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New Berlin airport took 10 years to build, was 5 billions/200% over budget and sucks so much rear end that there are discussions of blowing it up and have a do-over. The idea of letting these idiots try building a nuclear power plant is terrifying.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:25
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CommieGIR posted:Humans suck in general, film at 11. But given the alternative is the continued investment in Fossil fuels, you got a choice to make: either you assume nuclear plants are built, often overbudget, but likely held to NRC standards, or we let them continue to burn fossil fuels. The hurdles of continued renewables/transmission infrastructure expansion are so drastically smaller than those of a nuclear revival that it just doesn't make much sense to go down that route for many countries. The obstacle for renewables are basically just political/legal. The obstacles to nuclear expansion in the west are such a massive clusterfuck that you basically need an Apollo style effort to overcome them. In a perfect world, we would go down both paths, but it's not a perfect world and opportunity costs do exist here. There is definitely the problem of what happens when renewables expansion(without large scale storage) reaches the maximum cap of 80-90%. But by then it will already be ~2040 and it's very likely that solutions will be mass market ready by then, like dirt cheap mass market sodium ion batteries or cheap electrolyzer plants.
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Oct 11, 2021 18:52
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CommieGIR posted:Except for the places where its not working. Which is pretty much all of the larger states. Pretty much all of them are falling back on majority fossil fuel generation and is literally shooting them in the foot. I'm sorry renewables alone is not a success case. What do you think is happening in mainland Europe? Yeah, sorry, but I'm gonna trust the actual experts on the subject and the data/studies, which show that it is absolutely feasible, and not your gut feeling on this.
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Oct 11, 2021 19:12
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CommieGIR posted:Yeah how is that going for Germany? They are behind France in scale of emissions, they are actively facing fuel shortages because they are heavily dependent on Natural Gas, "biomass" (wood pellets), and energy imports. Overall they are not doing well. We went over all of this itt before. Germany is not a high gas user per capita(you are maybe thinking of the Netherlands, or confusing gas and coal?) Gas use in the energy sector has decreased in the last decade. Germany is a net exporter of power. I don't know what you mean by "fuel shortages", but if you are talking about the strategic gas reserves being lower than usual for this winter, then yeah, that's true. But that's true for every country in Europe this year. Haven't heard anything about reseves or supply being low enough to cause a shortage. Do you have a source? Don't really care about that ~but what if the wind don't blooow~ navel gazing in the media. You measure the success of decarbonization by the amount of Wh generated by renewables per year, not on a single day. Every Wh per year genered from renewables sources saves a Wh from fossil fuels. And no poo poo France has lower emissions per capita. They decarbonized something like 70% of their energy sector in the 70s an 80s. That's very admirable and I wish every country had done it then too. Would have saved us a lot of troubles today. Germany is not gonna reach that point until the mid to late 30s or something. Definitely a missed chance. Phanatic posted:They're falling back on fossil fuel generation. Again, just look at the data. Germany's renewables share for 2021(up to this week) is 48%. It's a drop of 3% compared to last year. With renewables expansion having been killed completely by the government 2 years ago it's withing the range of normal fluctuation. The UK is definitely hosed though, you are absolutely right about that one. Their mainland connection to France got damaged in a fire recently and they basically dissolved almost all of their strategic gas reserve infrastructure a couple year ago because they thought it would be cheaper to rely on other EU countries gas reserves. Then Brexit and this poo poo happened and now they are absolutely hosed.
