Interesting that even on the yearly chart almost all green and greenish areas get their 'green' power from hydro and nuclear by large. If only wind and solar produced as much power as they do talk.
The renewables buildout is still ongoing, while the nuclear and hydro areas were built decades ago. The hydro areas are also mostly former glaciated areas, which is a great advantage in terms of suitable sites.
The post-first-oil-crash nuclear buildout might have continued if it hadn't been for the combination of fossil fuel becoming cheap again and Chernobyl fallout covering the entirety of northern Europe. The symbolism of Reagan taking Carter's solar panels off the White House made it clear that wasn't going to be the path.
The initial nuclear rollout ran into capacity factor issues. They barely broke even at 90+% capacity factors with subsidies and would have needed increasing subsidies to become as common as coal. Ultra cheap energy storage would have fixed the issue, but nothing was viable at the time.
Unfortunately, renewables cause similar issues. If solar tanks wholesale prices for 8 hours a day nuclear needs to make that up on the other 16. Meanwhile Solar hits the same wall once it needs energy storage.
Hydro ran out of ideal locations in most countries etc which is why we have so many different energy sources. The only way things hangs is if the underlying economics does. Nuclear with an 80% reduction in operating and decommissioned costs would largely take over the world.
Australia is already on track to have half of that already with snowy 2 (350Gwh).
This also doesn't take into account stuff like https://octopus.energy/agile/ that can use pricing to adjust demand to supply. Heating, car battery charging, industrial processes like aluminum smelting - lots of demand can be time shifted easily.
I am specifically referring to a nuclear power plant’s income here. If they averaged 10c per kWh over a year that’s X$/year. To make that same X$/year when wholesale prices are 2c/kWh for 8 hours a day they would need to be average 14c/kWh for 16 hours to average 10c/kWh over a full day. Aka (8 * 2c + 16 * 14c)/24 = 10c
The above is of course a simplification of a complex market, but illustrates a real effect related to the “duck curve.”
Of course, this is why markets where everyone is forced to sell into a single pool don't work. If you let them sign a PPA for baseload electricity with a consumer who values that certainty (and there are many) for the whole year at 10c/kWh then there is no issue.
Yes and no, PPA don’t change the underlying economics. In the above model, of batteries added 20c/kWh then Nuclear averages cheaper over a full day. If batteries added 10c/kWh then Solar ends up cheaper over a full day.
The underlying issue is nobody wants a PPA that lasts for the full 40+ year lifespan of a new nuclear reactor and battery prices are still falling. Enough subsides can make anything viable, but western governments have largely lost interest in doing so.
I don't understand this line of argument - that's a high capacity factor! And it's not a dirunal or annual one either, it's a predictable "we need to shut down to refuel" one. It sounds like it wouldn't have broken even, even at 100% capacity factor? At which point it's no longer "too cheap to meter" but "nuclear power is too expensive". And that's before we even dig into capex vs opex vs decommissioning vs disaster insurance.
Hinkley point C is guaranteed a price of £92 per megawatt hour (or 9.2p/kWh), when it finally comes online.
A high capacity factor sounds like a benefit, however demand isn’t a constant. The perfect power source would be capable of running 24/7 but be profitable if run for 1 hour a year.
In the electrical industry a base load generation has historically been the least valuable electricity and it’s the only way Nuclear can operate.
Nuclear requires 90%+ of utilization to be competitive. They reached a wall once they provide enough power that they would have to be cut down for 10% of the time.
What is completely different from solar, that is outcompeting everything with ~20% utilization, and making the alternatives more expensive on the process... What is a problem because it can't provide more than ~20% utilization.
The negative externalities of fossil fuels justified some level of relative subsidies. Either by taxing pollution or direct subsidies of nuclear power.
Even ignoring global warming smog and acid rain have been known issues for a very long time. On top of this many countries lacked domestic supplies of fossil fuels.
Apparently they were not taken down just because Reagan didn't want them. The roof needed work and they were in the way. They were just not put back up.
Notably, GHWBush's mansion in Texas, shortly after, had solar water heating.
