BTW, A nuclear plant can run for 60 - 80 years with modest investment and license renewals.
By the same logic, a wind plant can run for thirty years and a solar plant for forty. As far as I can tell, the oldest operating nuclear plant is just about to shut down at 49 years of age due to rising costs, and even that seems to be an outlier. A facility with a seventy year lifetime still hasn't been proven in practice, which is probably why it's generally seen as a risky investment. (Unless it can pay for its own construction much faster than that, of course, which is way harder at the moment due to falling electricity prices, at least here in Europe.)
Its a shame Germany was stupid enough to start shutting them down.
That is something I can agree with. They should have held onto them as long as they possibly could. But it's their own democratic choice. We'll gladly sell them our nuclear power if they pay for it.:)
If we were to build to that, we run risks WHEN ( not if ) Yellowstone blows
If you think that human civilization would survive exploding Yellowstone by not building wind and solar power, I have some really bad news for you... (In any case, perhaps surprisingly, a variation of solar flux could wipe out our civilization that solar power plants wouldn't even properly notice. )
I actually read the article, and it even mentions some of my points. You clearly did not, otherwise you wouldn't be claiming such things as "The chart shows only electrical generation sources" when there's eight of them and four of them - that is one half of the data - aren't even about electricity.
Unfortunately you don't grasp the reasons why they are struggling. Wind and Solar require major investment in infrastructure that nuclear and gas don't required.
"Nuclear doesn't require major investments in infrastructure"...mmmkay, that's been enough of jokes for today, don't you think?
I care about total costs, too. You invoking Dunning Kruger, like in majority of cases, is most likely ironic anyway. I don't need to mention transmission and infrastructure costs if we already have electric infrastructure, which we generally do have. It works pretty well. In cases of specific projects such as NORD.LINK, we can debate the specific costs and benefits. And guess what, the benefits generally win, since these things actually get built.
You're caring about systemic costs in a very weird way, then, if you're divining function derivatives from a single function value. Otherwise it should be clear to you that just because old generators having the price tag several times higher than contemporary ones having driven electricity cost six cents higher means squat for what future cheap generation is going to do with the price.
The article is about financing the expansion of the generation fleet at the point where renewable sources are approaching, but not yet reaching the wholesale price, especially considering the different structure of costs of renewable sources (more has to be paid up front, as opposed to coal, gas and nuclear plants where a large part of the costs is for fuel and/or maintenance). In fact, that they're even considering expansion clearly means that the costs must be decreasing, otherwise they couldn't possibly be considering further expansion of the renewables fleet. It would have been impossible at the former high costs of the technology required. In other words, this is a positive sign that people are aware of what's coming. Also, the part of the debate about internalizing the fossil fuel externalities is perennial and should in no way surprise you. This would be the case even if the projects to be financed by this were nuclear plants. Nuclear advocates are generally in favor of carbon tax, too.
The chart shows only electrical generation sources. So no, your other excuses are applicable.
But the claim in the article is about "German CO2 emissions", not "German CO2 emissions from electrical generation". You're also wrong about the chart because there clearly is a primary energy consumption chart, too.
as they've added wind and solar, with almost no improvement in CO2 emissions.
Don't forget the decommissioned ancient nuclear plants that had to be replaced somehow. So far the effect of the renewables was that CO2 emissions haven't increased even further from replacing the nuclear capacity by lignite, so you can't really say that renewables had no impact. They clearly did.
Or vice versa - in places with high electricity prices, it is comparatively more advantageous to install even an expensive electricity source. Just look at Hawaii... In any case, decreasing costs of solar and wind electricity render this point moot for the discussion of the future. A price crossover is inevitable at some point.
Then you should have made it clear by using a comparative that it's related to the US/Germany discussion. Using a superlative such a situation is really confusing.
OK, so it's 37% (from 15.7 or so from the 2017 figures to below 10), not 40%. But you're still tripping if you think that electric vehicle replacement of ICE sales and renewable electricity expansion can possibly drop those 37% in seven years.
Quite probably the WORST thing that is going to happen to America, is that the far LEFT (our Dems) will win congress and then focus on shutting down our nukes. Right now, nukes provide 20% of our electricity and they are CLEAN. The dems are the ones that I fear if they stop our nukes.
No, nuke operators are stopping your nukes. Probably because your nukes are fucking expensive? Or I don't know, maybe your nuke operators are Democrats.:-p.
Also, U.S. Democrats = "far left" - hahaha.:D They're a lot like our Civic Democratic Party, definitely a right-wing party. They're just not an ultra-right-wing party like the Republicans, is all.