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Oct 11, 2021 20:10
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Kaal posted:I'd like to point out that the renewables figures are also leaning hard on burning lumber in old coal plants, which isn't green or carbon-free in the slightest no matter what Germany might say.  No? Do you have a source for Germany burning wood in coal plants? Are people just completely making poo poo up now and writing their own Germany fanfic?quote:You factor that out, and recognize the temporary drop in energy consumption due to the pandemic, and those renewables figures start to look more like 40 percent or less. And that's before considering that swapping gas power for wind power on continental electric grids doesn't really make it carbon-free. Germany is heavily relying on other countries to provide them with fossil fuel electricity when they need it, and that fact is definitely getting papered over in those figures. I mean, sure, if you completely ignore the actual amount of power generated and then just make up a number from thin air instead, then this number could be lower. Hmm, yes, never looked at it this way 
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Oct 11, 2021 20:48
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Phanatic posted:I did. I even quoted it to you: What is your point? The the metric for renewables generation should be cherry picked days or seasons, instead yearly totals and averages? Kaal posted:This is how biomass works, if you don't know that then it really brings into question your awareness of the topic. So you don't have a source and just made it up completely? Yeah, that's what I thought. Phanatic posted:Note that what he asked for is cleverly specific: Germany burning wood in *coal plants*. Lol, he didn't ask "cleverly specific". The claim was literally that Germany is "leaning hard on burning lumber in old coal plants", which is a weird rear end claim and smelled like bullshit. I live in this idiot rear end country and try to follow developments in the energy industry so something like this would have had to slip pass pretty much all domestic media outlets. So I asked for a source, which he obviously couldn't produce because it's made up bullshit
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Oct 11, 2021 21:58
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CommieGIR posted:This isn't actually addressing anyone's points Gaba, you are being even more dismissive than you claim we are beinur What do you think the point is? That Germany's biomass usage shouldn't be considered renewable? I genuinely don't know. Is it carbon neutral? Absolutely not. No form of power generation is. So the answer depends on its carbon intensity and that's obviously a very complicated topic because the term biomass covers so much different poo poo. Some forms will probably have lower intensity than wind and nuclear, some have absolutely horrendous intensity on par with natural gas. So you are left with using average numbers if you want to use the umbrella term "biomass" and then you will probably end up somewhere between wind/solar and natural gas(where exactly will depend on the country/region and what model you used for estimation). Technically still squeezing in below a certain renewables cutoff, but including dirty forms of biomass usage. And that's greenwashing. So yeah, I do think we should pick a hard cutoff point and a scientifically well accepted standard methodology to estimate intensity and then throw out all the lovely biomass usages into a separate category called "dirty biomass" or something. Dunno what biomass share you will arrive at after that, don't think anyone knows. The whole sector is a convoluted mess with ten billion actors doing their own thing. It's probably worth mentioning that Germany's biomass share of power production is pretty average for Europe. It's not a problem that is specific to a single country. Kaal posted:In 2012, Germany operated 30 coal plants that had been retrofitted to partially or wholly rely on wood pellets. Last year Germany authorized up to 40 billion euro in subsidies to help convert their coal plants to wood pellets, hydrogen (like Gaba's preferred Greenpeace ProWindGas), or gas. Germany has been converting old coal and gas plants into wood-fired biomass since the early 2000's. For example the Märkisches Viertel coal/gas/oil CHP plant was converted to wood chips in 2014, and the Ulm gas/oil plant was converted in 2004. Märkisches Viertel KWK is a dedicated biomass installation designed for that purpose(operating in a building that used to house a coal plant at some point(it's under monument protection, lol Germany)). But you keep digging for that source. I'm sure you will find it sooner or later. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 00:25