If I need (for my small European country) 15 TWh of electricity per year, and my typical rainfall onto catchment area for hydro is enough to do maybe 10 TWh per year, I'm 5 TWh short. In the 1980s you'd have probably solved that with CCGT, but that means finding or importing methane (natural gas). If I also build 10 TWh of wind production, even though I can't tell you a year in advance which days it will blow hardest, it will blow, and now my total capacity is enough to run solid green, because when the wind blows the hydro schemes save water to use another day.
Wind production varies year on year, but only maybe 10% where the variation day to day is almost 100%. So wind + hydro should pair nicely because the hydro plant can ramp up or down production as appropriate.
In the 1980s they solved it they solved it with coal. Or, occasionally, oil or simple (open cycle) gas turbines. CCGTs didn't really become popular until the 1990s.
At least in the UK, wind right now is over 30% of our power generation [0]. I don't have links handy but wind regularly exceeds most other sources here. How much more do you want it to provide before you'd consider it not just talk?
It does, sometimes, causing electricity price to go negative.
This summer our local Hydro dam was full. But instead of generating electricity at full capacity they had to open the overflow valves because it was windy and the local wind farm was producing at full capacity and the transmission lines does not have capacity to handle both wind and hydro at full capacity.
Renewable energy installation has broken records for newly-installed capacity every year, even during the pandemic-induced supply chain chaos and material price instability, and is projected to do so this year as well. However, we're still quite early into the curve, and even with the accelerating rate of growth it will be many years before most people are using mostly-renewable power.
I find your statement is slightly misleading, when there are just barely two handful green countries over the whole year and half of them have wind energy with at least 30% share, a few even as primary source.
Wind & solar are still in their infancy in much of the world, but are growing very quickly.
In the UK, wind will overtake natural gas as the largest source of electricity in the next few years. It’s already producing more than 2.5x as much as all the UK’s nuclear plants combined.
By 2025, more than half of all UK electricity will be renewable, and by 2030, 95% will be from low-carbon sources (including nuclear).
There's several places where you can see the UK's power generation live. Right this second we're running on 31% wind power. We're just rolling into peak power usage times so probably different when you click the link.
This one is not the full picture of UK generation, however, as Elexon's data only includes generators that are connected to the National Grid.
Many smaller generators, including all(?) UK solar farms, smaller wind farms, W2E plants, etc, are connected to the distribution networks (DSOs), not directly to the National Grid. These can account for a significant percentage of UK generation at times!
Most of the other websites displaying UK generation include additional data sources so that things like solar are accounted for.
Some grids are more open than others. ElectricityMap scrapes public system operator websites (“ISOs”) or government data aggregators (US EIA balancing areas or ENTSOE in Europe) for their data.
To my knowledge, outside of Europe, there is no data reporting requirement, so this is all best effort (but it’s pretty good for best effort imho).
Not "just" - that's not painting the whole picture.
Go to NSW (Australia) on the map. Look at the left hand side panel. Look at production during midday - it says 55-60% of power comes from solar energy for that time of day.
If you look at the snapshot at the current time (of this posting), the sun has gone down and there's less solar power.
Australia has the most installed solar capacity per capita in the world, and has installed nearly 4GW of solar in the last 12 months alone. They're also making strong moves on battery storage
They started behind the curve, but they're moving quickly, relatively at least
Australia has the 3rd largest coal reserves in the world, and relatively small population, so economically it makes sense for them as upfront investment is lower for coal compared to renewables, as a lot of the cost of coal power is in the extraction.
Obviously not good for the long-term, nor good for the planet, but this is the same driver for coal power also (which we indirectly contribute to due to the sheer amount of goods they export to the advanced economies).
It's nighttime and there is no wind. That's the downside of extrapolating from real-time data.
A couple of highlights from Australia's energy transition story in the last few days, which show some of the work being done at state level in spite of a largely renewables-hostile federal government over the last several years:
> the Western Australia grid ... reached 82 per cent renewables for a half-hour period on October 30 ... and it is likely that new peak is the highest for any gigawatt-scale grid in the world.
> South Australia ... has established the world’s highest share of renewables – as a percentage of demand – in any gigawatt scale grid in the world, when it reached 146 per cent on September 14. The excess is, of course, exported to the neighbouring state, in this case Victoria.