What other countries did the discussion talk about other than the US, France, and Germany?
I didn't say the discussion involved other countries (France included), I said it didn't involve France until you mentioned it. The comment you responded to (with your sudden mention of France), as well as five comments above it (comment 1,
comment 2, comment 3, comment 4, comment 5, comment 6) only mentioned Germany and compared it to United States. You were the first to suddenly mention France, and did so in a seemingly absolute statement, since there was no way for me to interpret it as "but France is the best of the three previously mentioned, the three being Germany, US, and France", because there was no three, only two (Germany and US). That left me with the set of all countries as the only meaningful reference set for your claim to the superlative (not comparative). Had you said "but France is better than either of the two", the mistake would have been easily avoided. Not so much with your "France is by far the best" phrasing.
Aaaaaand there it is - there's nothing in the article about your fictional "problem of increasing costs". Which is understandable, since it doesn't exist. In fact, the article even explains the situation in detail (grandfathered surcharges etc.) but you've apparently decided to make up stuff instead in your head.
Ah, no labels on axes. That's "useful".:-p Also has nothing to do with what I was talking about, which is decreasing cost of generator installations, and the corresponding decrease in auctioned price for new units.
That can easily be explained by an economic uptick, annual temperature record, and/or electricity only being about 40% of Germany's emissions and something else changing. A single inter-annual data point is meaningless for trend estimates and you should already understand that.
Actually, the "both countries" in question were clearly Germany and United States, which is exactly the reason why I interpreted "But France is besf of all!" as a global statement.
I'm afraid it demonstrates no such thing. Ukraine, for example, with its 50% of generation would by that logic be very productive and CO2-efficient but in reality it isn't. Their economic output per unit of CO2 emissions is terrible. Sweden also doesn't have extraordinarily cheap electricity. Come to think of it, neither does France, actually, at least according to Eurostat. France is slightly below average but Sweden is about average. Norway is cheaper, but that's thanks to hydro power. Which makes one think how hydro contributes to keeping Swedish energy costs from spiraling out.
France produced around $5900 of GDP per tonne of CO2 in 2006, Germany only about $3600 per tonne. However I'm not convinced that electricity is the only differentiator here (and the situation in the future will definitely improve for Germany), even if it is a major one.
Car replacements are NOT sufficient to remove 40% of US emissions. Even if you replace all of them, to the last sedan, van, pick-up, lorry and semi-trailer. Considering that transportation accounts for 30% of US emissions, even immediate replacement of ALL means of transportation whatsoever (cars, airplanes, ships) by carbon-free magical teleportation would only decrease US emissions to around 11 tonnes per capita per year. A prolonged replacement of a part of transportation by electric vehicles is not going to bring you under 10 tonnes per capita in 2025, sorry. That's simply impossible. Especially with the new administration.
Easy answer to that. Germany "conjures" this by selling electricity cheap to Sweden when Germany has an excess of sun and wind production, which seems to happen often with the large subsidies for wind and solar, and buying essentially that same electricity back from them at a higher price when there is a shortage.
That doesn't really account for the volume of energy trading between Germany and other countries. For example, in 2017, Germany generated 142 TWh from solar and wind and 50 TWh from natural gas, but only imported 27 TWh. (By your "logic", they'd have to import over 200 TWh to compensate for the capacity factors.)
Seems odd to me that nations that rely heavily on "cheap" wind power, like Denmark and Germany, pay such high prices for electricity when nations that rely heavily on "expensive" natural gas and nuclear, like France and Italy, pay much less.
The majority of the wind fleet in Denmark and Germany is very new, and considering the learning curve, the older units were more expensive (and had to be subsidized at that point). The majority of France's nuclear fleet is old (and already amortized). Nothing odd about this. At a comparable level of development, wind power will definitely be cheaper than nuclear.
Sure you can make this inference. If wind power has a capacity factor of 50%...
...then you have to build at least twice the capacity for the required average generation. That's all you can say from that number, nothing more.
then the rest has to be made up with load following natural gas turbines for a constant output.
That's the part that doesn't make sense because the cumulative capacity factor for wind power doesn't tell you anything about the shape of the generation curve, so you can't infer the amount of load following required as a percentage of average generation.
If the same electricity is produced by combined cycle natural gas 100% of the time, and with twice the efficiency of the turbines, then either way you'd be burning the same amount of fuel for the same consistent output.
And if you produce two and half times as much electricity from wind power than you even generate from natural gas, as is contemporary Germany's case, then you're going to lose by converting that wind power to CCGT - as I've already noted.
