General > General Technical Chat
Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 16, 2023, 09:28:39 pm ---So with all these great ideas, have we saved the planet yet? ;D
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Actually, the real world is much further in "saving the planet" than you understand (you would understand if you looked at energy production graphs and CO2 calculations, but I can see your agenda is preventing you). Many of these "great ideas", mainly solar and wind energy, but also including thermal storage, load management and heat pumping I keep mentioning, are in everyday use and together, significantly reducing CO2 emissions already. It is already showing as a clear difference to the imaginary case in which we would have continued burning fossil fuels for our energy needs. This gap widens all the time. It is large enough now to say it was not a fallacy, which it indeed seemed to many, me included, a decade ago.
It is more difficult to say how the political stability would be if we were even more dependent on fossil fuels than we currently are. We are still seeing a classic fossil fuel war in Europe (i.e., conquer fossil fuel resources violently so that you sell them to others, what USA has always been doing with oil, and Russia does with natural gas), but we are also evidencing coping through fossil fuel crisis with renewable energy, something that would have been a ludicrous, futuristic idea during the previous fossil crisis (oil crisis in 1970's/1980's). In 1970's, the world tried to cope through fossil fuel crisis with load management and nuclear, and currently we are being more successful (to the point of Germany going overboard demonstrating that success, with the outcome some interpret as failure). After 1970's, the fossil fuel use just skyrocketed again with no real solution, as nuclear was never able to really scale up (and cheap fossils stopped the improvements in storage and load balancing).
In other words, your fun-making comments would have flied better in 2011. Now it tells more about you and your inability to accept new data and viewpoints, than about the world around us.
madires:
My opinion on shutting down all nuclear power plants: it's total nonsense! Shutting down an old plant for safety reasons is fine, but it should be replaced with a new and hopefully better one. With the shift to electric cars and heat pumps for heating we'll need about three times the electric power we're generating at the moment. I don't see how we could achieve this by just adding more PV and wind generators. And we also need more transmissions lines. As a German saying goes, electric power comes out of the wall socket. But nobody asks how it gets into the socket. :palm:
Neutrion:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 03:48:28 pm ---AFAIK hydrogen storage in salt caverns is being build to store 36000 metric tonnes of hydrogen (as a start). The empty gas fields can potentially hold many times that much. So there isn't a practical limit in terms of storage capacity that is and/or can be made available in the NL.
The calculation has many factors. Nuclear, solar and wind are more or less on par where it comes to price per kWh to generate in the NL; around 4 euro cents per kWh. Transport costs through the grid are about the same or higher. This already shows that just looking at generation costs is going to skew any comparison if you don't take transport costs into account. Roundtrip efficiency for hydrogen is around 50% but is likely to improve significantly over time. But even at 50% efficieny, you are only looking at a price increase ballpark 33% at the consumer end because the transport costs are still the same (excluding taxes which make the relative cost for storage even smaller). Alternatively the hydrogen can also be used for an industrial process or vehicle that needs hydrogen anyway. On top of that, the NL intends to import and distribute hydrogen through the several sea ports it has which have direct pipeline connections deep into Europe.
And again, the nuclear power plants aren't intended to just produce hydrogen. Hydrogen production is supposed to happen when there is excess energy or when the hydrogen supply runs low. The nuclear power plants will primarily be feeding the grid.
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But this is the point, the 4 cents/kWh is only valid for old nuclear plants. You can not base the calculation on that. (And we of course COMPLETELY exclude the waist storage price for tens of thousends years)The prices in Olkiluoto if you count with 8,5 billion euro cost and 50 years of working would be around three times of the 4 cents.. I also read some 11billion Euro may Siwastaya can check that. Hinkley point C is not ready yet but already way over the planned costs.
So if this is how the calculation was made than it can not be valid. And basically all the extra costs only to justify some extreme rare Dunkelflaute events, which could be countered by just keeping the gas plants in readiness and not building anything.
Also no other information is aviable on the H2 storage? Costs, power etc.? I tried to find some, but found nothing so far in english or german sites.
I really would like to see how the argumentation went, as with the floating wind turbines countries like Holland will have enormous wind power potential in the near future.
BravoV:
Does the Green party, its officials and supporters, sort of celebrate this , at least symbolically ? Maybe singing kumbaya ?
Its quite an achievement, have to admit that. :clap:
/sarc
tom66:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 17, 2023, 08:53:03 am ---
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 16, 2023, 09:28:39 pm ---So with all these great ideas, have we saved the planet yet? ;D
--- End quote ---
Actually, the real world is much further in "saving the planet" than you understand [...]
--- End quote ---
I am always surprised by how much opposition there is in engineering circles to a change to the status quo, when it is clear there are significant advantages to moving away from it.
Regardless of anyone's particular acceptance of anthropogenic climate change, it is clear that it is unsustainable to continue to extract and use fossil fuel energy to power our vehicles, electricity grid and heating. Countries which supply this resource are often politically unstable compared to European norms, and shortages (often politically or economically motivated - see OPEC, and Russia) can lead to the price increasing considerably, creating the risk of fuel poverty and economic harm.
There are health impacts and non-CO2 environmental impacts of fossil fuel usage too. For instance oil spills, which can be economically devastating to areas, and there are concerns over fracking. Using fossil-fuel powered cars in cities has done significant damage to public health too.
A renewable supergrid with storage leads to a possible future where energy is so cheap we are incentivised to use it whenever possible. It means we need to adapt how we use energy, but incentives will reward those who are most able to do so and significant opportunities will arise from this. At the same time inefficient industry that relies on continuously cheap power, at the expense of everyone else, will need to adapt or die. But that's life.
Yes, there will likely still be fossil fuel usage (or synfuel) in 2050, because some applications are challenging for batteries or hydrogen. So we will need to be pulling CO2 out of the air for those applications, as well as to undo the CO2 emitted so far.
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