> [NSW is seeking] solutions on replacing 10GW of coal capacity that is likely to leave the grid within the next decade.
> Those plans are being accelerated by fast-tracked closures of the main coal generators, including Liddell early next year, Eraring in 2025, and Bayswater as early as 2030. Vales Point is expected to close by 2029, leaving Mt Piper with the only uncertain closure time.
We had ~10 years of a government in the pocket of fossil fuel companies. It’s that simple. Our last PM brought a piece of coal into parliament as a prop, telling everyone that they shouldn’t be afraid of it. The bloke genuinely took the “let God deal with it” strategy, which is more palatable or at least common in the US, but was quite jarring here.
With a new government and increased market pressures, the tides are turning, quite erratically though, because of time/market pressure, mismanagement, incompetence, opportunistic capitalists, and whatever else.
Worked in energy as a quant a few years back: the current 'greening' of the grid is nothing of the sort. It's just a cash grab by creating extreme volatility in energy prices. On the right (wrong) days you had swings of $10,000 USD within 5 minutes of each other.
The net result was the grid being taken over by the government after a series of rolling blackouts in a number of states and letting everything rip. All this is was directly attributed to _one_ coal station going offline unexpectedly and losing the baseload it generated.
I can write a book on how fucked the market here is.
Solar has a much higher upfront cost than coal, so it's much easier to finance a coal plant than solar one. That said, this is a better excuse for poorer, developing countries than Australia.
Yes, the WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) explains why it made financial sense to roll out solar PV in northern European countries before many sunnier areas.
But as you say, Australia has no such excuse, having both the geography and the cost of capital to be a world leader in this, way beyond what they are now, which is okay but could have been much, much better.
Also points to an easy way to provide assistance to any country that is trapped into this financial dead-end.
The chart Figure 2-1 Comparison of current cost estimates with previous work also has wind power, which is also cheaper than coal, and has been for longer than solar has.
Plus, Australia has hydro, which can be varied to fill the gaps.
> Greater confidence in role of wind and solar PV: GenCost previously included a Diverse
technology scenario which explored the case where deployment of variable renewables was more
limited and other technologies played a larger role. Stakeholder feedback received during AEMO’s
2020-21 Australian scenario development process found that it was unlikely that alternative
technologies will be able to compete in a significant way with renewables. This reflects relatively
uncompetitive gas prices, a lack of confidence in the future cost competitiveness of CCS
technologies and abundant low-cost renewable resources.
Their 2030 forcasts also include costs for grid integration for different percentages of variable renewable.
It's simply not true we cannot store energy. We can produce hydrogen, methane, methanol, ethanol, biomass, steel, aluminum, cement, sillicon.. These are all energy intense processes that can help store energy.
In fact, when it comes to food production (which is really just a form of energy), there are 3 major strategies how we deal with winter: storage (e.g. granary), shifting production (e.g. eating a pig you raised during the year), and trade (e.g. buying oranges from a tropical country).
This is partly because massive energy storage (on the order of weeks) isn't really needed until you hit around 75% intermittent renewables (wind and solar), which is not yet the case anywhere in the world.
But the technology does exist, and it's gonna be deployed eventually.
This is indeed the big issue we need to solve: how to store enough energy to make it through the night. Of course we can already store energy, but to do it at that scale, it needs to be a lot cheaper.
Let me explain my point: power is not energy and energy is not power.
Renewable power is cheap in the same way someone whose head is dipped in liquid nitrogen and whose feet are in molten lead in over all pretty comfortable.
There will be no civil fusion power, as it would cost >10x as much as fission, and fission is not now competitive, and gets less so with each passing day.
Each dollar diverted to fusion or fission from build-out of wind and solar brings climate catastrophe nearer.
France decarbonized (up to 90% ish) their electricity generation in the span of 10 years, back in 1985. Unfortunately they've been sabotaging their nuclear power plants for years now, in favor of renewable energy.
Essentially these plants are forced to be unprofitable via energy laws.
