Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway. The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway. Meanwhile the buildup of renewables continues and part of the "lost" production capacity will be filled in soon.
I don't think it's fair to compare the "little" 3GW with the total energy production. This is still power that must be replaced by coal and thus CO2 emissions. Yes, its 6% compared to the total energy production, but it's still extra unneeded CO2 in the atmosphere
> Germany would have had to burn coal that night anyway
But much, much less coal.
> The output of the remaining 3 reactors would have been only a fraction of the electricity requirements anyway.
That is s great way to say: we killed our stable source of electricity because of populism, and now we're burying our head in the sand justifying our decision.
> production capacity will be filled in soon.
Soon when? And the question of quiet nights remains
Somewhat less coal. We are talking about 3 GW less nuclear in a Grid which draws like 50. And yes, that were only the last nuclear reactors. But a lot of them would have had to be decommissioned anyway and there are still the problems of cost, especially of the nuclear waste etc.
A large part of these 3 GW will be replaced even in 2023 and that will continue through the years. The current plans aim for 80 renewables in 2030.
That's not how it works. I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load? You need quite a lot of battery storage to make that work, especially if the peak load lasts longer than a few minutes (it usually does).
And that's true even assuming instant capacity adaptation. It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.
> I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load
You'd know if you read the link I provided.
Nuclear plants in Germany had no issues scaling up and down between 400-600MW and 1200-1400MW per reactor per day.
Now, with renewables you do have this issue. Because due to their intermittent nature you're required to both overbuild them and provide enough grid-scale storage to last for hours.
> It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.
For some politically-motivated definition of efficient. Additional costs to running nuclear plants in load following mode are immaterial.
How is it immaterial to build twice as many nuclear power plants as necessary instead of using energy storage? You'd have to believe battery storage is way more expensive than an idle nuclear plant. But that's just not the case. The real killer in that comparison is that people really don't want to live near a nuclear plant and in any case, regulation and such politics makes it hard or impossible to scale up nuclear power in that way.
You don't get the fact that nuclear power requires just as much storage, right
France has this problem in a hidden way: They have to import power in the summer, because they DONT have that peak capacity, nuclear or otherwise. To provide that with nuclear, they would either need storage or increase the number of their nuclear plants, and probably like 50%.
If transport over big distances wasn't a problem, both technical and political, solar would be the only source we need.
I've read here multiple times that a "small" solar farm in the Sahara desert would suffice to provide energy for all Europe. Even if you can solve transporting it, imagine what could happen if it's in, or the wires run through a country in civil war, like Sudan.
> If transport over big distances wasn't a problem
There's a project that's planning solar power generation in Morocco and a cable to the UK. That'll be a fairly long cable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec.... Though no idea how realistic this is, it seems a bit like a new electric car company website that only has a prototype. Meaning, it seems that project seems to not escape the planning stage.
There's already a lot of cables between the UK and other countries, e.g. Norway and France. Though those aren't that long in comparison to something connecting to the UK.
EU is trying to tie all the various grids of the various countries together. There are loads of initiatives around that. Aside from that the Southern EU countries are trying to connect their grids to North Africa. Though again, that's not a huge distance to cover.
Yes, the problems with solar in Africa powering Europe are mostly political, not technical. Of course, a good intermediate step would be a big roll out of solar in all the southern EU countries. Which will undoubtedly come now that more and more countries push for renewables.
> France needs to buy electricity from Germany because reactors are down or can not function because the river used for cooling is to hot already.
Right now electricity maps shows that France produces 60% of electricity from nuclear, imports zero from Germany, and exports 6% of generated electricity to UK.
Also right now Germany generates 26% from coal and 9% from gas.
> won't be reliable enough in the dry Europe we are facing: Italy, France and Spain are in extreme drought and France in particular had to shut down nuclear power plants due to lack of water.
No, no they didn't. The shutdown due to "lack of water" (which is also bullshit) affected 0.18% of power generation.
The shutdowns happened due to planned maintenance when French government finally got its head out of its ass long enough to realize that power plants need to be maintained.
Flamewar will get you banned on HN. You posted dozens(!) of comments in this thread and in several places broke the site guidelines extremely badly. If you do this again, we will have to ban you.
