Isn't power to gas still ridiculously inneficient?
Last I checked it seemed like something pushed by gas companies since it upholds gas infrastructure and most of the intermittence is currently supported by gas.
It's very costly compared to normal gas but it's still marginally cheaper to use solar and roundtrip p2g to use on a cold, windless night than it is to use nuclear power produced on any day of the year.
There's just zero economic incentive while polluting gas is dirt cheap and maxxed out solar and wind rarely even covers 100% of current electricity demand.
>Many national grids do not have enough renewable generation capacity to satisfy 100% demand at all times yet.
When will it make sense for many countries? Because the difference between peak production and a winter dip for germany in let's say Berlin is enormous.
First of all there is no alternative that makes sense. Climate change is real and its consequences are more expensive and catastrophic than any trade-offs we’ll have to make for a 100% renewable grid.
The good news is that going 100% renewable is probably less onerous than most people expect. If we get our act together politically, we can easily build the grids, generation, storage and intelligent loads required. With the exception of a few industrial processes, the technology is already existing and economically viable, but it also gets better and cheaper every year.
I never get why people are so opposed to renewables. In the past (and apparently present), we have spent multiples of what we’d need for 100% renewables on stupid wars. Now we could transform our economy with dramatic positive consequences even if we ignore climate change completely (think air quality and corresponding public health concerns, as well as political risks associated with fossil fuels).
It will be one of the breakthrough developments of human civilization and unlock tremendous potential, but people are concerned with the aesthetics of windmills and bickering about minor subsidies, while there is literally an economic crisis going on because some ships with liquified dinosaurs on boats can’t get to their destination on time …
For power plants, this is glacial. A power grid has to balanced perfectly on a sub-second level. Also, you can only do this down to about 50% of rated capacity. Below that you have to switch it off completely.
If you combine this with renewable generation, it all falls apart. A cloud passing over a large PV installation will drop generation much faster than nuclear plants will ever be able to follow (by increasing generation). So if you want to have a substantial share of renewable generation (which, remember, is the cheap stuff), you can't have more than a token nuclear capacity, because you need to invest the money you might want to spend on nuclear on battery and hydro storage.
The other aspect is the economics of nuclear itself. Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive generation capacity you can build. Even when driving them at the maximum of their rated capacity, the have a levelized cost of electricity several times that of PV and Wind per kwh. Requiring routine load following for nuclear would basically guarantee that no one ever builds a nuclear reactor again.
There are reasons to build new nuclear, but it's not cheap/reliable power generation. You build it to have access to a nuclear industrial base, as well as the research and professional community to run a military nuclear program. Or you actually succeed in creating a Small Modular Reactor, which might be suitable for niche applications (i.e. power isolated communities in extreme remote locations). Or you are simply fascinated by the technology and want to invest a ton of money on the off chance that it will produce some unforeseen technological breakthrough (though arguably you'd do better with investing in nuclear fusion from my limited understanding of the research).
It's more cost efficient to keep them running all the time since most of the cost of nuclear is building the power plant, but power output can be adjusted if needed.
>Levelized Cost of Energy for solar is 30-60$ and 100-200$ for nuclear.
With the storage for shitty winter weeks? What's the source on that one?
Mind you I love solar since i'd like to go relatively off grid one day but i've heard too much bullshit around this.
>but it is not clear where you would buy fuel for it, It might still be a supply chain risk since Russia and Kazakhstan are the main players there.
There's a lot of locations from my understanding and a lot more that don't produce anything simply because Russia and Kazakhstan and such don't make it worthwile.
It's a tiny share of the cost of production in the end.
In theory you could have multiple providers but it just doesn't happen much due to market dynamics and incentives.
In this case if I understood it well there's a limit to the amount of satellites we can send into space at those heights and that space is essentially privatized for free uncontested and ESA and China's CNSA already complained about near collision events.
So not only do you get the same market dynamics but practical limitations too and an externalization of costs.
Not a single year has our population dropped.
We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
When that too stops so does the music as a baffling amount of the economy and society and it's support systems is predicated on endless inflationary growth. Frankly nobody in this game of musical chairs will fix it till it hits.
> Not a single year has our population dropped. We simply introduce fungible economic tokens aka workers from the poorer places and will go far to keep this going even if it's unpopular.
That'll only be feasible for so long, since birth rates are dropping pretty much everywhere.
> There is always few groups advertising affordable living in Munich. Never happened. Every year the rent climbs to new never seen high.
Well your population grows trough migration, your land does not and your construction doesn't match either in a long term inflationary environment with every incentive pointing in the continuation of that path.
See also Canada, Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Australia, etc, etc
>If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades
After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this.
It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality.
It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now.
It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.
>I had this view as well until I realized it’s predicated on living in a high trust society.
Building down these high trust scenarios has been the consequence of active policies. You don't just miss these trends and correlations. Not to this extent.
Conversely. The main reason I wouldn't tell someone to to use the UI is the reasons you listed.
At least. If I am not able to follow along step by step to point at their screen and the relative position of buttons. Even more so if the person I'm talking to is clueless to provide and interpret context.
Last I checked it seemed like something pushed by gas companies since it upholds gas infrastructure and most of the intermittence is currently supported by gas.
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