For example, the nuclear plants are forced to sell their energy to energy traders at unprofitable low rates but those traders are never required to buy the energy and if the price of energy drops below this rate (AFTER it was bought) then the traders can just "return" the energy and the operators have to eat it. This happened during covid when energy prices collapsed due to lack of demand. These middlemen profit off of cheap nuclear energy instead of rate payers.
In addition, the nuclear plants must pay a 23 euro per MWh tax that subsidizes the operation of renewable energy. Since the plants are forced to sell their energy below cost and subsidize renewable generation, they are not profitable and aren't given the proper funds to maintain/improve these plants. So then these plants look bad/expensive and the ministers in charge demand that these plants are closed down before the end of their life. Even though the upfront costs have already been paid and the electricity they make are far cheaper than renewable generation if you don't force these crazy disadvantages on them.
> For example, the nuclear plants are forced to sell their energy to energy traders at unprofitable low rates but those traders are never required to buy the energy and if the price of energy drops below this rate (AFTER it was bought) then the traders can just "return" the energy and the operators have to eat it. This happened during covid when energy prices collapsed due to lack of demand. These middlemen profit off of cheap nuclear energy instead of rate payers.
Is this just nuclear or does it apply to other generation?
> In addition, the nuclear plants must pay a 23 euro per MWh tax that subsidizes the operation of renewable energy.
Source? One that isn't an hour long video and actually has a primary source.
I was technically mistaken about the 23 eu/MWh tax. The amount seems to be correct but it is charged to the ratepayer (not EDF) and is meant to help EDF cover the cost of the renewable energy they are forced to buy. But it does not actually cover the amount of renewable energy they are forced to buy, hence the debt.
So they were complaining about being held to an agreement to priority (essentially a price cap) for 25% of power they made in exchange for being handed a monopoly on power generation with infrastructure paid for by the public?
And the feed in tarriff acumulated a quarter of a nuclear reactor's worth of extra liability which they are now being paid?
You seem to be really reaching to claim this is somehow unfair. Especially considering the other side of the deal where taxpayers or utility customers who are victims of new nuclear plants are just told 'fuck you, you're paying the price we made up even if we don't generate any power' or 'we made one in another country and failed really bad so you get to pay half' or 'whoops, we only put aside 1/4th of the money needed to decomission...have fun paying another billionperGWbyeeee' or 'we racked up a quarter trillion dollar cleanup bill but we made you sign a treaty saying we only have to pay 0.5%, have fun'.
EDF is 85% owned by the French government. They were forced to "privatize" by the EU but are now planning to be nationalized again.
Nuclear infrastructure that is already paid for is being neglected and paracitized to pay for new solar/wind generation. The government has mandated that they will shut down perfectly good plants, taking nuclear from 75% of generation to 50%. The grid was already largely decarbonized! They are throwing away reliable cheap energy in order to pay for new intermittent energy. The result is increased cost, decreased reliability, and more emissions when the renewables aren't available. Fossil fuel use has stayed the same or even increased since renewables started being added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media/File:F...
> Especially considering the other side of the deal where taxpayers or utility customers who are victims of new nuclear plants are just told 'fuck you, you're paying the price we made up even if we don't generate any power' or 'we made one in another country and failed really bad so you get to pay half' or 'whoops, we only put aside 1/4th of the money needed to decomission...have fun paying another billionperGWbyeeee' or 'we racked up a quarter trillion dollar cleanup bill but we made you sign a treaty saying we only have to pay 0.5%, have fun'.
Hmm, maybe they'd have more money to fund things properly if they were allowed to charge the true rate for electricity (instead of letting other companies arbitrage for free), and weren't forced to buy renewable electricity at high prices?
> The government has mandated that they will shut down perfectly good plants, taking nuclear from 75% of generation to 50%.
A plant that is aging out or reaching the stage in its lifetime when it needs a $1.5/W refurb isn't 'perfectly good'. Nor is a much newer one that is corroding due to major design faults and is off half of the time.
Replacing them with energy sources where total costs are lower than running costs is just financial sanity. At least until there is a large enough renewables fraction that storage is a concern.
> Hmm, maybe they'd have more money to fund things properly if they were allowed to charge the true rate for electricity (instead of letting other companies arbitrage for free), and weren't forced to buy renewable electricity at high prices?
