Dear European Commission, you are missing the point by publishing such graphs, as pointed out by other people already - the goal of the whole exercise of transforming our energy systems is not to push any particular technology (in this case, renewables) but to decarbonize the energy systems. This is how the country with the largest share of #renewables does today:
@kravietz
Unfortunately that is not correct. Nuclear energy is insanely expensive (it only exists with massive government subsidies) and the biggest supplier of material is...Rosatom. So renewables are the way to go, as they represent a technology that actually has a future and can ensure European market leadership (if ee don't sell that to the Chinese as well). @EU_Commission
Nuclear LCOE (levelized cost of electricity) is comparable with utility PV and on-shore wind but still cheaper than off-shore wind or residential PV, when compared directly.
Nuclear is much cheaper when you want to deliver 24/7 electricity, in which case wind/PV needs to be coupled with batteries (very expensive) or coal/gas (dirty)
There’s ~30 countries producing uranium worldwide, including many Western or pro-Western countries.
The fact that Russia has been investing in nuclear power while Germany has been investing in Russian gas and Chinese PV only testifies to the stupidity/corruption of the German leadership granted that they now mostly run on coal. @EU_Commission
@kravietz
The article focuses purely on Germany. That they can't do it doesn't make it impossible.
Nuclear plants have often been slow and colosally expensive to build. If you don't trust the Germans to build out renewables which can be done in small money-making chunks, why would you trust them to do well on nuclear?
If this really is your plan, I suggest building them across the border in France, Czech Republic etc. and adding transmission.
And I focus on Germany because it’s a perfect example of a highly-industrialised European country that has no suitable geography for hydro power (unlike Sweden or Norway or Portugal) and has high population density that prevents huge renewables projects (unlike say Morocco). Then I’m looking at Poland’s CO2 emissions, which are even worse at CO2 intensity, and wondering how that could be improved, one look at Germany makes it perfectly clear that the whole purpose of Energiewende was to show the world how not to do it and that renewables may be fun but they don’t deliver decarbonisation 😉
@dynode
We are the home of the NIMBY. People have zero sense of collective benefit. They mostly care about their own backyard. More trains, yeah. But don't build that high speed line through my town. Renewables are awesome, but I don't want the shadow of a wind park over my house. Nuclear is cool, but please put the waste facility in a different state. @t_mkdf@kravietz@notsoloud@EU_Commission
There’s one more aspect - in case of electricity sources land surface usage must be looked at in the lifecycle methodology, that is including manufacturing, operations and disposal. A PV panel is not made of pranic energy and does not appear out of thin air to levitate over a grass field.
A PV panel is made of glass, coal, lots of metals, including lead and copper, and is attached to the ground using a heavy concrete base. And then produces some electricity over its life time. Same applies to wind turbines and nuclear power plants of course.
The difference is once again, nuclear delivers hundreds of times of more electricity per every kilogram of mined resources due to much higher power density, capacity factor and longer lifetime.
And it does matter, because these resources need to be physically mined and processed, which has environmental impacts and uses energy.
In the EU this is trivially bypassed by simply not talking about it - everyone just says “PV are cheap” and they conveniently ignore the fact they are cheap because they are produced in Asia with zero regard to environment or human rights. And of course nobody will open new mines and PV factories in the EU… because they would be then more expensive and the mines would spoil our precious landscapes. But hey, why worry - neither CO2 nor pollution from these poor countries can ever cross EU border 😂
Objectively, the complaints about renewables are much more justified than those about nuclear. When we speak about NIMBY, we usually mean local residents who are concerned about their neighbourhood and lanscape - when looking at the surface power density, wind power has 130x higher impact than #nuclear (for PV that’s 36x) in terms of land surface occupied alone.
This is nicely illustrated by the first diagram which shows land use of a network of nearly 9000 wind turbines compared to land use by nuclear power plant of equivalent installed power. The reason why the left hand side (wind turbines) looks the way it looks is that wind towers don’t just stand in the field all by themselves, but they require construction roads, maintenance roads, wire connections, substations etc. And yes, the total territory occupied is around 60x60 km so 3600 km2 (!).
This aspect I think is totally missed by 90% people who support #renewables and think you can replace a 1 GW coal or nuclear power plant by just a few dozens of good looking wind towers. Which leads to many misunderstandings because no, it’s not a few dozens, it’s a few thousands and such as massive land surface use is a show stopper in countries with high population density.
I know no onshore wind farm that is not dual use (agriculture) or on land not suitable for anything else (on the side of the Autobahn or on top of a landfill).
So yet another problem with renewables is that they are very much geography-dependent: in many cases, especially with wind power, the locations which you can use for wind power are not suitable due to low winds, and in places where there’s wind you don’t want to install the turbines. Which, at the end of the day, leads to destruction of forests and landscape “because we must expand renewables”.
What about the real numbers. If you take just the spacing between the wind turbines and declare it all a wind power plant, sure you have a really high land use.
But if you take the land between the turbines and use it for something else (like farming), the numbers should differ.
These make up the majority (if not all) of the onshore wind farms in continental northwestern Europe (NL, N GER, DK).
@t_mkdf
The labor costs of home solar makes it uncompetitive with utility solar. When it really produces, spot price is usually zero. If tariffs and taxes are high it might make a bit of money due to misaligned incentives.
Combined with a battery it can add resilience against grid failure, but it has to be set up in a specific way.
It's one of many uneconomic things people do for happiness. And one of the more sensible ones 😃
@EU_Commission
This representation is misleading because it says nothing of how the rest of the energy was produced.
For instance, France and Germany look similar with this simple metric. But in France most of the energy comes from nuclear plants, yielding no greenhouse gas emissions; in Germany, it is gas and coal. The ratio of renewable energy is similar, but the French mix is sustainable, while the German mix absolutely is not.
@photos_floues@EU_Commission It's even worse than this, because it's not about electricity, but energy. So it's lumping together electricity generation, fuel for cars, and heating fuel. Climate protection is really two different world: electricity production is improving rapidly to the point of being a solved problem, transportation is standing still and any attempt to do something about it leads to fascist rioting (Gilets Jaunes, the tractors here, etc.).
@Alon
As far as car transport, electric cars will outcompete fossil burners in the next few years. Prices are coming down, ease of charging going up and experience is spreading (which in this case tends to make people more positive).
It will happen a bit faster or slower, depending on local conditions.
Note that in Norway sales are 100% electric, in Denmark 50%. In Denmark a lot happened in just five years. @photos_floues@EU_Commission
@notsoloud@Alon@EU_Commission
This is better than it not happening, of course, but it is not a sufficient solution. We have to rethink road transport of goods, the overpresence of cars in urban environments, the dependence to cars that empoverished populations develop, and the fashion for grotesque contraptions such as SUVs and pickup trucks, as well as the implications of electric cars in terms of privacy and dependence on totalitarian regimes to source materials.
@notsoloud@Alon@EU_Commission
Yes, except that with electric cars there is no second-hand rust bucket to be had to escape corporate monitoring. But you are right, mostly it is an argument against cars in general at they exist today.
@photos_floues@notsoloud@EU_Commission Side note: one of the reasons German-style open subway stations with proof-of-payment ticketing work well is that it's impossible for the agency to monitor individual users. I have a monthly and that's all BVG needs to know - whereas in e.g. London, TfL is open about how it monitors individual Oyster cards.
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