The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

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DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

DrSunshine posted:

[*]Nuclear plants must power down during droughts and heat waves

This is true and has already happened:

quote:

https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-in-france-worsening-europes-energy-crisis/
High temperatures in river water are reportedly forcing Electricite de France SA (EDF) to cut power generation at some of its nuclear plants. The news is particularly troubling as several European nations struggle to cope with an energy crisis caused by gas cuts made by Russia in retaliation against sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine.

River water is often used in many parts of the world to cool steam condensers at all types of thermal power plants, including at nuclear, coal, and gas-fired units. The water picks up heat as it passes through the condenser and returns to the river. However, regulators often place temperature restrictions on the cooling water to prevent harm to the environment, which could be caused if limits were exceeded.

Extreme heat and the driest July on record in France have caused river temperatures to reach certain thresholds that restrict nuclear plant output at some sites. Bloomberg reported that the Saint-Alban plant will operate �at a minimum of 700 megawatts, compared with a total capacity of about 2,600 megawatts� and that �reductions are also likely at the Tricastin plant, where two units will maintain at least 400 megawatts.� The minimum output limits reported by Bloomberg are presumably intended to maintain grid stability while plants restrict output to keep river water under the maximum permitted discharge temperatures.

...

Reuters reported in July that production restrictions had also been placed on the Bugey plant, which is also on the Rhone River, and on the Blayais plant and the Golfech plant, which are both on the Garrone River. The maximum river temperature before restrictions kick in at the Bugey plant is 26C, while that at the Golfech, Tricastin, and Saint-Alban plants is 28C, and Blayais is 30C, according to Reuters.

Of course this isn't the case everywhere, but it has to be considered when looking for sites for new plants and existing plants have to somehow deal with it.

DrSunshine posted:

Building nuclear plants won't replace coal plants: they take too long to build: This is due to siting restrictions and the time it takes to obtain funding ( I don't have figures or facts on hand for this)

This is usually an argument with regards to taking action that has an effect immediately. It is a lot easier to build a huge amount of solar or wind power with a quick ramp up in comparison to nuclear power plants. A ramp up of nuclear power starting today will not have an effect for at the very least 5 to 10 years and more. This is not only due to regulations, but due to other engineering and safety work that needs to be done. Nobody has really presented a solution for making that happen faster.

DrSunshine posted:

Using nuclear plants to address climate change has huge downsides and risks: increasing accidents, nuclear waste, proliferation, and increased environmental damage from uranium mining

The counter argument here is simple: None of the cited dangers have to do with climate change. In the very worst case (catastrophic nuclear meltdown) nuclear power plants can only have catastrophic regional effects on a timeline of decades at most. Climate change has the potential for catastrophic global effect on a timeline of centuries.

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Jun 14, 2023

# ¿ Jun 14, 2023 21:30

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 12:54

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

DrSunshine posted:

Appreciate this.

As a small addendum to this part: As others above have mentioned this is not something completely negating the possibility of using nuclear power plants, but it is something that has to be considered and compensated for through siting, technological/engineering investments, potential reduced power output at critical high need times (due to air conditioning), and so on.

DrSunshine posted:

The "long timescale for ramp-up" argument is pretty valid when our goal is net-negative within <20 years or so, so if I'm discussing with an interlocutor that believes "All energy can be provided by wind, water, and solar", and given that it's a lot faster to build up a whole lot of wind and solar right now, the argument then becomes "What, then, is the point of nuclear now?" I'm kind of at a loss when it comes to arguing for that, because I feel like if I hold to every other counterargument thus far presented, it becomes at best an argument for not reducing nuclear. If anything, the time to start on thousands of new nuclear projects would have been about 35 years ago, when I was born.

In that case, then, is there a good argument to counter "All necessary power generation can be provided by wind, water, and solar", with the argument I want to make: "Nuclear has a big role to play in getting to net-negative CO2"?

