power plants built across the world in the 1970s/1980s. Developed countries went from "no nuclear" to "~20..30% nuclear" or more in less than 20 years. If that's not sufficient scale to be economical, then I don't know what would have been.
Historical evidence therefore rather suggests nuclear isn't economical at any scale once active subsidies are out. Current nuclear power plants under construction in the US or Europe, or recently completed there add more than evidence for high cost and major overruns to the pile.
Of course, one can go all conspiracy and claim that's only because of the deep anti-atom lobby, and because the cheap SMRs have always been torpedoed, or because Thorium molten salt reactors have been secretly killed by the military-industrial complex or whatever.
Occam's razor makes me think though, could it just be that nuclear was, is, and likely, at least for quite a while still, will be just so friggin' expensive that pretty much any "alternative" is more economical?
(back-of-envelope calcs say that if ~1.5GW electric from a new nuclear power plant cost ~20..40G$ to build .. between ~13..28$/W ... solar is <1$/W, there's a lot of spare change for batteries in that. Ok, that's pub talk. Still, if I have influence where my money goes, I'd only grudgingly accept nuclear for base load, subsidised as needed. Economics say, build what's cheap capex to build and then gives zero-opex energy when "running". There's no economic alternative to the "alternatives")
> Nuclear power simply does not work from a capitalist point of view.
So what? Capitalism doesn't work from any point of view.
”The west is weak. Not capable of building like the motherland.”
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.
> 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.
As long as you add the cost of the gas infrastructure to renewables, sure.
The reason why we have been using fossil gas as peakers for decades are because they are about the cheapest we can build while offering acceptable running costs.
We also have an entire fleet of them, which lives are easily extended as long as we add for example capacity markets to ensure their survival as renewables push down their capacity factors.
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.
Well, we don't have that capacity.
Installed battery capacity has been skyrocketing in just the last few years. It's almost as if time is linear.
Yet.
But people are working on it.
Efficiency always matters. There’s always capex, ROI, and alternative opportunity costs for capital
It's OK to be inefficient sometimes.
Everyone feels this way until they personally have to pay more money for something.
Sure, but that can happen with too much efficiency, too. See, for example, supply chains during COVID. We had a very good handle on how much (for example) toilet paper we needed in normal times, and produced almost exactly that much.
Having some extra power generation capacity means you're not freezing to death in a cold snap or frying all the elderly in a heat wave.
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.
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-...
It wasn't nothing to do with them, but it was mostly not to do with their intrinsic characteristics, and a lot to do with how they were managed on the grid, and how some of them were not actually acting as they should (which was also true of some non-renewable sources). Saying 'nothing to do with renewable energy sources' when the report spends half its time talking about renewable energy plants and how they contributed to the problem is really not helpful (as unhelpful, IMO, as going on about how it proved renewables intrinsically make a grind unstable, because it gives credence to that argument).
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?
Batteries are also inverter based sources so they typically don't add any inertia to the grid either. It's not really about the supply of power, it's about maintaining the 50hz frequency to a 0.002% accuracy (yes really) and keeping the voltage similarly exact, otherwise things start quickly disconnecting and tripping in a chain reaction. DC sources would work much better with a HVDC grid... if we had one.
grid-scale batteries generally do add inertia, because that's the most valuable service for them to provide at a small scale. Inverters attached to batteries can do it way better than spinning generators, but they need to be set up to do that.
(And a DC grid would be much more difficult to manage: the nice thing about frequency is that it has to be pretty much the same over the whole grid, so it's a useful signal for the balance between supply and demand, while voltage is really quite sensitive to local effects)
Grid forming inverters are off the shelf technology today.
Price the ancillary services and you will be swimming in them.
> it's about maintaining the 50hz frequency to a 0.002% accuracy (yes really)
That doesn't sound right to me. In the UK the legal requirement is to be within 1% so between 49.5 to 50.5 Hz.
In operation they aim for tighter than that at +/- 0.2 Hz, so 49.8 to 50.2 Hz, or 0.4%.
I can believe that other countries might have tighter limits but not that much!