This is well into the territory where we should probably ban an account. I'm not going to do that right now because you've also posted good comments (especially on other topics). But if you don't stick to the site guidelines in the future, we're certainly going to have to. Please remain thoughtful and respectful in the future, stop calling names and attacking others, and don't post any more flamewar comments.
I just tried deleting my account. Which isn't possible, counter to best practice and even many data privacy laws (not in california I guess). But I'm logging out and using a new account from now on (if at all). Congratulations.
No more dissent. Got it. I would encourage a ban. I will just make another account. I get that I should reduce some of the "flame war" stuff but I think this is one-sided.
Flamewar will get you banned on HN. You posted dozens(!) of comments in this thread and in several places broke the site guidelines extremely badly. If you do this again, we will have to ban you.
Edit: you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines badly and frequently—mostly on the nuclear topic, about which you've been perpetuating vast and dreadful flamewars—but also on other topics. This is seriously not cool.
I've therefore banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
"Future is not baseload except we actually need baseload, but let's call it by different names like flexible generation and magical non-existent new types of storage"
I think the opinion piece is overly reductive on what the strategy is, and that makes it easy to dismiss it in this way. Actually diving into the details paints a different picture.
The actual EU strategy hinges on multiple interacting elements. Making more of the demand steerable, to align peak use better with peak production. Overbuilding renewables capacity so it can still provide enough even at lower efficiency. Wind at sea at a never before seen scale (decided this week at the north sea conference) to have a form of base load (there is dunkelflaute but in general wind at sea is reliable at producing a certain amount of base load). And last but not least the EU hydrogen strategy, where a transport and storage network will be built similar to that for natural gas (in fact converting over that infrastructure), that then can be used to respond to demand in a steerable way, and that can be fed through shipping and pipelines from regions where renewables are most cost-effective at producing hydrogen.
Skeptics like to pretend the EU doesn’t have a renewables strategy beyond hope, but if you dig into it they (like in most things the EU does) have actually worked out a detailed and pragmatic strategy.
For renewables? Absolutely huge. We would need 10-20x the nameplate power. Perhaps even more. The only reason renewables "work" at the moment is that all other energy sources work overtime to compensate.
(And the EU's hydrogen strategy is a huge green elephant -- but Timmerman has invested most of his political capital in it so the idea doesn't go away until he does.)
It's not baseload if it's not on all the time. The point of the article is that what was previously supplied by "baseload" is now generated from a flexible mix, with hardly anything generating 100% of the time.
And one needs to understand that "base load" is mostly a concept important for slow, bad to regulate power plants. In those times, a lot of effort was spent on creating "base load" so the power plants have the least requirement for regulation. This will switch to more agile consumption where you get much cheaper electricity when you can time your consumption. So the amount of energy which was previously part of "base load" will be reduced considerably.
No, renewables are easy to regulate and nothing about them is slow. You can regulate solar in milliseconds, wind in a couple of seconds. They don't have to produce when there is no demand.
And yes, you have to provide as much electricity as is pulled from the grid. But that does no longer have to be done in a constant fashion as with nuclear and coal. That is why I write that "base load" is reduced. Overall energy consumption isn't. It will actually rise with the electrification of mobility and heating. That is, why there is a need for a huge buildup of renewables.
Your arguments are fueled by a lack of understanding.
Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier. The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice. You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.
The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions. There are still plenty of years left in that process before you even need any storage to cover capacity fluctuation. Because even when covering SOME extra capacity with fossil fuels SOME of the times, total emissions are still getting reduced. Is it that some people just want to ignore that a coal plant that doesn't produce energy also doesn't produce emissions?
> Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier.
And the source for this is? Because reality seems to disagree with you
> The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice
You're surprised that renewable energy is intermittent and you need to significantly overbuild them?
> You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.
So many decisions in this space are made purely for political points, so you can see how yes, people who are building this rarely if ever talk abou this.
> The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions.
Note how if you don't shut down nuclear power plants you don't need to burn coal to make up for the difference.
The rescript-reason split killed both IMO. ReasonML was a very tiny language to begin with. Splitting it into two split the already tiny language and community into two minuscule ones.
And for no good reason (pun not intended).
And they were doing quite well, and influencing OCaml in good and meaningful ways (like improving error reporting).