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Phanatic posted:That's a pretty obvious dodge. Germany will never burn wood in coal plants because when they convert them to burn wood then they're not coal plants anymore, they're dedicated biomass installations. No, firing(and co-firing)coal plants with biomass is a thing that does exist. quote:https://powerplants.vattenfall.com/markisches-viertel/ Of course if makes a difference whether you burn biomass in a dedicated biomass plant or in a coal plant. They have substantial differences in design. It's makes a difference in carbon intensity and emissions. Don't burn biomass in coal plants ffs (or anything else for that matter) CommieGIR posted:They are still burning poo poo, you are missing the entire point, in fact they are basically woodchipping entire forests to fuel their power. And your argument is this is somehow BETTER than just keeping their nuclear plants operations or building new ones? Because it would be expensive and take a while? They are marching backwards and claiming its progress. Taking low carbon intensity nuclear power plants off the grid during a climate apocalypse is pure idiocy. I don't think you will find much disagreement about this on SA. Building new ones? No. I think that whole idea is a dead-end. The thing is, if you ask the the anti-nuclear side what their path to resume decarbonization of the power sector is, they can actually provide structured logical paths on how this can happen. For example, legislative action. We need to redact 2 laws specifically that have been put in place by the the current government. I don't know if it will happen, but it is at least a goal you can work towards. If you ask the pro-nuclear side, you get some insanely convoluted 400 step plan with each step infinitely less probable than the last one and one of the step very likely requiring a coup of the government and dissolution of parliament and then trying to do a 10 year Apollo style project while most of the country and public administration goes into a general strike and two or three states secede and there is a armed standoff at the Bavarian border between state and federal police and France and Poland putting sanctions on the country and stationing troops at the border. It's completely loving nonsense. Not a single federal party in Germany supports nuclear expansion (outside of some of the 60 or so microparties nobody gives a poo poo about), because the whole idea is such a waste of time. Not even the loving Nazi parties, which are obsessively contrarian on almost anything else that is even slightly perceived as ~mainstream~ go any further than just advocating for extensions on existing plants. It's a baaaaad idea. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 18:44
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CommieGIR posted:Except its not a waste of time. At all. And we've demonstrated this over and over again. What is a waste of time is pretending that Biomass is somehow better than lignite coal, its not. Yeah, sorry, I don't know how to respond to this post. Nothing in it seems to be connected to anything I wrote. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 12, 2021 19:13
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lol, eating a sixer just for calling out Commie on markovbotting again  suck my woke dick posted:Now you can say that Germans are too anti nuclear to do the latter option, but in the interest of European integration and also taking our poo poo country's ego on green issues down a peg I'm totally fine putting all the required nuclear reactors a few km across the western and eastern borders. Not gonna find much disagreement on that. The population seems to have pretty much arranged itself with the cognitive dissonance of just importing nuclear power from EU countries at times and doing it basically indefinitely(or up to some vague very distant point in some utopian future). (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 13, 2021 11:26
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Electric Wrigglies posted:Battery tech has reliably improved in capacity, cost and form factor ever since it was first invented as it is not only the renewable industry that benefits from improved battery tech. However, it has not had and there is no likely expectation that it will have the order of magnitude improvements that are required to make batteries feasible for grid scale storage beyond grid services or minor same day load shifting. A hydro plant will store 100's to 10,000's of TWhrs of power and the biggest batteries today are a few 10's to 100's of MWhrs. The tech to install those 100 MWhrs battery plants has existed for a hundred years but the need has only arisen recently - ie do not mistake the current dramatic rise of grid battery installations as some sort of paradigm shift in battery tech. I can only speak for Europe, but at the current price point there is little demand for long term battery storage for the grid right now. It's usually just so much more profitable and efficient to improve the grid/transmission infrastructure and sell the electricity from areas of overproduction to other parts of Europe that have a shortfall. This will probably continue to be true until we are in the region of 60-90% renewables and decades into the future. So the question is if battery tech will be up to the task by 2042 to remove the last 10-20% of fossil power plants, not now. As far as long term storage is concerned, hydrogen from electrolysis might become a practical solution by that point. Maybe not from a market perspective, but if there is a regulatory demand to keep a certain amount of it storage for energy security reasons it could be a solution. The energy market is already heavily regulated with security in mind today.
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Aug 19, 2022 16:23
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Owling Howl posted:We're going to have to make hydrogen and biogas anyway for industry, heating and heavy transport so we might as well use it for energy storage too. The efficiency of a round trip(electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity) is just horrible. IIRC ~20-40%. It still makes sense in situations where there is absolutely no alternative (like aviation or ships), but for storage we will probably try to avoid it like the plague unless absolutely necessary.