You misspelled 'fully exploit their monopoly rather than have a price cap at their claimed true cost of generation for 25% of it'. If €48/MWh isn't enough to pay for the upkeep then maybe don't claim it's cheap?
Recently they added a feature enabling the users to see production data per country on a monthly basis.
From that you can see that France still hasn't recovered in terms of nuclear power generation capacity and that, along with high natural gas prices was the perfect storm that caused electricity prices to skyrocket.
They're restarting as we speak and the effect on prices is already visible.
I am always (plesantly) suprised to see just how high the amount of renewables are. It really is quite contrary to the naratives - on both sides of the debate.
Huge progress has been made over not that long a timeline, if nothing more than diversifying the sources of power. More can be done but it is impressive all the same.
It's still too little too late. In Spain we still burn a lot of gas. In the last 12m gas was the main source of electricity.
And then it's everything which isn't electricity. For a more clear picture, look for sankey diagrams like this one [1], which shows how electricity is actually a small part of the equation.
Thats what the activist blockading my commuter train was hysterically screaming too.
When you are packed 3 deep and 3 high on an electic train being screamed at that you are personally destroying the planet (by taking this train to work?) it brings the climate wars home.
> When you are packed 3 deep and 3 high on an electic train being screamed at that you are personally destroying the planet (by taking this train to work?) it brings the climate wars home.
Had the displeasure of meeting some of those activists as well. While I don't support their means of protest (in Germany the constantly glue themselves onto the street) I understand their message. However, considering the activists blocked a packed tram line that is powered exclusively by renewables, I'm not sure if they themselves understand the issues completely.
Gluing yourself to a tram or the street in 2022 is having zero (positive) effect. The transition from fossil fuel to electrictiy and clean forms of electricity has been happening for a decade plus now - maybe the greenpeacer of the late 90's can legitimately claim credit. No policy maker is seeing these activists at work and changing their mind about anything.
The offshore wind farm opening in 2023 is not a product of that activist gluing themselves to something, and the one planned for 10 years from now is not either. The train, towards clean electricity and near zero oil is in motion, has been for quite some time, and the only question is how fast it is travelling.
I would love to see it move faster, and certainly anyone actually pulling the strings of investment are looking at a coventional power plant vs renewables and throwing their money at renewables faster than people can take it. It is only amongst the chattering masses and everyone having their voice heard on twitter that there is much debate.
Hm, I'm not on the side of those annoying activists, but I think your assertions have no ground.
Existence of "extremists" usually helps "moderates" make things change. Without the "extremists", the "moderates" ARE the "extremists" and will not be taken seriously. It reminds me of how without the Black Panther Party, some white moderates would have not accepted propositions from Martin Luther King.
I think that wind farms and renewables would not be there if there was no pressure from extremists that helped deciders realize that wind farms and renewables are not just a whim from few ecologists.
> the greenpeacer of the late 90's can legitimately claim credit
They were swiming against the tide - today they are swiming with a pretty rapidly moving current.
> wind farms and renewables would not be there if there was no pressure from extremists
Wind farms and renewables that exist today because someone in June 2022 glued their hand to a road. They are the product of research and development and planning under corporations and governments 3/4/5 leaders ago. In the context of the UK - 2014 for consent to build Hornsea which started delivering power in 2020. With each successful phase they keep asking to build more, it is the success of the project that had them proposing part 2 and now in 2022 part 3. The person glued to the pavement can claim Hornsea 3 is their doing but personally I dont think they are moving the needle at all.
If you could build a wind farm, and sell off 50% of the interest in the project for what it cost to build - you would be planning the next one as well.
Nobody is pretending that today's wind farms are the result of someone gluing their hand to a road in June 2022 (the fact that you are framing the discussion as if it is the case is not a good start).
But it is incorrect to say that it's obvious wind farms would have happened without people doing similar things in their time.
Maybe you are too young, but people doing similar things as people gluing their hands today existed way before 2014.
You take Hornsea, it is a good example: projects from industry in UK existed for a long time, but were unlocked only due to European Union promotion and subsidies for renewable energy, which itself would not have existed without the need for Germany to boost renewable because they decided to go out of nuclear, because of the ecologist protests in 1980-1990.