Well, as someone who believes that it is probably possible to "provide all energy needs by wind, water and solar" here are my suggestions:
1. Goal is to get to net-negative CO2 and stay there for a long time. That means that there is basically infinite need for energy this century. Nuclear is an extremely low CO2 source of energy (with CO2 extraction net-negative?).
2. Using nuclear power for base load reduces the difficulty of dealing with intermittency and storage for renewables. If those problems can be solved without nuclear power, then we can still use nuclear power for CO2 capture and retire them if/when they aren't profitable or useful. If those problems can't be solved, then it would be bad to then have to wait another 10-15 years to get a solution via nuclear power.
3. Whats the real harm being done by throwing out wads of cash at a solution that might turn out to be not economically viable in 10 or 15 years? Maybe throwing wads of money that way can actually, really, finally make one of the many (failed) attempts of rapid construction at reasonable cost of nuclear power? And if not, then some companies go bankrupt and you've wasted a lot of cash and effort. It only becomes a problem if you use nuclear power in order to reduce the drive for renewable energy (which is what happened in Germany and why I hate the FDP and CDU and am very fine with nuclear power finally being dead and buried here).
4. It is never too late to start reducing CO2 emissions. Every little bit of CO2 not emitted helps. There is no tipping point at which outputting more CO2 won't make the problem worse.

FistEnergy posted:

I'm not even sure what a 100% renewable grid would look like or be operated. Hydro is only available in select locations (and climate change will significantly change the conditions), and wind/solar can't ramp up or down and provide no frequency stability or inertia to the grid.

mobby_6kl posted:

~batteries everywhere~

or maybe hydrogen which is what Germany seems to have planned

Hydrogen is what the EU has planned. Creating enough storage for hydrogen is possible. If the hydrogen is further converted to methane, then the existing storage for natural gas is already enough to cover all possible needs.

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 14, 2023

# ¿ Jun 14, 2023 22:53

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

QuarkJets posted:

Is it? I would guess this is true if you only look at nameplate capacity (which for solar and wind is practically fiction) and don't bother building any energy storage

At its peak - before Chernobyl - nuclear power managed two years of increasing energy production by more than 600 TWh in a single year. Source
Renewable energy production has been doing that for the last decade. In the last four years production actually increased by more than 1000 TWh each year. Again, actual production. Source

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jun 15, 2023

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 00:12

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Now you are adding various constraints and additional qualifiers, changing the scenario to a completely unrealistic one deliberately aimed at emphasizing the biggest problem of renewables, while completely ignoring the problems of nuclear power.

We can instead simply look at history. During the height of the nuclear boom phase, nuclear power expansion was a small fraction of the (still accelerating) renewable energy boom happening over the last decade.

The fact of the matter is that right now, right this moment renewables are already ramping up very, very quickly and eating into the amount of energy produced by fossil fuels. Storage hasn�t stopped that ramp up from happening. The difference between capacity and actual production hasn�t stopped that from happening. Intermittency hasn�t stopped that from happening.

Reality has shown that renewable energy production can ramp up a lot faster than nuclear power production. Hell, it can ramp up so quickly that you can see the immediate effects of politics on renewable energy production on a year to year basis when you start looking into single countries or states.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 05:36

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

His Divine Shadow posted:

Reality has also shown that all this massive ramp up of renewables is worth less per unit of power as well than a lesser but steady and reliable amount of generation. That's what europe desperately needs now.

Renewables can be built out massive on a name plate basis and provide loads of power, in certain times. But it's a problem, the same problem as it always was. We could really really need a smaller amount of reliable fossil free generation to counteract all these wildass disruptive swings.

The numbers I quoted were production, not name plate capacity. We are still not at a point where real life energy systems can't deal with additional renewable energy production. We are still at a point where every bit of fossil free generation helps. And renewables have proven they ramp up faster than nuclear.

And of course an energy source with higher nameplate power but a lower capacity factor can produce less energy overall than an energy source with lower nameplate power but with a higher capacity factor. This doesn't change the fact that the last decade has proven that renewables are more than capable of ramping up faster than nuclear energy ever did in actual energy production in the real world.

Dameius posted:

Not that this would invalidate your point on its own, but I'd be hesitant to compare industrial build out capacity for energy across such a large time span as pre-chernobyl and now and draw too many conclusions or make many definitive statements when you're viewing it purely from nameplate capacity coming online. The world and energy markets are in just such different places.

The numbers I quoted were actual production, not name plate capacity.

Wibla posted:

Solar is great, but where do you get power from at night?

Wind and storage.

QuarkJets posted:

The qualifier of "let's not keep building fossil fuel power plants" was, I assumed, the point of the question

The question was originally about rapidly adding fossil fuel free energy production in the real world.

