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Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely ther
by kokey 8mo ago
Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc.
This time, however, it looks like it's actually true and that's just for wind and solar. This is incredible, and done through slowly compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way.
- fred_is_fred 8mo agoHow much did Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine and nat gas price and supply changes accelerate things?
- toomuchtodo 8mo agoEmber Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-and-costs/ https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily)
- natmaka 8mo agoWe must take into account the public money spent to build and maintain the electricity system. In France, for example, electricity is cheaper than in most similar countries, but nuclear power costs taxpayers a huge amount of money.
- cies 8mo ago[flagged]
- direwolf20 8mo agoIf the US did the attack wouldn't it be on the US?
- cies 8mo agoYes. First that, now Greenland. But brrrr, Putin/Gadaffi/Sadam/Khomeni/Kim bad... (they never attacked Europe like this)
- ZeroGravitas 8mo agoSadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response. Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose. It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice. And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread.
- torginus 8mo agoThis is just a conspiracy theory of mine, but how credible is the notion that in Germany, the Greens who campaigned (successfully) for nuclear shutdown were in fact funded by Russia?
- nandomrumber 8mo agoWhether true or not, it is almost entirely Greenpeace, and your local Greens party, who are to blame for us being in this mess. Without them raising panic about nuclear we could all be paying something closer to $40 - $80 a month for all the electricity we could reasonably consume, much like mobile phone plans / prepaid service. That would still leave transport and agriculture emissions to deal with, but they’d be easier to solve if we had virtually unlimited process heat to generate hydrogen > synth fuels.
- natmaka 8mo ago> if we had virtually unlimited That's outdated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter
- nani8ot 8mo agoIt was the conservative CDU with the economic liberal FDP which decided in 2011 to stop using nuclear power in Germany. At the time when the Greens were in power a decade later, it was already way to late to build out nuclear infrastructure again (not to mention the lack of fuel). So yes, you've metioned a conspiracy theory without any substance. The Greens continually pushed for renewables, which the (conservative) government largely ignored in favour of building gas pipelines to Russia.
- 7952 8mo agoThe problem is that it lead to investment on the expectation of high electricity prices in the future. Oil companies went and overspent on offshore wind concessions. When the prices dropped they were back to relying on strike prices that didn't offer enough profit and cancelled schemes. At least in the UK offshore wind has been somewhat stalled by that and by delay to grid connections.
- pranavj 8mo agoThis is an important observation. For years these headlines came with asterisks - one sunny/windy day, excludes gas, new capacity only, etc. This being actual annual generation for wind+solar combined vs all fossil fuels is genuinely significant. The compounding nature of it is key too - solar capacity is now large enough that even modest percentage growth adds enormous absolute capacity each year.
- jl6 8mo agoThe “but” this time is that we are talking about electricity demand, not total energy demand. Electrification of heating is the next big milestone. It’s still a great trend.
- RationPhantoms 8mo agoIn my opinion, the "but" is still the "hellbrise" considerations brought up in the Decouple podcast. Renewable energy is fantastic but, at grid scale, has to be coupled with sufficient storage: https://www.decouple.media/p/hellbrise https://www.decouple.media/p/hellbrise
- adrianN 8mo agoYou can get pretty far with negligible storage. There is a cost tradeoff between storage, peaker plants (those could burn hydrogen, not just natgas) and grid size. 70% renewable with no storage is rather easy.
- RationPhantoms 8mo agoNot sure if you read the podcast but the whole point is that over-reliance on renewables without a sufficient means to handle oversupply can cause grid instability specific to the Spain/Portugal grid outage.
- Rygian 8mo agoThe reports on the Iberian outage point out that, if solar/wind had been allowed to help, the outage could have been prevented. The outage was never about renewables, it was caused by bad dispatch of reactive power.
- youngtaff 8mo agoIf you take a look at the All Time view on https://grid.iamkate.com https://grid.iamkate.com you'll see wind overtook gas a few years ago in the UK
- owenversteeg 8mo agoThe only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-source-and-country?country=~OWID_EU27 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.
- eigenspace 8mo agoIt can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage. Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation). Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating. So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies. ______ If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever
- adrianN 8mo agoMost power plants are less than 50% efficient.
- 8mo ago
- dmix 8mo ago> compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way. I’ve read multiple stories of European manufacturers saying they are struggling with high operating costs, with energy being a major factor making it difficult to compete with China who has invested in every sort of energy broadly. China doesn’t just compete on labour costs like people think, they figured out ways to make every part of operating there cheaper. Just keeping the prices baseline to something else that’s already relatively expensive shouldn’t be the only goal. But it’s progress I guess.
- b3orn 8mo agoThe largest "but" is that they only look at electricity generation, not energy in general. There's a lot of heating with natural gas and of course most cars still have internal combustion engines which burn petrol or diesel.
- samus 8mo agoHeating with gas is difficult to phase out since it's a major investment. It would require large-scale build out of remote heating. Replacing IC engines is a whole different story, and it's not clear whether electric cars are a complete replacement yet.
- ricardonunez 8mo agoThis of what Germany needed to do and not go nuclear… on nuclear.