Hornsea is the result of the 2010 European Union push for 20% renewable, and would not have existed (at least not as early) otherwise, because EU funding was, obviously, a really good incentive. Before that, there were wind power industry pushing for projects in UK (such wind power industry groups exists since 1970), but they were not very often taken on board by the UK government. Also, Hornsea has deemed economically profitable because it used efficient technology created due to the push for renewable that was in general a political move due to pressure of ecologist protests.
Having annoying activists is unavoidable, especially as long as we also have climate change deniers or climate emergency underestimaters, and therefore, we should learn to not be deterred to still do the right thing.
People opinions on what actions are probably similar to Gaussian curves, with two consequences:
1) you may be situated on the mean value, but you may not, and you have almost no way to know (personal assessments are so biased they are worth nothing)
2) it is unrealistic to expect that no one will exist on the left or on the right of you. There will always be annoying people that will go too far. As long as those are agreeing on the climate emergency problem, considering that they are a problem that need to be solved is just a waste of time. Just live with it.
If it makes you feel better, you may even consider that the existence of those annoying activists is the consequence of the lack of action of people who are downplaying the climate change emergency. If the second ones don't exist, the first ones would not exist too.
I'm highly skeptical of your story. I'm 99.9% even the most tone-deaf activist would not block an electric train, if the objective of their campaign is to replace cars with trains and bikes. I find this hard to believe.
You jump on the roof while your fellow activist glue their hand to the side. 14% of those activists polled were down with it, not 0.01%.
"A poll on the Extinction Rebellion Telegram chat showed 86 per cent of members were against action targeting the London Underground. Just 4 per cent approved of the action, while 7 per cent approved if they could be sure trains wouldn't get blocked underground."
I believe the idea was that the commuters were going to jobs that destroyed the planet. I can only assume that philosophically they were ok with people taking public transport to work, but they disapproved of the jobs they were going to.
To add context, in greta’s climate book there’s a whole narrative on how the climate and sustainability crisis is a consequence of the current global economic model that incentivizes consumption and growth, so people that are on their way to the financial district and therefore probably work to support that model would be considered enemies of the planet by those activists. Their mode of transportation would be immaterial to that.
They’re not in favor of communism either by the way, they want the global economic system reformed to become sustainable and they consider the job of doing that a responsibility of the powers that be.
That diagram only shows waste heat when converting to electricity.
So if fossil fuels get converted to electricity it shows the roughly 50% loss, but if they're used in cars it doesn't show the 80% loss.
Electrifying everything makes a big difference, so much so that people quoting primary energy figures rather than final energy (the stuff we actually use to do stuff) are liars.
And this diagram, which is misrepresenting transport fuel as if it was final energy is also misleading for similar reasons.
> But I agree with you that generally too much panic is being created.
Unfortunately without the panic we wouldn't have even gotten where we are. The last decade's progress has been excellent, but there was 20 years of stagnation before that. The latest nuclear plant that was opened in the UK was in 1995, and we've not successfully built another since. Meanwhile gas plants have served their entire lifecycle and been decommissioned in that time frame, and are still actively being built (but thankfully no longer planned).
> However, the full picture isn't so glamorous once you take all energy types into account
Why not? Electricity is one of the biggest of energy, and is growing as transport (which is the second largest source of energy usage) is electrifying. Cleaning our electricity sources and moving our largest polluters to electricity is a great path forward. Theres no silver bullet here but what we're doing is pretty much the biggest impact we can make. We should have done it 20 years ago, and we should be doing it quicker now though.
The next biggest source of emissions is from agriculture, mostly from deforestation and oversimplifying for the sake of an internet comment, if the EU, China and the US just ate less beef, that problem would mostly solve itself.
Many people are saying, "but it is only electricity".
Of course, however, is there anything where the conversion has been from electic to petrol / gas / coal? My car is going electic, my bolier is going electric. This isnt new, it has been the path of travel for a while now.
Unless Nvidia has really f'd up their calculations my 5090 graphics card isnt going to be coal powered.