You then created a completely unrealistic scenario of what the best way would be to generate 10 GW of base load power with no surrounding infrastructure, interconnections, storage, demand fluctuation, existing energy production, etc.

You've basically created a scenario as far away from the real world as pitting two men without armor on an open flat grass field 300m apart from each other in order to compare personal weaponry. In that case, the bow and arrow would be the best weapon for all of history until the first good rifles start appearing. Which might be true in that contrived scenario, but has almost nothing to do with the real world.

The real world has proven that renewable energy is adding actual generation a lot faster then nuclear energy ever did:

Electric Wrigglies posted:

I think a lot of "what is possible" is being done by China. It does have the safety considerations of nuclear but no-where near the same level of NIMBYism or effective green resistance to nuclear. China had great ambitions of building out nuclear but tempered them over the last decade or so (but always in parallel with massive buildout of wind, hydro and solar and transition coal, gas, etc). China is approving new nuclear stations at a rate that can be supported by the scale up in heavy industrial capacity but also operators, supplier and regulator institutional knowledge.

To be fair, China installed 51 GW of hydro capacity in five years between 1015 and 2020 which is roughly what France generators total across all sources at any one time. Or another way, China has taken solar power from 2.6 TWhrs production in 2011 to 327.0 TWhrs in 2021. A massive increase over the 10 years (that I think is the large chunk of what DTurtle was talking about when he talked about a massive increase not impacting current grids) and is even more than the amount of extra thermal production that China did in one year from 2020 to 2021 (~316.1 TWhrs, from 5,330.2 TWhrs to 5,646.3k TWhrs). So China is building out a huuuuge electrical grid in line with being the world's factory and it reducing the carbon footprint of its grid is in effect reducing the carbon footprint of a large chunk of the worlds mfg.

TLDR, nuclear is going to take a while but there is no reason to hold it back as solar and wind are going to take a while as well.

In China, wind energy production is larger than solar energy and has been increasing even faster than solar the last few years. Both are dwarfed by coal. Nuclear power growth has held at a somewhat steady state:

cat botherer posted:

"Dispatchable power" in this case is fossil fuels. That's what we need to get away from. If you think nuclear "can't make sense", fossil fuels really really can't make sense.

There is so much power generation that has to be replaced, that we are not going to run out of enough dispatchable power. Right now adding fossil fuel free power generation as quickly and rapidly and massively as possible is what counts.

This is what we need to adress:

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jun 15, 2023

# ¿ Jun 15, 2023 19:02

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

breadshaped posted:

Even state of the art NASA solar cells aren't coming close to that number. You'd need about 500m^2 of solar cells to power a Nissan Leaf continuously on the go.

That's a bullshit number made up for a bullshit use case.

A typical EV uses 15 kWh per 100 km. A typical average speed is 100 km/h. So you need 15 kW of solar power for continuous use. A typical solar module produces 150 to 200 W per m2. That means you need 70 to 100 m2.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2023 15:26

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

M_Gargantua posted:

Yes, SAE runs student competitions every year and they are a lot of fun. A lot of interesting engineering and research. But the point isn't to make useful vehicles, its to make something uniquely challenging as a learning experience.

There are various categories, and some do include stuff like usability.

Moving a "normal" car just using solar power looks like this:

Obviously not deployed while driving.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2023 16:27

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

TheMuffinMan posted:

what is pure H2 and O2 needed for besides energy production

Pure H2 is expected to replace coal in steel production.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2023 19:46

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

TheMuffinMan posted:

omg

Why?
Currently CO2 is the byproduct. In the future it will be H2O.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2023 20:45

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

TheMuffinMan posted:

uhmmm

If you write complete sentences, it might actually be possible to have a conversation .

# ¿ Aug 15, 2023 22:04

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

TheMuffinMan posted:

yeah well if you don't project random poo poo my way, it might be possible to have a conversation

???

The entire conversation has been you asking what H2 could be used for, me pointing out a use case and you answering "omg" and "uhmmm"

What "projection of random poo poo" are you talking about?

cat botherer posted:

https://www.mining-technology.com/news/green-steel-hydrogen/

There�s H2 steel plants already under construction. It�s a thing.

Yes, basically every European company involved in steelmaking is investing heavily into producing CO2-free steel using H2.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2023 06:00

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

QuarkJets posted:

In this analogy you've created the people who are pro-nuclear also voted for the nuclear power plants to close (???)