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Aug 20, 2022 09:27
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MightyBigMinus posted:this is such an infuriatingly common and hyper dumb line of reasoning Sadly it's not that simple. There are substantial capital and operation costs associated with it(running electrolyzers, fuel cells and storage on a massive scale). We don't know yet how substantial it's going to be in 20 years, but it's never going to be as cheap as something like demand response. Maybe not even as cheap as battery storage or just keeping renewables in reserve that you spin up only a couple of times per year. It's definitely not the only way how we can create long term energy storages. We do have biomass, bio fuel and bio gas.
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Aug 21, 2022 11:38
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MightyBigMinus posted:by definition cheaper than idling spent capital (wind & solar capacity) when again they could be making literally *anything* more than zero. It's absolutely possible that just idling renewables could be cheaper. Even assuming that you get the power to run the electrolyzer for free, capital and operating costs can be higher than the expected price you get at the exchange for the stored electricity. You would be operating your storage at a loss.
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Aug 21, 2022 22:53
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bad_fmr posted:So Germany now shut down its last remaining three nuclear powerplants. To everyones surprise some energy producers announced a mild increase in the price of electricity. The article is not outright lying, but it's pretty dishonest/bad faith for trying to associate this with nuclear phase out. If anyone is interested in how the convoluted monstrosity that is the German electricity market works: "Basic supply"(Grundversorgung) is a legal scheme where public utility companies are required to provide uninterrupted services under any circumstances. If your power contract lapses, is terminated or you moved into a new apartment where you don't have a supplier yet, the public utility company will serve you automatically in the form of "basic supply", no questions asked. It is intended to be a measure of last resort and is usually substantially more expensive than market rates and you want to get out of it as fast as humanly possible. It is largely so expensive because utility companies meet that demand through stable long term contracts with producers. All of this changed with the energy crisis. At the high point of the crisis average market rates for new contacts were 60 cents per kWh and basic supply providers with their stable long term producer contract were suddenly the cheapest option. A lot of people just terminated their normal contract and moved into basic supply, which was still at pre-crisis prices of 30 cents or less. I did the same thing and saved a lot of money. But these long term contracts don't last forever and utility companies bad to negotiate new contract with producers at current high market rates, so basic supply prices have been massively going up everywhere in the last few months. I got hit wit price adjustments in February and would be paying above market rate now, if I had stayed in it. These massive price hikes are going to continue throughout this year and the next. The whole market is very messed up in general right now due the government price caps. As a consumer you only pay 40 cents per kWh and the government pays everything above that, so utility companies don't have a lot to gain from lowering prices below 40 cents. e: someone from NRW can chime in if I got something wrong, but I assume it's the same situation there as everywhere else in the country. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 11:17
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Blorange posted:Lifting concrete blocks for energy storage isn’t economically feasible, but if someone needs to subsidize construction during an economic slowdown it can be a symbiotic grift. Every year the demolition of buildings all around the world releases unimaginable amounts of energy into earth crust when kinetically highly energetic rubble fragments and particulates impact at the terrestrial-atmospheric intersection line. With the help of AI driven research methods we developed a novel technology that can recuperate this energy and make it available to the power grid, reducing carbon emission and combating climate change.
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Jun 5, 2023 16:49
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Jows posted:What's your SPAC? Moon for sure! Trampoline Technologies Inc., we are still it the angel investor phase so not public yet
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Jun 5, 2023 17:16
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Saukkis posted:Well, the prices sure are volatile. On Friday between 15 and 24 electricity will cost -50c/kWh. Because a Norwegian Kinect Energy send an erronous bid for the Finnish market. Supposedly Nordpool won't redo the bidding so the price will stay. Hell yeah, time to boil off a couple hundred liters of water on the stove and make some bank. Kitchen will double as a sauna.
