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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Burning coal is cheap, that's why we're here. I'll pay more for electric today to leave a planet for our children. Wish my parents did that for me.
Only a fool would consider the cost in dollars alone.
Only a fool would advocate for paying way more for nuclear when renewables + storage are substantially cheaper.
Storage? Like battery storage? Lead? Lithium? Go on, tell me more.
Or will we flood river valleys? What are you thinking?
If intermittent energy would be held to the same standards of sustained energy, you’d see the real price. Right now, the dirty secret is that renewables are integrated into our energy supply by having a crap-tonne of gas capacity (and importing nuclear energy from France) standing ready on poor renewable days.
Go look at any historic data of U.K. power generation. We have multiple periods every year where there’s barely any wind and solar generated for a week. How do you propose to supply exactly every Watt required, at every second of the day, running only on renewables?
If your answer is batteries or pumped storage then please go look at battery storage capacities and what a week of energy needs look like for the U.K.? You’d have to strip mine the entire planet’s worth of supply lithium and other required metals to be able to do it … and if you think nuclear is expensive, have a look at battery storage.
If your answer is “imports” then my retort would be that every country has to solve this problem and we can’t just “turtles all the way down”-solve this problem. On the same days that wind turbines are still in the U.K. they are still in Denmark, Norway, Germany. Where does the energy come from then? Oh, they’ll just import their electricity from Eastern Europe and we can buy their little renewable generation for that week? Ok, but then you’ve just transitioned to coal plants in Poland, by way of a long supply chain. Every country has to solve this problem.
If your answer is “we just need to build such an excess of renewables that we have enough even on still/gray days” then we are back to cost of guaranteed generation, which is how renewable energy providers should be measured anyway. Where does their backup come from? If you held renewable energy supplies liable for guaranteed supply rather than just accept “oh on some days, you can’t generate any power” you’d see a then buy their supply from backup gas. As they currently do, they can just squirm away from the accountability.
Having said that, I’m a HUGE fan of renewable/intermittent energy. We need to build more, fast! Lots and lots more.
But we do have to answer the uncomfortable question of how we back it up too. That’s included in the price of nuclear.
So what do we do? Import our way out of it, moving the generation to remote, cheap, foreign coal? Over, and over-build renewables, thereby making it extremely costly. Accept gas peak generation, thereby keeping carbon in the mix? Or nuclear?
I know which way I’d choose.
Compared to nuclear? Go check out the cost and schedule overruns for Hinkley C and then talk to me about cost. $40 billion and counting so far.
No, compared to the cost that proponents of an all-renewable strategy argue it would cost.
Both nuclear and massive-oversupply of renewables are pricey. The difference is one works on a quiet night, while the other doesn’t.
Show your math.
Sigh. Really?
I’ll show you all the world’s power grid planners, combined, making a choice to include nuclear in their decarbonised grid planning!
But I’m sure you know better than all of them.
Go right ahead.
You could have made an actual argument here... but then you decided on the "renewables only work because of nuclear imports from France" fairy tale.
And we all know that this is a lie and also who likes to tell it. So please, stop reading that bullshit and use those trash tabloids as the only thing they are somewhat useful as: toilet paper ...
I no point did I make that argument. I posed a series of questions. Right now renewables only integrate because of masses of gas plants.
Neither of these are questions. These are statements. False ones repeated again and again by the same fossil fuel and nuclear lobbyists lying to you.
Oh, sorry. No. They don't lie. They pay millions for desinformation so people like you tell the lie while seriously thinking it's true. That might actually be worse even but ymmv...
And only a fool would think that Renewables + [magical] storage was sufficient on it's own.
Nope, burning coal was cheap a long time ago and allowed the people to accululate enough wealth to push for more coal (and brain-wash people to believe coal is cheap; and also how expensive renewables are). Just like the nuclear producers did decades ago to tell the tale of how there's no alternative to nuclear.
The actual reality looks like this. And if you think that you need to pay more for electricity to not destroy the planet that's already their propaganda having done their work.
Dollars is a metric that is easy to understand and complex problems are complex. Do you really think it's that simple?
Some parts of it are... there is a certain amount of either nuclear base load or storage infrastructure needed.
But more than 50% renewables are easily doable without much strain on modern grids (modern models for nuclear usually plan with ~30-35% minimal base load needed...).
Also another argument for specific fossil fuels -domestic availability and thus more independence- is also a pro argument for renewables.
So no matter where you stand, if you are not at least using (or planning to use in near future) 50% cheap renewables in your electricity mix (or see narratives about expensive renewables even) then you know that the decision is not taken for economic reasons but because decision makers are getting money to stick with more fossil fuels than necessary.
Renewables are an economical no-brainer right now. Actual complexity of balancing out their fluctuating production with base load or storage comes much later (although in the case of nuclear the build times are often long enough that you should start soon). And still there are so many countries so far away from the absolute no-brainer amount of renewables.
Hundred percent. I'm happy that the UK is considering going nuclear for the other 50% instead of just saying, "we've done 50% wind and solar so we're done. Let's jut burn coal and gas for the remaining 50%."
Actually coal energy is expensive. Renewable energy is cheap energy.