Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
The last ~4% or so when the sun isnt shining, the wind isnt blowing, the batteries and pumped storage are depleted can be supplied via power2gas.
Unlike pumped storage and batteries, Power2gas has poor round trip efficiency (40%) but unlike them gas is a very cost effective way to store large amounts of energy for long periods of time.
The ironic thing is that even if we produced all our power in this inefficient way and not just 4% it would still be a bit cheaper than nuclear power.
Until natural gas extraction is taxed or banned, though, power2gas probably wont be cost effective. Natural gas is too cheap even with all the wars.
Areas where solar is much less productive (e.g. Norway, Canada) tend to have lower population density, more abundant hydropower potential (which also means storage capacity) and more wind potential.
So, the ratio of solar, wind and hydro would be different under a 100% green energy scenario for them.
They often have grid interconnects to countries where solar does produce a lot, too.
Possibly, and we do use linters, but linters don't stop LLMs from going off the rails. It does end up fixing itself because of the linter, but then the results are only as good as the linter itself.
The irony is that your comment should be entirely inverted. Renewables are not rewarded way over the odds - in fact the ruling party banned onshore wind entirely and i remember them banning at least one offshore wind farm. Luckily it is very cheap to build.
Now Hinkley Point C is another story. It's a hugely expensive boondoggle which is taking decades to construct at enormous cost and the reward at the end is that they are rewarded with a strike price that is 3x that of solar and wind. That is an obsecene subsidy forced on to customers for a power source that cant even do load following and doesnt help with fluctuations in supply and demand.
The slow fluctuations on cold, windless nights or when nuke plants are down for unplanned maintenance are going to be managed with gas.
Maybe one day it'll be gas synthesized with electricity from solar+wind overproduction on a day like today. The roundtrip is expensive, but will still be cheaper than nuclear power on a windy, summer day.
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
It kind of is.
Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.
Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
This exact same thing (literally another german state i think) almost happened about 20 years ago and Microsoft freaked the fuck out. Thats where all the TCO nonsense came from - just one german state trying to de-microsoft.
I think Microsoft won, too.
I think theyre terrified of positive examples. Especially ones with FAR lower TCO and lower geopolitical risks.
Germany never had a huge amount of nuclear power anyway and keeping it going was expensive. Fukushima was just what pushed them over the edge.
Meanwhile in the UK rate payers are being forced to subsidize nuclear power with a guaranteed strike price that is ~4x what they have to pay for the same amount of power from solar and wind.
Remove the lavish subsidies and make nuclear pay for its own catastrophe insurance and it'd be dead in the water. Those subsidies would be put to far better use on storage, wind and solar.
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