> 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.
> I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe.
For the US PJM (US east coast and midwest) and CAISO (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada) grid areas, total wind power fluctuates over a 4:1 range on a daily basis. Both grids post dashboards where you can see this. Averaging out wind over a large area does not help all that much.
Solar fluctuates too; there's not much at night.
This largely means we have to build a bit more of each, and store some.
The chances of an entire continent being devoid of wind and solar for an extended period becomes vanishingly small pretty fast.
There is a paper floating around showing that for both US+Canada and the continental EU there has never been a single hour where there has been no wind and no sun somewhere in a 30 year period.
> There is a paper floating around
This needs a better cite.
I mean, would you believe it the other way around?
Someone claiming, there was a day with no wind and no sun in whole north america in the last 30 years?
I wouldn't believe that. But concrete data to have, is of course better than assuming ..
Here's the CAISO wind graph. This is the total wind energy from four large states. Note that the low point is 1/7 that of the peak, which is around noon.[1] Here's the PJM wind graph.[2] Low point is about 1/4 the peak, again, around local noon.
It just doesn't "average out" across even a sizable country.
[1] https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
[2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf
Now click the demand view.
It goes dramatically up and down on a daily pattern, too.
Every night there is no sun, and there are many times where there is not enough wind for all of our needs.
...or we can just build nuclear powerplants, no need for millions of batteries, power at night too, and all it takes is removing a few "greens" from their position of power.
Need the batteries regardless for the cars, and the scale of cars' needs exceeds the current use of the electricity grid.
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.
Solar efficiency degrades over time. When these sites are no longer economical their owners will turn to bankruptcy, we'll have thousands of hectares of green fields covered in disarrayed broken blue panels, overgrown, unmaintained, a public nuisance of massive proportions in the making.
Those locations have a large grid connection, which is valuable enough to pay for the decomissioning / cleanup costs so something else can use the connection.
Heck, there are companies cleaning up coal plants to use the connection for solar or wind, and that's a lot more expensive than cleaning up an old solar plant.
Solar panels are not degradable and are piling up in toxic landfills as are windmill blades.
Solar panels are made of exactly the stuff needed to make solar panels.
The ability to recycle solar panels will only get better with time.
Nuclear waste is not biodegradable either...
I'm not pro nuclear, but FWiW:
There are bioremedition techniques used to treat contaminated sites, just as there are similar techniques for toxic metals contamination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioremediation_of_radioactive_...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266676572...
The radioactive material doesn’t go away, it’s either diluted until safe or concentrated until you can bury it somewhere safe.
So we shouldn't bioremediate radioactive or heavy metals contaminated sites then?
The point being, there are biological processes that address toxic waste.
Further, there are waste issues with pretty much all human uses of energy and resources, including "green" technologies. It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
* https://hamiltonlocke.com.au/unlocking-clean-energy-the-cruc...
The sane approach is to address external costs from the get go, not assert that there are none.
The point is that solar panels in landfills are not a problem and nuclear is not a panacea.
Either path leaves us with radioactive waste to treat.
> It's impossible to have green tech w/out rare earths, and impossible to have rare earth end products w/out creating radioactive waste.
Where do you get this idea from? (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Solar power does not leave us with radioactive waste.
Considering radiation and heavy metals as the same problem because they're both bad for you and involve remediation processes when things go wrong is like treating a lack of seatbelts in cars the same as sugar induced diabetes.
Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive" is lithium deposits come in salt flats, salt flats contain potassium, some potassium is radioactive. But that's already diffused everywhere on the planet making *all life* radioactive well before we arrived in the pre-neolithic.
> Where do you get this idea from..
a few decades in mineral and energy exploration, processing, etc. Several million line kilometres of environmental radiometric surveying, covering both exploration and industrial settling ponds across many countries. Had a 42 litre crystal pack and spectrometer airborne in Northern India over the 1998 Pokhran-II test series.
> (If it's NYT, paywall, can't read it).
Try archive.md et al.
See second link:
Unlocking Clean Energy: The Crucial Role of Rare Earth Minerals: What’s all the Fuss About?