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Nov 23, 2023 20:19
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Dante80 posted:40% of US electricity is now emissions-free At least in Europe, a lot of the new gas plants coming online are intended to be around for a very long time. They will either be mothballed and only reactivated shortly during rare dunkelflaute weather events that only happen every 2-3 years or so(doesn't make economic sense to have a storage solution for something so rare) or intended to be switched over to hydrogen at some point.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:Why does cost matter when trying to decarbonize the grid? How is it worse? Is it worse for the tax payer? Worse for emissions? Seems to me that the CO2 emissions of nuclear is about an order of magnitude lower than natural gas so maybe the premium is worth it? Costs matter because energy prices factor into most modern human economic activity (we have seen this recently with the massive spike in inflation due to the Ukraine invasion price shock on the natural gas markets). It has nothing to do with the way an economy is organized (market oriented or centrally planned) and is just fundamental to current modern society. A fully renewable grid with storage and mothballed backup green hydrogen gas plants is not significantly more or less carbon intensive than one that still has 10-20% nuclear in it. Right now it looks like there are only going to be disadvantages to keeping nuclear plants online once we reach that point. This might of course still change with technological development like cheap modular reactors, etc.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:23
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Raenir Salazar posted:Needs scrutiny. The relative expenses and costs of nuclear don't necessarily translate to higher costs to the average electricity consumer once built and running; so nuclear being the "worse" choice as presented her is as I like say, an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence. I mean, if you really want to fudge the numbers like that and completely ignore capital costs then renewables/storage become even better in comparison because generation with them becomes almost completely free. We pay the sun nothin'. It's not really a good argument to make IMO. quote:Also we don't have a fully renewable grid, nor do we have afaik, full hydrogen gas plants capable of replacing natural gas plants, so this seems like an odd comparison? A quick google suggests that the only operational hydrogen plants are natgas who use a blend. That's better than coal but not better than nuclear as of now. Dante asked about how the newly constructed gas plants are going to be used after decarbonization and I was speaking in that context. IIRC most developed countries plan for power sector decarbonization in the mid '30s (optimistically) to early '40(realistically). quote:And also well no, nuclear power plants provide all sorts of other benefits than power, for medical devices, research, materials, and possible supply of reactor fuel for fusion plants if that technology does continue to progress, so even in this hypothetical scenario you still want to keep the existing fission reactors going and to replace them with newer designs as they're developed. That's a good point. - I assume countries with nuclear weapons rely to some extent on their civilian commercial reactors for weapons production and might continue to operate them through subsidies indefinitely. - I have not heard of any substantial civilian scientific research being done at commercial nuclear power plants. There are a lot of nuclear research reactors all around the world for exactly this purpose and I don't know why you'd want to complicate the research work by also trying to commercially produce overpriced power for the grid with the research reactor.
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Jan 3, 2024 02:03
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Raenir Salazar posted:So what this says to me is that there isn't really practical evidence that hydrogen plants can in practice, completely replace nuclear for base load power. The plants you speak of don't exist yet, and just like new nuclear plants, may not exist for decades. IIRC Siemens calls their hydrogen compatible turbines "fuel switch"- something. Dunno what branding other manufacturers use or if there is a more general industry term for them. The turbines(and plants)are certified for up to 75% hydrogen out of the box and can go to 100% after applying an upgrade kit. Here are more details https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/hydrogen-ready.html quote:I was thinking you meant cost in terms of the consumer, not capital costs. I'm not sure if this is really a relevant point in either case, renewables are only starting to displace coal and other fossil fuels because of massive government intervention and subsidies and other policy implementations (despite Manchin's best efforts). If we could wave a magic wand and have world governments throw money at the wall then of course they should be rolling out nuclear as much as they can, because the capital costs don't matter in such a scenario. Sure renewables capital costs ARE cheaper but: - In general, capital costs are fully passed on to consumers and included in the costs to them. These two are not independent of each other. - My point was that your argument ("we can just socialize power production capital costs and let consumers only pay for operating costs") is not a pro-nuclear but an anti-nuclear argument because nuclear power fares even worse against renewable+storage in such a scenario. We shouldn't use that argument at all.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:14
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Almost not country in Europe is geographically large enough to have renewable energy autarky. The only way to achieve that is through fossil fuels(making you dependent on fuel imports and prices, btw)and that means we effectively abandon any hope of power sector decarbonization by ~2045 and our current climate goals. It's the political equivalent of rolling coal. And for literally zero gain because almost no EU member is a permanent electricity exporter or importer and trade goes in both directions depending on time and weather. Even if more EU countries go insane and brexit, electricity trade will continue, just like after Brexit.