If the wind power has a capacity factor lower than 50%, which is almost always the case, then you'd be burning more fuel in the turbines
As I mentioned above, this inference is nonsensical, that's not how capacity factors works.
Wind is cheap because wind is not reliable.
No, wind is cheap because of the comparative simplicity of the associated equipment. That's the same reason why PV solar is cheap, provided that the (steadily decreasing) capital cost is low - no mechanical parts at all, so maintenance per unit of output is minimal. And having a steady wind region or an interconnected grid with guaranteed output wouldn't make the equipment more expensive, which is why the not-reliable=>cheap inference is nonsensical, too.
Nuclear power can demand a higher price because it is reliable. Adding storage, load following power sources, arranging for shedding of load, or importing and exporting with nations with such load management, costs money. If the nuclear power plant was so "expensive" they why did anyone agree to this price guarantee?
That's a moot argument because my country didn't agree to the price. So if ~A, it doesn't matter that A => B, even if A => B is a valid inference to make. It's literally a what-if scenario on your part.
It's likely to have an old center, around which a larger number of newer buildings was built. The fact that there are old quarters doesn't change the fact that the populations of countries increased immensely in the 20th century.
What you fail to understand is that nuclear demands a higher price and people are willing to pay for it.
Clearly they aren't because the project was cancelled.
What we are seeing now are people like Bill Gates, TerraPower, and Southern Company, working together to bring the cost of nuclear power down. This technology also promises the ability to load follow like natural gas turbines, because it shares a lot of technology with it. Oh, and these reactors "eat" the waste from old nuclear reactors as fuel.
Ah, the famous small meme reactors, promising the economy of unscale.:)
And tomorrow? It's quite possible that these molten chloride fast reactors can stand alone. It's impossible for wind and solar to offer that.
The latter is in no way impossible. Just politically impractical. Fortunately the universe won't fall apart if no single source pushes out all the others.
Germany's electric prices have gone up significantly since they started adding solar and wind, and there is no debate about the cause.
There's not a lot to debate about, considering the fact that the related accounting is quite accurate. But obviously, sunk costs are irrelevant for future installations.
They are even trying to figure out how to keep going forward knowing costs will continue to increase.
That is nonsensical, because unit costs have been decreasing year-by-year.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, A nuclear plant can run for 60 - 80 years with modest investment and license renewals.
By the same logic, a wind plant can run for thirty years and a solar plant for forty. As far as I can tell, the oldest operating nuclear plant is just about to shut down at 49 years of age due to rising costs, and even that seems to be an outlier. A facility with a seventy year lifetime still hasn't been proven in practice, which is probably why it's generally seen as a risky investment. (Unless it can pay for its own construction much faster than that, of course, which is way harder at the moment due to falling electricity prices, at least here in Europe.)
Its a shame Germany was stupid enough to start shutting them down.
That is something I can agree with. They should have held onto them as long as they possibly could. But it's their own democratic choice. We'll gladly sell them our nuclear power if they pay for it. :)
If we were to build to that, we run risks WHEN ( not if ) Yellowstone blows
If you think that human civilization would survive exploding Yellowstone by not building wind and solar power, I have some really bad news for you... (In any case, perhaps surprisingly, a variation of solar flux could wipe out our civilization that solar power plants wouldn't even properly notice. )
"by far the lowest"...yes, that's definitely not a superlative. /s
I actually read the article, and it even mentions some of my points. You clearly did not, otherwise you wouldn't be claiming such things as "The chart shows only electrical generation sources" when there's eight of them and four of them - that is one half of the data - aren't even about electricity.
Unfortunately you don't grasp the reasons why they are struggling. Wind and Solar require major investment in infrastructure that nuclear and gas don't required.
"Nuclear doesn't require major investments in infrastructure"...mmmkay, that's been enough of jokes for today, don't you think?
I care about total costs, too. You invoking Dunning Kruger, like in majority of cases, is most likely ironic anyway. I don't need to mention transmission and infrastructure costs if we already have electric infrastructure, which we generally do have. It works pretty well. In cases of specific projects such as NORD.LINK, we can debate the specific costs and benefits. And guess what, the benefits generally win, since these things actually get built.
You're caring about systemic costs in a very weird way, then, if you're divining function derivatives from a single function value. Otherwise it should be clear to you that just because old generators having the price tag several times higher than contemporary ones having driven electricity cost six cents higher means squat for what future cheap generation is going to do with the price.
