How #Russia understands Western #deescalation? Margarita Simonyan’s husband Tigran Keosayan explains to his colleagues:
Everything we wanted to know about NATO is now quite clear: we can start a war with any NATO country, almost any, and US will not intervene. As long as US doesn’t intervene, they are just a bunch of paper tigers.
Second of the three European EPR ( Evolutionary Power Reactor) #nuclear projects - #France#Flamanville - will be shortly connected to the grid. The projects caused many controversies due to long delays… but they are getting completed:
🇫🇮 Olkiluoto 3 ✅ connected in 2023
🇫🇷 Flamanville ✔️ finished, will be connected by end of 2024 : 🇬🇧 Hinkley Point C 🕓 will be completed by 2027
The moment these projects get connected, they start delivering gigawatt-hours of low-carbon electricity to the grid, which is desperately needed for #ClimateChange prevention and mitigation.
Each of these has been criticised for delays (which is factually true but unfair) and “huge cost” (which is unfair and untrue).
Talking about the total investment cost in case of clean electricity sources that may live up to a century is a popular manipulation but what matters is LCOE.
It’s the cost of investment and operations divided by value of electricity produced over its life time. In case of nuclear power LCOE is quite low, in the range of $60/MWh because the relatively big initial costs is divided by decades of delivery of huge amounts of power. This is exactly the same case with very costly off-shore wind farms (e.g. the Doggerbank project) or huge solar farms (e.g. Ouarzazate in Morocco).
The reasons for delays are… complex. This article[1] by Joris van Dorp is probably the best explainer to why exactly Hinkley Point C was delayed so much. It’s a mix of reasons, starting from “first of kind” scale of the project to prohibitive and often absurd safety requirements lobbied after Fukushima by countries who saw an opportunity in replacing EU nuclear by Russian fossil gas. And they were absurd, for example because you don’t get earthquakes and tsunamis on the La Manche Channel.
And the reasons are complex, for example due to general UK attitude to funding infrastructure projects - they exclusively opt for private funding, which means the investors need to get a direct financial profit. Most people see the absurdity of private ownership of UK water utilities (which leads to no investments in the network and dumping of sewage into rivers by underregulated companies) but nobody sees the same absurdity in funding the electricity grid (which is in turn overregulated).
somewhere where you hope it’s not part of LCOE any more
No, it’s exactly the opposite. If you make an arbitrary, ideological choice to use commercial funding for any project, you end up inflating its cost by up to 60%. If you instead choose direct government funding, you get lower overall cost and lower LCOE.
You talk of it as if these were laws of physics, but they aren’t. You are talking about a specific financial practices widespread among governments in Western Europe. The term “subsidy” is a legal one - it isn’t carved in stone either and its definition depends on the legal system.
To give you a simple example: me and my nine friends want to build PV. So every one of us just drops 1000 EUR into a common pot and we buy as much as 10’000 EUR can buy. Which would be roughly 70x 200W panels today or 14 kW(p). But no, here comes Andreas and says “you can’t just buy things, you need to use your money as a collateral for a bank loan! otherwise that would be socialism!” Okay, we go to the bank and we get 15% rate for 5 years, so ultimately we pay 4000 EUR interest which buys us 8 kW, but Andreas is happy because we fed the financial industry!
the same money being used for more efficient purposes
Or less efficient. Depending on the current definition of “efficient” in the light of current political goals. Was Nord Stream 2, DESERTEC or Solyndra money spent “efficiently”?
The fun part is happening as always on the edge between dramatically different political systems - this is precisely how Russia was able to supply fossil gas to EU so cheaply, and this is precisely how China is now able to deliver PV to EU so cheaply. They simply use taxpayer’s money more flexibly than say Germany.
The result is that Germany has killed its own PV industry because it was “too expensive” (due to strict adherence to the paradigm of private funding) and instead is buying PV from China.
Looking at the global PV market, would you say China’s use of taxpayer’s money was “more efficient” or “less efficient”?
You’re now evading the discussion on funding and changing topics, but I’m OK with that. I have explained several times that the above arguments for using social discount rate apply equally towards large renewables, nuclear and hydro power projects.
Now, by singling out nuclear you are making the mistake of comparing projects of incompatible size and pretending they’re equal. Of course, it’s much easier to build one 10 MW(p) wind turbine than a 1 GW nuclear power plant. The difference is that the former will deliver 100x less power for 30% of the time during a year on average, so it will ultimately produce ~25 GWh. The latter will output 100x more power 90% of the time, so it will deliver ~7 TWh of electricity.