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Jan 7, 2024 14:46
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VictualSquid posted:I don't think ecofascism can be coherently defined, because it doesn't exist as an independent movement. If you see something arguing for ecofascism they are normally just trying to recruit greens into fascism, including the assumption that the recruits move on to normal anti-green fascism eventually. Or the opposite recruitment direction. I always thought Gilead in the Handmaid's Tale was a good depiction of what ecofascism would look like. They appear as a theocracy at first, but looking closer they don't really have any churches or priests or a sophisticated religious life. Instead the authoritarian and totalitarian state is the basis of society. They strongly believe in tradition, hierarchy and militarism and despise liberalism and pluralism. And of course they are absolutely obsessed with restoring nature from human damage at any cost and to live in balance with it in a deindustrialized Luddite society.
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Jan 8, 2024 06:21
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Son of Rodney posted:People itt using cherry picked values to own the Seeing how almost every commercial and residential building around me is now hastily slapping PV modules on their roof makes me wonder how much that affects official power consumption statistics. I assume to grid operators the installation of the modules would seem like a simple decrease in demand from factories and office buildings and they don't have access to anything more detailed than what capacity was installed.
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Jan 12, 2024 10:21
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Tuna-Fish posted:Because we have now seen twice within 5 years that in a crisis situation it's every country for themselves, with everyone passing (often actually illegal by EU law, but no-one cared) special laws that gently caress over their neighbours a lot just to help themselves a little. Then that's the end for the European 2050 climate goals and staying under 2 degrees of warming. The only way for most European countries to remain self-sufficient are fossil fuels. Long term there may be other options like massive efuel storages/usage or nuclear power, but that's on timescales that are completely incompatible with 2 degrees(or anything close to it).
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Jan 17, 2024 12:26
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Zudgemud posted:No, it's not a binary choice the solution is to build international transmission AND much more generation capacity. Not sure what you are saying, but a country can deal with the intermittency issue of a growing renewable production either by - integration into a larger, geographically spread out renewables grid and lose self-sufficiency or it can - try to remain self-sufficient and keep its renewable capacity isolated and rely on fossil fuels to solve intermittency You can't do both at the same time. One of them allows a much faster phase out of fossil fuels use and a chance to reach the 2040 & 2050 emission goals and the other does not. Indulging in nationalism, paranoia and isolation are going to cook us alive.
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Jan 18, 2024 11:14
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No, it has to be in NJ. What if New York or Pennsylvania leave the union?
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Jan 29, 2024 17:10
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Yes, "windmill cancer" is a thing that certain interest groups have been pushing. What's supposedly causing the cancer is infrasound and electromagnetic radiation. You can read about all the fun propaganda talking points the coal & gas industry has been coming up with here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_turbine_syndrome And that's just the health related claims. There are vast numbers of other insane claims like them eradicating bird populations, changing the weather, leading to blackouts or not being deployable in large numbers, their shadows disturbing wildlife, etc.
