> IMHO EU should just drop everything and do China level or even beyond transition to Solar and similar.
The funny part is that we dropped our home grown nuclear power in favor of renewables, which are mostly provided by China since all the biggest manufacturers of solar panels and windmills are Chinese.
Why should we "drop everything" to pursue renewables when no one else is doing it? It's obviously not the right choice, we should be consolidating our nuclear power reactors AND developing renewable
Look into the history of pro renewable in Europe, the foreign ties, the whole german/france nuclear scandal, the common European electric market abomination, were not fighting China or the US, we're fighting ourselves
> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
There are plenty of things you cannot do with electricity, try to make fertilizer or medicine with electricity instead of petroleum derivates
Nuclear is expensive AF and takes decades to commission. You put outrageous amount of money in for 10 years then you have free electricity for 40 years. With renewables you get the free electricity much more quickly at lower price.
There's nothing inherently Chinese in renewables, there are European companies who build PV from scratch.
Also, the more renewable you use the more fossils you have for other things like fertilizers or medicine.
Nuclear power does not complement renewables at all. Why should someone buy extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when renewables or stored renewables are available?
Which means we have to factor in the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.
And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.
Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh.
That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.
The duck curve talking point is years out of date due to storage buildout in California.
Yeah but not all places are California (constant sunshine) and even there the battery storage solutions so far are what, not even 20% of demand or something ?
Energy policy is very much locale dependent. The solutions that work for California do not work for most other places. In Germany we have periods where there are two weeks with no sunlight. Sucks, I know.
Of which about all storage has been built in the last 2 years.
Grids tend to operate on the timescale of decades. Do you realize what a complete disruption of the grid storage is now?
Storage does now work as long as you can cycle it every couple of days.
Then we of course also have the backup of open cycle gas turbines. Low CAPEX and high OPEX. A good solution for backups.
Force them to run on decarbonized fuels like ammonia, hydrogen, synfuels or biofuels (with decarbonized inputs) when even the backup needs to be decarbonized.
You know, the exact same thing we use today to manage the yearly peak.
"just wait for the magic solution of the now+10 years" is what Germany has been doing for 70 years while France invested in nuclear.
They're paying their electricity about 2x more than France while producing almost 10x the co2. Of course now that everyone fucked up for the best part of a century nuclear seems like a bad option... Nuclear didn't have to be expensive
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power. Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026… And the French government just fell because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
Not true It's possible to make nitrogen fertilizer from air and water using electricity there are multiple European startups with working prototype systems.
It is expensive comparatively to current systems as electricity is expensive but solar + battery is changing that rapidly. This is why I say most governments and the world at large are not ready for the change that is going to come with cheap electricity. Many countries will not need purchase from outside energy and fertilizer. Also the new fertilizer production systems are small enough that they can easily be transported to the area requiring fertilizer instead of moving 1000s of tons of fertilizer.
> Not true It's possible to make nitrogen fertilizer from air and water using electricity there are multiple European startups with working prototype systems.
At what price ? Who's doing it in any meaningful way ?
> but solar + battery is changing that rapidly.
Who's building your panels and batteries ? Are you just trading dependency from Russia to China ? Is it desirable ?
At this point I have stopped caring about the renewables ideologues.
We are very clearly funding a massive industry in China and becoming even more dependent on a single country than we ever were with fossil fuels.
It's not even clear that renewables are actually that much less carbon intensive because I believe there are some massive accounting shenanigans happening around emissions for building/recycling and we can't clearly check that out because it's all happening in China. They increased their coal consumption even more than their renewables consumptions by the way, that should be a clue.
And what the report failed to mention is that electricity consumption has fallen in the EU, precisely because the renewables has made it much more expensive, so people try to use less of it or go for alternatives (wood heating is making a comeback in rural areas for example).
And the EU keeps hemorrhaging industries left and right, so there is that. But I guess we will have "green" intermittent electricity sponsored by China, and that's supposed to be good somehow...
We dropped new built nuclear power because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy.
In the early 2000s we invested both in the nascent renewable industry and the nuclear industry.
Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver.
Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end nuclear subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???
> We dropped nuclear because it didn’t deliver. There’s no grand conspiracy.
?
Look at France again... It gave them unlimited cheap, clean energy and nuclear weapons, all at once. And then again, Germany, even if they went full renewables right now it would take hundreds of years to make up for the past pollution
> Given the outcome of Flamanville 3, Olkiluoto 3, Hinkley Point C, Vogtle and Virgil C. Summer it is abundantly clear that the nuclear industry doesn’t deliver.
Hm weird, we had 0 problem delivering back in the days when we really cared and had politicians with long term visions about their countries...
> Why spend hundreds of billions on dead-end subsidies to ”try one more time!!!”???
France generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because France's nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Have you heard of the Baumol effect?
Construction haven’t gotten meaningfully more efficient while salaries have increased to keep up with productive industries.
Looking at the actual data renewable subsidies are being phased out in the EU. Down to €61B in 2024 from peaking at €89B in 2020. They just aren’t needed anymore.
The funny part is that we dropped our home grown nuclear power in favor of renewables, which are mostly provided by China since all the biggest manufacturers of solar panels and windmills are Chinese.
Why should we "drop everything" to pursue renewables when no one else is doing it? It's obviously not the right choice, we should be consolidating our nuclear power reactors AND developing renewable
Look into the history of pro renewable in Europe, the foreign ties, the whole german/france nuclear scandal, the common European electric market abomination, were not fighting China or the US, we're fighting ourselves
> Had EU already switched to renewables 4 years ago there wouldn't be any disruption by the war Russia started in Ukraine.
There are plenty of things you cannot do with electricity, try to make fertilizer or medicine with electricity instead of petroleum derivates