The article is about financing the expansion of the generation fleet at the point where renewable sources are approaching, but not yet reaching the wholesale price, especially considering the different structure of costs of renewable sources (more has to be paid up front, as opposed to coal, gas and nuclear plants where a large part of the costs is for fuel and/or maintenance). In fact, that they're even considering expansion clearly means that the costs must be decreasing, otherwise they couldn't possibly be considering further expansion of the renewables fleet. It would have been impossible at the former high costs of the technology required. In other words, this is a positive sign that people are aware of what's coming. Also, the part of the debate about internalizing the fossil fuel externalities is perennial and should in no way surprise you. This would be the case even if the projects to be financed by this were nuclear plants. Nuclear advocates are generally in favor of carbon tax, too.
The chart shows only electrical generation sources. So no, your other excuses are applicable.
But the claim in the article is about "German CO2 emissions", not "German CO2 emissions from electrical generation". You're also wrong about the chart because there clearly is a primary energy consumption chart, too.
as they've added wind and solar, with almost no improvement in CO2 emissions.
Don't forget the decommissioned ancient nuclear plants that had to be replaced somehow. So far the effect of the renewables was that CO2 emissions haven't increased even further from replacing the nuclear capacity by lignite, so you can't really say that renewables had no impact. They clearly did.
Or vice versa - in places with high electricity prices, it is comparatively more advantageous to install even an expensive electricity source. Just look at Hawaii... In any case, decreasing costs of solar and wind electricity render this point moot for the discussion of the future. A price crossover is inevitable at some point.
Then you should have made it clear by using a comparative that it's related to the US/Germany discussion. Using a superlative such a situation is really confusing.
Quite probably the WORST thing that is going to happen to America, is that the far LEFT (our Dems) will win congress and then focus on shutting down our nukes. Right now, nukes provide 20% of our electricity and they are CLEAN. The dems are the ones that I fear if they stop our nukes.
No, nuke operators are stopping your nukes. Probably because your nukes are fucking expensive? Or I don't know, maybe your nuke operators are Democrats. :-p.
Also, U.S. Democrats = "far left" - hahaha. :D They're a lot like our Civic Democratic Party, definitely a right-wing party. They're just not an ultra-right-wing party like the Republicans, is all.
What other countries did the discussion talk about other than the US, France, and Germany?
I didn't say the discussion involved other countries (France included), I said it didn't involve France until you mentioned it. The comment you responded to (with your sudden mention of France), as well as five comments above it (comment 1, comment 2, comment 3, comment 4, comment 5, comment 6) only mentioned Germany and compared it to United States. You were the first to suddenly mention France, and did so in a seemingly absolute statement, since there was no way for me to interpret it as "but France is the best of the three previously mentioned, the three being Germany, US, and France", because there was no three, only two (Germany and US). That left me with the set of all countries as the only meaningful reference set for your claim to the superlative (not comparative). Had you said "but France is better than either of the two", the mistake would have been easily avoided. Not so much with your "France is by far the best" phrasing.
Aaaaaand there it is - there's nothing in the article about your fictional "problem of increasing costs". Which is understandable, since it doesn't exist. In fact, the article even explains the situation in detail (grandfathered surcharges etc.) but you've apparently decided to make up stuff instead in your head.
Ah, no labels on axes. That's "useful". :-p Also has nothing to do with what I was talking about, which is decreasing cost of generator installations, and the corresponding decrease in auctioned price for new units.
That can easily be explained by an economic uptick, annual temperature record, and/or electricity only being about 40% of Germany's emissions and something else changing. A single inter-annual data point is meaningless for trend estimates and you should already understand that.
Actually, the "both countries" in question were clearly Germany and United States, which is exactly the reason why I interpreted "But France is besf of all!" as a global statement.
I'm afraid it demonstrates no such thing. Ukraine, for example, with its 50% of generation would by that logic be very productive and CO2-efficient but in reality it isn't. Their economic output per unit of CO2 emissions is terrible. Sweden also doesn't have extraordinarily cheap electricity. Come to think of it, neither does France, actually, at least according to Eurostat. France is slightly below average but Sweden is about average. Norway is cheaper, but that's thanks to hydro power. Which makes one think how hydro contributes to keeping Swedish energy costs from spiraling out.
True, perhaps because we produce more.
France produced around $5900 of GDP per tonne of CO2 in 2006, Germany only about $3600 per tonne. However I'm not convinced that electricity is the only differentiator here (and the situation in the future will definitely improve for Germany), even if it is a major one.