Actually, yes. The CDU and FDP were the ones who put the nails in the coffin of Germany's nuclear power plants after Fukushima. They were also the ones who had just the year before that stopped the previous plan to phase out nuclear power in Germany.
This back and forth cost billions in compensation.

The CDU and FDP were also the ones who then did nothing in order to compensate for the back and forth on nuclear power except to ignore renewables and support the shift to gas (along with the SPD) instead. When this blew up, they then blamed the Greens, because ...

Their only solution to the problem was then to try to go back again against their own back and forth and try to argue that actually they never did support the back and forth they did and that the insufficient solution they were willing to go with would magically solve all problems.

So the analogy does work quite well.

# ¿ Oct 8, 2023 11:41

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

mobby_6kl posted:

That's fascinating. Instinctively it does seem like it might work. It might require more land it seems, and I guess maintenance of these wings running around a track would be more complicated. But OTOH you won't need giant cranes to lift stuff up and what not. Should be fairly easy to set up some test farms, at least.

One reason that windmills are built bigger and bigger is that further up in the air wind is a lot more constant. Wind close to the ground has a lot more variability.

So I do wonder just how much cheaper such a system really would get in comparison to the �traditional� form once the capacity factor is included.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 19:19

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Well, the thing is that windmills are getting larger and larger because larger windmills are more effective and efficient and cheaper per unit of energy produced.

They do get more complex and expensive per individual windmill, but they are cheaper than building a number of smaller windmills in order to produce the same amount of energy. That�s the whole reason repowering exists: taking a number of older, smaller windmills and replacing them with a single larger one. Thereby producing more energy, more reliably, while using less land.

Unless this concept is drastically cheaper, which I doubt, I don�t really see it as being an alternative to that.

If you simply want to have less investment into a single windmill, then you can just build a smaller one requiring less exotic construction methods. But that will still be less efficient than building the largest windmill possible.

Where this concept might theoretically become interesting is if the construction becomes so simple that almost no special equipment is needed at all, so that any rural community with lots of land can install such a system by themselves with no special knowledge. But competition with top of the line �traditional� windmills on a cost efficiency level seems like a pipedream to me.

One example (from a company advertising cheaper ways to lift a windmill up higher - relevant for our case is the difference in costs between the capacities of the windmills):

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 00:53 on Nov 11, 2023

# ¿ Nov 11, 2023 00:43

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Son of Rodney posted:

Also I really wonder if it's more practical than simple pv plus small battery pack. Yes, the pricing sounds extremely attractive but before a commercial model is out the numbers is just marketing guesswork and you can put a 3x multiplier to it easily I'm guessing.

Still, love these alternative energy harvesting methods, people need to keep trying, who knows what funky stuff can still be developed.

This. Alternative options are always good. They open up competitive solutions that are a much better fit than other ones. I just hate the the apparent necessity to market them as revolutionary, paradigm-shifting solutions instantly replacing anything and everything coming before them.

For the racetrack solution, I can see them as a possible solution for low cost, low energy, high wind, high space usage, low infrastructure areas. I don't ever see it competing in the traditional wind mill market.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2023 23:49

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Potato Salad posted:

for industrial heat applications, why would you bother purchasing, insulating, and then heating a gigantic thermal ballast rather than just directly heating precisely the parts of your process that need the heat

the specific context they're talking about here is energy storage, downstream of a generation source.

Because generally stuff you need to heat up also later needs to be cooled down. Capturing that heat and using it to heat up the next batch is something that is done sometimes. Another use case is using the residue heat to feed community heating systems.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 08:03

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Potato Salad posted:

It is not my understanding that heat will flow from a source into a lower temperature sink then spontaneously back into the high temperature source. The "capturing" part here is going to need an explanation; even a perfect crossflow heat exchanger cannot push energy back up the entropic hill to the source. That requires some kind of heat pump.

I am speaking very generically and not at all about the specific pie-in-the-sky trillion dollar whatever stuff proposed by the heating up stones thing.

The general approach is: Hot stuff heats up cold water (or air, or salt, or some other thing capable of absorbing a lot of heat) to hot water, becoming cold stuff in the process. Hot water then heats up the next batch of cold stuff up to becoming hot stuff, becoming cold water in the process. Additional heat is only needed to compensate for thermal losses in the process and not for the entirety of the cold stuff becoming hot stuff temperature difference.