I think the point of "But it is only electricity" means that _currently_ the situation is not as good as one might think based on electricity production.
“Coal-fired power stations emit over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year,[4] about one fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions, so are the single largest cause of climate change”
The counter factual; if the 60% of electricity coming form wind or sunshine at this instant was from coal, then 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year becomes 20/30/40/50 Gt of carbon dioxide each year and global emmisions are significantly more than what they are now.
There are only 8500 coal power plants in the world generating 20% of all emissions.
“Coal-fired power stations emit over 10 Gt of carbon dioxide each year,[4] about one fifth of world greenhouse gas emissions, so are the single largest cause of climate change”
Take a look at global coal consumption (almost entirely driven by China, the world's leading manufacturer of solar panels and a leading adopter of wind power) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Coal_Consumption.sv... - and it's at record highs again this year.
Look at what happened in last ~20-30 years during which time the "green" movement was insisting that nuclear is too late, too costly, and renewables are the better solution to climate change, and that coal can not possibly compete with renewables and coal is dead and coal infrastructure are stranded assets.
The reality of the situation is that renewables can't even keep up, let alone reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, that coal is still one of the cheapest ways to generate power. And after China we still have half the world's population hasn't even started its energy consumption S-curve.
The people who thought fossil fuels were done for and renewables would just magically kill them and solve the problem -- with no need to look at serious investment in nuclear and hydro and real carbon pricing -- were lied to by fossil-fuel backed "green" propaganda.
With wind and solar we apparently only need 3 days of storage. For median household thats about 3x29kwh. It costs 87kwh*150$/kwh=13,050$ to produce such battery (tho sell it at about 5x markup). Given property prices and how much it costs to upgrade grid, small residential batteries is no brainer.
> Coal is also quite polluting and no one wants to live near a coal energy plant.
With modern filters and high enough smokestacks, the effect on air quality doesn't seem to be that bad. In my region, every city has its own coal plant (mostly used to provide heat for the city in the winter) and I don't notice the effects on air quality. It's definitely a small fraction of the pollution brought by people burning coal at home (in old boilers, obviously without any filters and with low chimneys).
Hard to imagine how far Germany could have been today if they weren't trapped for 16 years by a party which did everything it could to stop renewable expansion. Crippling the national industry and selling it out to China this way.
Time didn't stop in the pandemic. The 2007 election was fought on the topic of a carbon transition. It's at least a decade and a half, and the anti-transition side hasn't given up yet so it's still ongoing. If the Andrews government is returned it may be the beginning of the end with their proposal for a renewables oriented renewed SEC, but it won't be the end for the country as a whole.
I'm sure it is and it will continue to be since renewable energy has become some "evil tool" of the eco/leftist-conspiracy for the international-anti-intellectual bubble.
They look bad, but certainly the rate of badness is nowhere close to what it once was - if post pandemic emissions are not horrific, then you can make the case that the upward trend is broken.
I built https://energygraph.info based partially on ENTSO-E data, it uses grafana and a custom plug-in for the maps, focused on French nuclear and European eletricity with flow, day ahead prices and live and cumulative production by type or individual units.
I find it stunning that Germany, a country that according to Wikipedia has about the same solar potential as Alaska, produced 16,4GW ! from Solar, this last 2 November.
As far as I can tell, the comparison is made based on the average number of sun hours per day, which is about 3 for both Germany and Alaska. I’m not sure that “sun hours” is a sensible measure for solar potential, but if it is, the energy produced would be proportional to the area utilized for solar panels.
Given the UK may be having rolling blackouts (fwiw, more curiosity) I've been keeping an eye on this https://grid.iamkate.com/ - nice little dashboard.
If you have two of the same type of chart on a dashboard, _most likely_ you want the scale of the y axis to be the same on both (unless you very clearly call out the difference). When I land on this I get an "Actual Generation..." chart for Spain and Germany. Each chart is individually scaled, so the largest bars come to around 90ish% on the y axis, but in actual fact Germany's output is roughly (eyeballing it) 2x that of Spain's.
Title is slightly misleading, as the linked website also includes data from European countries which are not in the EU (ie, Serbia, North Macedonia, Bosnia, etc).