> Closest I can think of for why someone might think "rare earths" are "radioactive"Any reason your "thinks" might be better than actual exposure to mineral processing IRL ?
China, Malaysia, other rare earth processing locations have concentrations of radioactive waste as a result of refining concentrates to end product (see NYT article).
Right, got it.
I'm one of today's lucky 10,000, this is a new and exciting definition of "radioactive waste" that I was previously unaware of.
All previous uses of the phrase "radioactive waste" I have encountered, have been "things produced in a nuclear reactor or by a nuclear weapon detonation", and not simply "found in ores that also have thorium and uranium". (While this is broader than my potassium example, I think it's of the same category).
I'll note that alternative meaning for future use. I'm sure you're not the only one on here who would use it in this sense, and wouldn't want to mix up these two very different risks.
Of course, the consequence of this definition is that there is, in this sense, "radioactive waste" from coal mining. What with the trace levels of, IIRC, both uranium and thorium in coal.
Good thing it only takes a couple dudes with impact drivers and a truck to tear that down in under a week. Even a hand truck is good enough to cart a few of them away at a time.
Yeh, it's not as if they can't replace the solar panels or anything.
Everything degrades over time.
Just absolute nonsense. Modern panels are often guaranteed to produce 90% of their nameplate capacity for 25 years and then degrade at something like 0.35%/year afterwards. A panel installed today will likely be generating more than 60% of it's capacity by 2100 and will have done so for 75 years.
> 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 :(
Gas price are still twice as high as four years ago. Whole industries are collapsing because electricity is too expensive for factories. Personally, just heating my home has become very expensive.
Europe is deindustrializing. Especially Germany, the EU economic engine, has been hit hard. So yes, the word crisis is used correctly here.
> For instance, BASF, a global chemical giant, recently announced plans to downsize its operations in the country with the reason being unbearably high energy prices in Germany. Now, the company is shifting its focus toward expanding its production efforts in China and the U.S. to access more stable energy costs. Germany’s prime power- the Automotive industry, is also struggling due to immense pressure caused by rising energy costs. A recent study revealed that energy costs for Germany’s automotive sector increased by 20% in 2022 and a similar trend followed in 2023. https://ceinterim.com/deindustrialization-in-germany/
> Whole industries are collapsing
Ok, I'll bite, name 3 collapsing industries - on the verge of extinction due to rising energy prices - that could be fixed by building highly-polluting power generators ASAP?
It’s late, my brain has shut down but I can name 2 on top of my head:
Steel.
Anything chemical. We already lost half our production. :o
You should read some financial newspapers. Things are really bad.
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).
Nuclear plants and their cooling towers tend to be made of reinforced concrete. That makes them harder to bomb. If you want to take out power you bomb the transmission or substations instead as they are far less durable.
I recall hearing in school that 9-11 masterminds had considered planes against nuclear power plants but abandoned it after doing the math and realizing that it would do little damage. Not sure how true that is admittedly.
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.
Because it's a fact. When your interlocutor doesn't care about facts there's no particular reason they should care it's cheaper, that's just another fact.
You say "OK, Joe thinks the Earth is flat but he should still use Solar" and Joe doesn't follow. Joe's number one news source is "Jenny Truth Sayer" on TikTok and Jenny just told him that the solar panels attract Venusian Space Clowns, and he has to smash them with a hammer or else his genitals will explode
There are greedy assholes for whom it doesn't matter why the line is going up. But it turns out they don't like wind or solar because they're too democratic. Those assholes are - like most capitalist asshole, used to a system where you own stuff (a mine, a well, a pipeline, a ship) and you get infinite money, but newer systems aren't about owning stuff. You can't own the sunlight, or the wind, well then it's no good is it? The big oil companies stepped back from "We're part of the transition" and doubled down on fossil fuels, because that means more money for them, and if we all die well, too bad.
Because there are uses of fossil fuels where solar won't be cheaper to replace them, but that still must be eliminated to avoid eventual disaster.
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.