A very simple example is waste heat from combustion being used to heat up the air at the intake, leading to a more efficient combustion process. A ton of industrial processes require heating up stuff and then cooling that stuff down again. The vast majority of the time that heat is simply blown into the atmosphere or used to warm up giant pools of water exposed to air.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2023 17:32

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Potato Salad posted:

I can't tell if you either didn't see the part where I refer to existing heat reuse in things like chemical reactor design or if you're so far to the left of the Dunning-Kreuger chart that you don't even realize that's what I'm talking about

I have no idea what your beef is.

The very simple general approach I mentioned is not limited to chemical reactors or whatever. A simple use case is heat treatment of steel products: You heat something up to 700 degrees Celsius, keep it there for an hour or ten, then cool it down to 50 degrees Celsius by blowing huge amounts of air through the furnace and out into the atmosphere. Then you take out the finished batch, put in the new one and heat it up from room temperature to 700 degrees again.

Storing as much of the heat as possible while cooling down from 700 degrees is generally not done as it is too technically complex and expensive. Having some kind of simple system to do that and store that heat for an hour or two would be very useful.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 15:47

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Potato Salad posted:

You expressed incredulity of the whole idea of storing and using waste heat from industrial processes. I merely pointed out that that is already done to a certain extent and could be done even more if a viable solution would exist.

I never expressed any support for their specific approach and don�t care to do so. I will however note that increased efficiency of energy in industrial processes is a large, but underdeveloped part of going towards carbon neutrality.

That you made a whole thing out of that is your problem.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 16:41

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Tuna-Fish posted:

The Energy Generation Megathread: Heated Exchanges

This is the only positive result out of this digression.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 22:11

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

bad_fmr posted:

Build it in a way that it can be met, obviously. Or close enought to not make the system poo poo the bed in basic winter conditions. That means building a system that doesn't rely on wind and so on, because they cannot meet the demand, when it matters the most. Wind power is only as cheap as it is (when it is windy) because all of the cost is of not having wind is directly sourced to the customers who need the electricity anyway. The downside we see right now.

Why should Finland expend a lot of money and effort into building a 100% self-sufficient energy grid, when it can instead import energy from the rest of Europe (and export excess energy in times of abundant energy)?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 19:20

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

bad_fmr posted:

In ideal world, sure. But as it is the close by generation and trasport infra is no where near sufficient. The grid is running out of power as it is. Plus, if we would import from central Europe we would be importing coal or gas powered electricity. Apart from Scandinavia, from which we import most of the energy anyway. We shut down several megawats worth of fossil energy generation in the past and now we see the results.

The big issue is that wind power companies can just sell their electricity as they create it, at cheap price when it is windy and demand is lower. Most other forms of elecricity cannot compete with that price when it is not cold, meaning it is not profitable to keep them available when they are needed. Now that wind does not exist, and the grid is in danger of getting overloaded we have no capacity to adjust. The wind power should be priced in the way the we could keep this very needed adjustment capacity.

So expand energy transportation infrastructure. That way you can continue expanding wind, export more of it when in surplus and import more when in deficit.

That will be cheaper than trying to build out Finnish energy production so much as to always have a surplus (which then can't be sold).

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 12:38

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

His Divine Shadow posted:

Citation required

Construction of Aurora Line begins � a new interconnector between Finland and Sweden

quote:

Contracts for the 400 kV Aurora Line�s first phase have already been signed, Fingrid reports. Construction of the first phase will begin as early as in fall of 2022.

�
The signed contracts have a total value of �50 million and are expected to be completed by the end of 2024. The link, which is expected to be fully completed in 2025, will run from Muhoksel to Messaure in northern Sweden. When completed, the Aurora Line will increase transmission capacity by about 900 MW from Finland to Sweden and by about 800 MW from Sweden to Finland. Investment costs on the Finnish side will be 85 million euros, while the total cost of the construction phase of the joint project will be 254 million euros.
�

Finland�s new nuclear reactor:

quote:

It�s taken 14 years longer than planned, but the Olkiluoto 3 reactor is providing a serious boost to the Nordic country�s electricity self-sufficiency.
The costly reactor, which has 1,600 megawatt capacity, was connected to the Finnish national power grid in March 2022. After a test phase lasting more than a year, it kicked off regular production on Sunday (16 April).
�
Experts have put Olkiluoto 3�s final price tag at around 11 billion euros ($12 billion) - almost three times what was initially estimated.