But if you start comparing equivalent projects you will very soon get very similar numbers in terms of project schedules. For example:
UK Sizewell C nuclear power plant - 3 GW installed power - planned completion 2032
Looks similar, doesn’t it? It does, as soon as you look at installed power only. Because in terms of actually delivered electricity they are very different:
UK Sizewell C annual output 23 TWh
Denmark off-shore wind hub annual output 11.8 TWh
And that’s not all, because a nuclear power plant operates at ~90% capacity factor and is dispatchable (it produces when you want), while wind farm produces when wind blows. Therefore, to get 24/7 electricity supply you need to somehow compensate the variability of wind.
This is the only reason why Germany is now building 10 GW fossil gas (500 gCO2eq/kWh) power plants - to get 24/7 supply while having a large share of renewables. So you can’t just look at the LCOE of wind alone, because it will not supply you power alone - you need to look at the cost of both wind and cost of balancing (gas, nuclear, batteries, hydro etc).
This is why in grids with large share of renewables they started using LFSCOE (levelized full system cost of electricity), which is incorporates all these costs. Selected Bank of America LFSCOE estimates for Germany:
Hmmm weird, because now you seem to very much believe in the current decarbonisation plan involving further increase in renewables and fossil gas which may be in unspecified future replaced by hydrogen?
#Russia has declared an intention to unilaterally extend its territorial waters on #Baltic sea in a way that collides with territorial waters of #Finland and #Lithuania. Russian Ministry of Defense (!) proposed to cancel the 1985 #USSR decision of demarcation of the sea borders and redraw them according to “new geographical references”, and then declare them “internal waters”.
Obviously, this looks very much like a poorly disguised attempt to create an strategic dilemma for #NATO by unilaterally opening a territorial dispute with two NATO members without really invading anyone yet. In case of NATO inaction the next step will be Russian actually enforcing their “new territorial waters” by threatening or sinking ships sailing to Finland and Lithuania. And if the inaction continues, the next step will be likely establishing “new geographical references” on one of the land borders of NATO countries.
Technically, they are not “expanding” anything yet - their Ministry of Defense merely declared an intent to remeasure Russia’s territorial waters on Baltic with “new geographic references” and their intent to declare specific areas their “internal waters” indicates they may want to expand their borders not “near” NATO but right into the territory of Finland and Latvia, for now. What they will actually do now 100% depends on NATO reaction - if it will be soft and deescalating, Russia will just move forward and escalate their revisionist demands.
But an ephemeral umt=14 is a replacement? 😉 Everyone has their own ways, but for me it’s much easier to occasionally use !g with DuckDuckGo as my default search engine.
Uwielbiam mentalność ludzi mieszkających w okolicy przedszkola, do którego chodzą moje dzieci. Są tam nowo wybudowane bloki, w każdym z nich jest jakieś 18 mieszkań, co łącznie da pewnie niecałą setkę mieszkań. Garaży jest sześć. Parking jest, ale oddalony o kilkadziesiąt metrów od bloków, akurat pomiędzy nimi a przedszkolem. Nie ma tam żadnego zakazu wjazdu, nie ma żadnej tabliczki "parking tylko dla mieszkańców", nic z tych rzeczy, naturalne więc, że rodzice zawożący dzieci do przedszkola tam parkują.
Dzień w dzień znajduję za wycieraczką karteczkę "proszę tutaj nie parkować – sąsiad" albo, jak dziś "debil" (miło, że się podpisał, ale zapomniał o treści wiadomości).
Deweloper obiecał rozszerzenie parkingu, ale na jednym miejscu postanowił jednak wybudować kolejny blok, a drugie miejsce na razie jest po prostu utwardzone, ale pełne dziur otoczonych ostrzegawczymi pachołkami.
Mając wśród krewnych osoby, które np. we dwójkę mieszkają w nieocieplonym trzypiętrowym domu o powierzchni 400 m2 i narzekają, że “na nic ich nie stać” pozwolę sobie mieć odmienne zdanie 😉
Wspomniani krewni też nie mają żadnych oszczędności. Czy powinno to w jakikolwiek sposób zmienić moją ocenę ich sytuacji? Przecież mieszkanie w 400 m2 domu o wartości pewnie pod milion złotych jest świadomym wyborem a nie jakimś dopustem Bożym.
Nawet ten jeden przypadek falsyfikuje popularną narrację, że “ludzie nie mają oszczędności więc nic się nie da zrobić”. Jak widać, czasem nie mają oszczędności właśnie dlatego, że nic nie robią. Innymi słowy, stać ich na to.