Not entirely sure: everywhere I read about solar + storage, there are huge errors bars. Eg : https://www.lazard.com/media/eijnqja3/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Solar+storage : from 50$/MWh to... 131$/MWh !
Go make a decision with something like that.
The trend is clear, for sure, and it will make sense to extrapolate... Up to a point, as usual. (baring one of the "breakthroughs" that make it to the HN top page on e in a while and never materialize... Sigh)
Night, sure. Doesn't work in winter though. (Not that that means we should stop building solar - we're still far from the point where it wouldn't make sense to build any more solar because we can't store the energy.)
If you're bordering on the article circle, yes. Otherwise you just have to overbuild a bit more.
I live in the UK. The ratio between solar output on a typically sunny summer day and a typical cloudy winter day is about 20. So your "a bit" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
Globally seen the Uk is close to the arctic circle. It is one of the worst cases
Right but it's not exactly the latitude that's the issue. On sunny days in winter I get plenty of power. The issue is the weather - only about 1/3 of the days in winter are sunny.
Yeah, my comment was a simplification - like most things trying to describe local effects globally are. The UK doubles as unusually cloudy weather and relatively short days.
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.
I'm not sure this makes sense? If you have a solar system setup at home, with a battery, electric heating and also ev charger, then it's all the same thing. Or am I misunderstanding something?
Electricity is a type of energy, but all energy isn't electricity. The total amount of energy is electricity + non-electricity energy, and solar doesn't yet equal to greater than 50% of that total.
No, this is an important distinction as different energy sources can be used to do the same thing.
For example, you can run a boiler to do electricity and/or district heating. Very common in Sweden for example.
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.
Yes, I couldn't find data for the same month.
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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I just dislike lavish handouts to an industry that has spent the past 70 years living on them experiencing negative learning by doing and still expects the public to pay for their insurance.
The plan is essentially locking in energy poverty for generations due to the costs.
Are you not worried about pissing away one of the largest advantages Scandinavia has in cheap electricity? And instead of investing in the future we’re going all in on a dead end industry.
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.
This is where energy mixes and economics come into play.
Dams provide most parts of the globe a lot of seasonal storage. It takes the same water if they average 10% over the year or 5% over 9 months and 25% over 3. Similarly, locations for wind farms often vary in the season they provide the most power. So the economic maximum around high solar productivity ends up compensating for it’s lower winter output.
"Dams provide most parts of the globe a lot of seasonal storage"
Is this true? I think it's the opposite, that dams and pumped hydrostorage of energy works in a few areas where the geography supports it, but (for example) in the plains of the USA it's not really possible.
Why haven't we built a huge solar farm around the Hoover Dam to pump water back up to Lake Mead insted of letting it flow downstream.
There are contracts around how much water needs to flow downstream, so they can't just hold it back like that. California and Arizona both have allocations that they pull from the river downstream of the dam. Mexico too in theory I think, although I don't know if they actually get their allocation any more.
Given how oversubscribed the river water already is, how the river flow rate is steadily diminishing due to increasing temperatures, and the politics involved, even a small or temporary additional reduction in downstream flow would encounter huge opposition.
With multiple dams you can release water early at one point in the system and have zero impact on users below the second dam.
The northeast and northwest has an abundance of water. Managing total water usage is a large problem for the southwest but there’s many opportunities to do things like evaporation reduction.
Hydro generation is pretty geographically limited, but pumped storage only requires two reservoirs vertically separated. If you allow building one of the two reservoirs then there are millions of potential locations.
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
It’s not universal, smaller dams don’t have nearly as much storage as large ones but they also produce vastly less power. At the other end the Great Lakes are effectively storing years worth of electricity, and have significant flexibility in delivery.
Looking at the US most of it is family close to large scale hydropower, except Florida, but it’s a little under 7% of annual power nationwide. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2011.06.10/hydro_pa...
Because the primary purpose of the Hoover Dam isn’t power generation it’s water management.
0.05% of the world's population live north of the arctic circle. Solar panels don't work for them, but their diesel generators are not a significant portion of the world's CO2.
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.