Newly built nuclear vs. transmission:
40 times the cost for twice the capacity. Six times as long a construction phase.

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 5, 2024

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 19:57

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

M_Gargantua posted:

Yeah but a nuclear reactor is a capital asset, you make the power there. A transmission line is just a way to buy or sell power to someone else, its a road, and its not useful if there are no goods to ship back and forth. That is a huge difference in value proposition, so saying its 40x the cost doesn't mean anything.

It does when we are talking about the exceptional times where production is at a minimum and demand at a maximum and how to address that.

It is cheaper to build transportation infrastructure for importing from other countries than to expand production so much as to always have a surplus.

Roughly by a factor of twenty when comparing it with nuclear power.

QuarkJets posted:

Why would I sign up for an expensive electric plan with my local utility when I could just buy an extension cord that goes all the way to my neighbor's house?

In the case of preparing for a once a year or decade power outage at my home, I think the investment in an extension cord makes more sense than investing in a power generator.

And yes, obviously that doesn�t help when the entire city has an outage, but then we are also looking at power production and transmission on a continental level. And the chance of there not being enough production continent-wide is negligible.

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jan 5, 2024

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 20:22

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

mobby_6kl posted:

If you ignore the cost of the actual electricity, maybe

We are talking about a few hours every year or less. The cost of electricity is unimportant.

In addition, the cost of electricity would be less if there is enough transmission capacity to cover needs.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 22:20

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

His Divine Shadow posted:

Making an undersea power-connector between finland and sweden is not at all representative of the problem of interconnecting europe with enough capacity that wind power can be moved to where it needs to go. There will be a need for new lines having to be made across europe, over land, over inhabited areas. These are going to be much more expensive, much more contested by the people affected too which drags out on the construction time, I've heard of new transmission lines being delayed by 20 years due to similar problems.

Moving the goal posts a bit much? I gave you a real life example showing how much cheaper expanding transmission in comparison to expanding energy production was.

quote:

From a strategic perspective IMO it would be better if each country tried to be as independent as it feasbly can in the area of power generation, rather than relying on neighbors.

Ask Texas how that worked out for them.

It is much, much, much cheaper to continue with increasing transmission than to try and achieve country-level autarky.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 05:12

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Pander posted:

Yes, all it takes is a neighboring country burning lignite and switchgrass and you're set when the wind stops in winter. I don't see any downsides.

You were saying?

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jan 7, 2024

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 19:26

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

QuarkJets posted:

*significantly reduces emissions by building out renewable energy*

*offsets a big fraction of that reduction by shutting down all of the nuclear power*

Look at the reduction in emissions!

Been said a dozen times in this thread, been refuted a dozen times in this thread, and continues to be false.

As a challenge, point out when nuclear power plants were turned off based on this chart:

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jan 14, 2024

# ¿ Jan 14, 2024 02:42

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

QuarkJets posted:

Carbon emissions would be even lower if the nuclear power hadn't been turned off, that chart does not dispute this fact

Thanks for conceding the challenge.

Kaal posted:

In 2023, the wind and solar share of German electricity production reached its highest percentage of all time. This was primarily due to a sluggish economy using less energy generally, increased energy imports, and the early shuttering of the last of the German nuclear reactors.

Success!

I will never understand the hostility to energy trade within the EU + periphery in this thread.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2024 08:43

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Endjinneer posted:

What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store.

Up to a certain percentage (I've seen conflicting numbers from 8 - 50%), hydrogen can simply be stored together with natural gas. My guess is that that percentage is dependent on the material, etc. used. To store even higher percentages without refitting the entire natural gas infrastructure, hydrogen could be combined with CO2 in order to produce methane - obviously with further conversion losses.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2024 01:13

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# ¿ May 20, 2024 12:54

DTurtle: Apr 10, 2011

Hadlock posted:

What is the, uh, recyclability, or uh, lithium reclaim rate of recycled batteries

Roughly 95% or so of all materials in a lithium ion battery can be recycled. I�d expect the lithium recovery rate to be close to 100%.

Edit: looking at it a bit more, the recovery rate for Lithium is currently around 90%.

DTurtle fucked around with this message at 21:04 on May 13, 2024

# ¿ May 13, 2024 20:52

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