Car replacements are NOT sufficient to remove 40% of US emissions. Even if you replace all of them, to the last sedan, van, pick-up, lorry and semi-trailer. Considering that transportation accounts for 30% of US emissions, even immediate replacement of ALL means of transportation whatsoever (cars, airplanes, ships) by carbon-free magical teleportation would only decrease US emissions to around 11 tonnes per capita per year. A prolonged replacement of a part of transportation by electric vehicles is not going to bring you under 10 tonnes per capita in 2025, sorry. That's simply impossible. Especially with the new administration.
Easy answer to that. Germany "conjures" this by selling electricity cheap to Sweden when Germany has an excess of sun and wind production, which seems to happen often with the large subsidies for wind and solar, and buying essentially that same electricity back from them at a higher price when there is a shortage.
That doesn't really account for the volume of energy trading between Germany and other countries. For example, in 2017, Germany generated 142 TWh from solar and wind and 50 TWh from natural gas, but only imported 27 TWh. (By your "logic", they'd have to import over 200 TWh to compensate for the capacity factors.)
Seems odd to me that nations that rely heavily on "cheap" wind power, like Denmark and Germany, pay such high prices for electricity when nations that rely heavily on "expensive" natural gas and nuclear, like France and Italy, pay much less.
The majority of the wind fleet in Denmark and Germany is very new, and considering the learning curve, the older units were more expensive (and had to be subsidized at that point). The majority of France's nuclear fleet is old (and already amortized). Nothing odd about this. At a comparable level of development, wind power will definitely be cheaper than nuclear.
Sure you can make this inference. If wind power has a capacity factor of 50%...
...then you have to build at least twice the capacity for the required average generation. That's all you can say from that number, nothing more.
then the rest has to be made up with load following natural gas turbines for a constant output.
That's the part that doesn't make sense because the cumulative capacity factor for wind power doesn't tell you anything about the shape of the generation curve, so you can't infer the amount of load following required as a percentage of average generation.
If the same electricity is produced by combined cycle natural gas 100% of the time, and with twice the efficiency of the turbines, then either way you'd be burning the same amount of fuel for the same consistent output.
And if you produce two and half times as much electricity from wind power than you even generate from natural gas, as is contemporary Germany's case, then you're going to lose by converting that wind power to CCGT - as I've already noted.
If the wind power has a capacity factor lower than 50%, which is almost always the case, then you'd be burning more fuel in the turbines
As I mentioned above, this inference is nonsensical, that's not how capacity factors works.
Wind is cheap because wind is not reliable.
No, wind is cheap because of the comparative simplicity of the associated equipment. That's the same reason why PV solar is cheap, provided that the (steadily decreasing) capital cost is low - no mechanical parts at all, so maintenance per unit of output is minimal. And having a steady wind region or an interconnected grid with guaranteed output wouldn't make the equipment more expensive, which is why the not-reliable=>cheap inference is nonsensical, too.
Nuclear power can demand a higher price because it is reliable. Adding storage, load following power sources, arranging for shedding of load, or importing and exporting with nations with such load management, costs money. If the nuclear power plant was so "expensive" they why did anyone agree to this price guarantee?
That's a moot argument because my country didn't agree to the price. So if ~A, it doesn't matter that A => B, even if A => B is a valid inference to make. It's literally a what-if scenario on your part.
Just walk through a random old city.
It's likely to have an old center, around which a larger number of newer buildings was built. The fact that there are old quarters doesn't change the fact that the populations of countries increased immensely in the 20th century.
What you fail to understand is that nuclear demands a higher price and people are willing to pay for it.
Clearly they aren't because the project was cancelled.
What we are seeing now are people like Bill Gates, TerraPower, and Southern Company, working together to bring the cost of nuclear power down. This technology also promises the ability to load follow like natural gas turbines, because it shares a lot of technology with it. Oh, and these reactors "eat" the waste from old nuclear reactors as fuel.
Ah, the famous small meme reactors, promising the economy of unscale. :)
And tomorrow? It's quite possible that these molten chloride fast reactors can stand alone. It's impossible for wind and solar to offer that.
The latter is in no way impossible. Just politically impractical. Fortunately the universe won't fall apart if no single source pushes out all the others.
Germany's electric prices have gone up significantly since they started adding solar and wind, and there is no debate about the cause.
There's not a lot to debate about, considering the fact that the related accounting is quite accurate. But obviously, sunk costs are irrelevant for future installations.
They are even trying to figure out how to keep going forward knowing costs will continue to increase.
That is nonsensical, because unit costs have been decreasing year-by-year.