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Feb 7, 2024 10:54
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Saukkis posted:Matt Ferrell did an interesting video of the concept of two-sided solar panels installed vertically in east-west orientation, bifacial vertical solar panels. I hadn't thought that kind of installation could be viable. This varies by country, but in Germany the current consensus is luckily that the overall effect on animal populations is pretty insignificant compared to other habitat killers like high-intensity agriculture. Where it might actually cause significant damage to populations, i.e. in protected areas for endangered species, construction is already illegal. And for species that are exceptionally affected by wind power like bats, some wind park operators have started turning turbines off during certain weather conditions that trigger large scale bat movements. This seems to work extremely well and massively reduces the population effects. It will probably become mandatory for wind parks that are close to forests in the future. Overall Germany plans to zone out 2% of its land area for wind park to fully decarbonize electricity production. Most of this will be taken from the 50% that is currently farmland. German farmland is mostly a toxic sterile wasteland extremely hostile to any life that is not maize, sugar beets, wheat or canola and that is mostly used for producing animal feed. Building wind parks there is going to create habitats and massively increase biodiversity.
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Feb 12, 2024 12:17
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Zudgemud posted:As far as I know plonking down a wind tower in the middle of a field will only create a very minor reduction in farmable land. So wind farms are not going to displace agriculture to any meaningful degree thus I doubt wind parks will create new wild habitats free of agriculture. Even if every wind turbine only has a m² of grass around it it's still an infinite increase in biodiversity. Like, when you go from 0 worms in a wasteland corn field to 1 sickly worm with windfarm cancer, that's infinite growth
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Feb 13, 2024 00:04
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suck my woke dick posted:No, wind power planning does not take into account endangered or vulnerable species conservation outside of highly specific circumstances anymore. To deal with the recent slump in renewable construction, wind power planning has been simplified to the point where it's impossible to create a buffer zone around sensitive habitats where you don't build new turbines. The foundation is not literally in the boundaries of the nature reserve as marked on the map? Approved, gently caress you, birds are assumed not to fly unless the project is so horrifically sited it's going to cause a habitats directive violation proceeding on its own. As a bonus, certain bird conservation measures are now no longer permitted within iirc 2.5km of wind turbines to avoid making wind farms look bad when something rare gets smashed after trying to nest in the conservation area. Thats interesting, do you have more information on this? From everything I've read about the changes the effects on endangered populations were not supposed to be that serious. But of course there are huge regional variations. So 'not concerning' can still mean that a windpark in some area will be the final nail in the coffin for some bird species there, even if the total population is not affected much. The big elephant in the room is of course that leaving these habitats in pristine condition now is not gonna do much good when all the various effects of >2.5 °C of warming start hitting us. Inaction means death to those species too and there is no alternative to wind power in sight to achieve current emissions goals. The plan is for 80% of the energy sector to be decarbonized by 2030. That's in less than 6 years. It's gonna be close as hell, if we really manage to pull that off and there is absolutely no way to do it without speeding up wind power expansion from the piss poor state that the Merkel governments left us. Shooting Blanks posted:Why is German farmland so toxic? How does it compare (in general) to other neighboring countries with a significant agricultural footprint? Can this be improved/resolved within a reasonable timescale, or are we talking about "Let it go fallow for a generation and see what happens." I've never heard this before and don't disbelieve these statements, it's just news to me. It's just the usual stuff. Overreliance on problematic monocultures like maize, excessive use of herbicides/insecticides/fungicides, excessive use of fertilizers, soil degradation, etc. IIRC the poison flowing from those fields is one of the primary reasons for habitat destruction. Insect biomass has been in free fall for years now. It's really, really bad. I don't know what the situation is like in other developed countries, but I hear the Netherlands also has constant farmer protests when the government tries to enforce environmental laws or water pollution limits. My guess is it's the same poo poo everywhere in western Europe. The situation can be easily improved of course. We don't need most of the agricultural production and could easily enact and enforce laws that limit the worst practices. Whether that will happen is a different question. German farmers have just started a war with the current "Green terror regime government". There have been massive protests across the whole country with them blocking cities and highways. They attacked a Green party event today and managed to get it cancelled. Apparently our Green party agriculture minister had to flee the scene after they started throwing stones. The car of his security escort had a window smashed in. Police was completely helpless.