No, and keep in mind the map paints a much rosier picture than reality if you're concerned about climate. Just grid electrity is but a fraction of total energy use, and nearly all other energy is gathered from burning gas, oil and coal.
“The roadmaps envision 80% conversion by 2030 and 100% by 2050.” [1] [2]
Extrapolate out renewable and battery storage uptake rates. You won’t get the first kWh from a nuclear plant you start building today for at least a decade. Nuclear will have to compete on price so long as someone has to pay for it.
On the production side, renewable production is fully influenced by weather and this influences also the other means of production as renewables have "priority" on the grid.
On the demand side, it depends on how people heat (or cool) their home. In France, there is a lot of electrical heating and the partial dependency between temperature and demand is very well understood (and visible in the data). In countries where they rely more on gas story is different.
A good way to study these dependencies is to do load forecasting with white box models such as General Additive Models [1][2], you get the full picture of partial dependencies between your input variables and target variable.
entsoe has an API but its horrible XML code. I tried to work with it but just gave up at some point, too painful. I would recommend entsoe_py if you are using python, its pandas-based and does not contain all entsoe functionality but much more pleasant to work with
I generally agree, but for some of the data you need to download one csv file per month (or at least i could not avoid that) and at than point it becomes easier to use the api
The website is funny. They call themselves "transparency platform" and they even got a .eu domain. Yet their cookie consent popup is so not GDPR conform, because it only has an "accept" button and not reject button at all.
Fortunately trusty ol' element zapper gets rid of this and one can still look at the actual content one came for.
It's not accurate, at least for RO. According to an official site, 32% of our electricity comes from wind since yesterday. On this site it says it's 0.5%
This is great. Incredible to see how many countries still greatly depend on coal as a key source of energy, including the US. Macro trends that take hundreds of years to fade out.
In general, higher electricity prices mean that rooftop solar amortizes faster, since you save more per kWh that you don't have to purchase from the supplier.
Rates for feed electricity into the grid vary widely within the EU, for example in Germany it's around 6-7ct/kWh for home rooftop solar, in Belgium it depends on the energy company, but goes up to 40ct.
* connect your solar to the grid, sell off the excess (default for larger installations)
* connect your solar to the grid, donate the excess to the grid (easier from the paperwork perspective, doable for very small installations)
* have an "island" installation that's not connected to the main grid, move some devices to that island (you need two separate circuits, need to manage which device to put on which circuit)
* go fully island / off-grid (you only need one circuit, but need battery and enough power generation to go through the winter all by yourself)
The first two are definitively easier, the latter two only for real tinkerers / enthusiasts. So unless you count the latter two, the alternative to selling to the grid is donating the excess to the grid.
i own this solar inverter and i get to use on-grid mode when the grid is live during the day and if grid goes dark for any reason, i cut off supply outside and use the solar for home use WITHOUT BATTERIES. Been running this at home for 2 years now, 5 KWH inverter, 5.3 (i think) panels
This seems to big missing a major option:
* Connect your solar to the grid, but also to a local battery. Charge the battery with excess solar until battery is full, then sell/donate excess.
This has really started to become a viable option with solar panel prices being so low and battery prices (particularly lithium iron phosphate) dropping significantly in the last few years.
Unless this isn't a legal method anywhere in the EU, but I highly doubt that.
Up here in Lithuania we “store” excess power in grid and then pay a little for transmission when getting it back. Dunno exactly, but selling might be better since power is cheaper at night (but given current events - more expensive in winter).
sure, someone who can afford a car should be able to afford 1-3-5 kwh panels, right?
btw, do you know how much it costs for a 1kwh or a 5kwh panel + inverter?
The question is more whether a) they can afford a roof to put those panels on, or they actually live in a flat (most people in the EU) or rent it out and b) they can afford a car AND the panels, if the car is more or less a necessity for their daily lives, which is often is (not always, I think cars are overused even in Europe)
A rough rule of thumb is about 1 EUR per 1W of nominal / peak power output if you buy the parts yourself and handle installation, a bit more if you pay for installation as well.
This is from Germany, I hear prices differ a bit between EU countries.
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https://app.electricitymaps.com/map