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Feb 14, 2024 22:55
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breadshaped posted:Never understood this hydrogen obsession. Didn't we already figure out how to work with methanol one hundred years ago and that's much safer and easier to handle than gaseous hydrogen? Lots of industrial processes need hydrogen specifically and that's where most of the green hydrogen production will initially go, so you would convert it to methanol only for transport and long term storage and then convert it back anyway. The problem with the conversion process is that it's a very immature, inefficient and capital intensive technology. You want to avoid it at any cost if possible. Especially for storage, there has been a lot of very promising research progress on storing hydrogen at scale so it's not the huge problem anymore that it seemed 10 years ago. There has also been some very interesting publications on new approaches to methanol conversion that are much more practical, but IIRC all of it is currently at the lab experiment stage. It could maybe become more viable in the future though. The timescales of decarbonization are so incredibly tight that you gotta work with what you have now or in the very near future. We are talking about just ~20 years here. Mature and scalable processes for producing, transporting and storing hydrogen already exist, so that what everyone is using to plan with. mobby_6kl posted:Build more natural gas infrastructure now Kinda the opposite. Most of the gas infrastructure in the country is for heating homes and is planned to be dismantled. Luckily it's not a huge effort and mostly amounts to remodeling, i.e. removing chimneys and gas pipes in indoor rooms and sealing everything up.
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Mar 20, 2024 14:54
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cat botherer posted:That's still potentially compelling due to the problems and expense of of Li-ion batteries. However, with the recent success of much cheaper sodium-ion batteries in China, that advantage might erode. Not even sodium-ion batteries are ever going to be competitive for long term grid scale storage. Production capacities just can't scale up enough to meet global demand. For large scale & long term battery storage only redox flow batteries seem feasible on a global scale. Some versions like the iron redox flow one have AFAIK no production or resource bottlenecks. You can churn them out with early 20th century industrial technology in any quantities in any part of the world. Despite all this, they are still probably going to be less competitive than hydrogen. But then again, grid scale storage is gonna be a wild mixture of many different technologies and implementations adapted to specific niches. Ironically there has been very little deployment of redox flow batteries in Europe because there is almost no demand for long term storage right now. In the well integrated grid it's almost always better to just export excess renewable overproduction to other parts so that they can curtail gas or coal generation there. The US has seen much more deployment of them and has more experience with the technology due to their lovely grid.
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Mar 20, 2024 16:51
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Endjinneer posted:What form does this storage take? I was under the impression that hydrogen is a fucker to store. Salt caverns, mostly. IIRC there have also been some ideas of using depleted natural gas reservoirs or aquifers, but actual engineers really hate the idea because inspecting/qualifying one for H storage is a nightmare and storage conditions are unstable due to not fully predictable chemical and biological reactions with the hydrogen. They can also just straight up leak hydrogen. Their only advantage is the lower cost. Salt caverns on the other hand are nice, controlled environments with leakage only being a problem through technical equipment like seals/pipes/etc., which is much easier to control and track. Many countries also have an extensive network of caverns for natural gas storage already and you only need to upgrade the technical equipment to use them for hydrogen. One draw back of underground storage is that it's hard to store high purity hydrogen(like the one you need for fuel cells). There are biological and chemical reactions going on that change the gas composition. That's why the idea of just burning the stored hydrogen in thermally coupled gas plants is so attractive. The purity doesn't matter much when burning it. There have been some very promising test installations using special cavern wall coatings that, together with regular cycling, can keep high purity though. It's probably gonna be important for use cases where you do need to use fuel cells like ships or airplanes.
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Mar 22, 2024 11:03
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