I read the article but it's still unclear what argument the anti-wind groups use to say _why_ "wind is bad for environment/our children/the economy/greater good"?
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Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.
e.g.
- Often wind typically need to be subsidised heavily by the government and are not cost effective over its lifetime.
- Typically wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel or nuclear power generators as it is unreliable or you need to buy capacity from elsewhere.
I won't pretend to know enough to state whether they are valid arguments or not. But they are potentially much stronger arguments against wind power than the others frequently made.
Firming argument is valid, but UK deploys nuclear/gas anyway. You can start feeling real challenges past ~70% ren generation - firming becomes more expensive due to opex but you still need it and gas opex is smaller vs nuclear in this low utilization area. So now you are in a moral dilema- ditch nuclear and build gas firming or reorganize capacity market so that nuclear has some CFD or is compensated for firming&grid stabilization (not all nuclear can operate in island mode so that's another factor)
Germany choose the path of gas expansion if you read Fraunhofer. UK is still in a mix. Nordics are lucky with hydro so they can expand basically all low carbon tech
For now they have sufficient power, but considering nuclear timelines, you better start now
Enhanced geothermal could play a role here, but for now it's debatable.
Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.
Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.
Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them
It's a strange double standard. As is the building of expensive pumped hydro storage for use with nuclear.
THE UK gets 30% of its electricity from wind and another 5% from solar; Denmark gets 70% from renewables, mostly wind. Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38%, mainly from solar.
But some lobbyists are trying to kill momentum, especially those who see nuclear as a silver bullet. It is not.
The company supposed to build them held a tender for first SMR, then pivoted to large scale reactors and shortlisted three options. Then that tender disappeared and now they have shortlisted 2 SMR options.
What is happening is a no one wanting to admit the absolutely ludicrous costs and hope the question will fizzle out.
Which as we all know are paper products which rely on ”scale” to achieve anything. No one seems to talk about who will buy the couple hundred SMR prototypes to achieve said scale.
what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it
Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements
”Get something on the grid” when the mangled number put out in PR communication is 2035.
So realistically early to mid 2040s. Why not just build renewables and storage and have ”something on the grid” counted in months and years instead of decades?
renewables cover different aspect of demand. What you do if you don't have enough firming power? Hope neighbors will have spare power? That's why you start planning nuclear now, or you'll start planning gas later, just like Germany
Anti subsidy reports in 2019 [1] landed on a what was seen as a worryingly large €10B for the entire Swedish market based subsidy system over the period from 2003 to 2045. 2018 the actual costs landed on €300m.
In 2021 the price of the system went to zero and was subsequently phased out for new producers. You know; market based subsidies.
In other words, much less than €10B will ever be spent on it.
Please stop making stuff up because you can’t bring yourself to accept how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is.
Are suggesting that we should build peaking nuclear power plants to solve firming? Because that is Sweden’s problem. Managing a January cold spell coupled with low wind is what is used to calculate the resiliency.
What capsize factor should we calculate? 20%? That is way higher than a January cold spell but let’s go for it.
Running Vogtle at a 20% capacity factor leads to 80 cents per kWh electricity.
What you are suggesting is completely batshit insane when actually putting a number on it.
Who cares if the final bit of firming is fossil based with possibility to be decarbonized through synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen when we still have large portions of the economy to deal with?
Don’t let imaginary perfect be the enemy of good enough.
[1]: https://timbro.se/miljo/ny-rapport-subventioner-till-fornyba...
Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV uses the same amount of energy than the ICE car?
> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it
Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, more production, but until then, what should the grid do if the demand is growing?
> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements
It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.
Yes, you need vastly more transmission for a distributed ren grid. Both for deployment and for avoiding curtailment
Hydrogen firming is extremely expensive per Lazard, it's strange you are bringing it up while complaining about nuclear. Needless to say their numbers are for US. For europe it'll be more similar to Germany https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/shipping-green-hydrogen... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-report-says-making-g...
Nuclear can achieve this and you can reform capacity market to guarantee 60%cf if you need, because you know, you still need firming power and maybe you want to avoid too high transmission expansion and grid forming inverters.
If ren strategy alone can't achieve this due to gas firming, then you deploy less ren. Sweden can expand ren as long as hydro can firm it. Past that, you don't have other realistic option than nuclear if you want to phase out fossils entirely
Solar panels in rooftops can decrease the saturation of the grid, so more transmission is not necessarily needed.
Willing to waste 10x as much resources and money because 99% is not 100% even though we still need to decarbonize shipping, aviation, agriculture and industry. Laser focused on one sector ignoring all else.
That sounds like a juvenile position coming from an ideologist rather than someone vying for the quickest possible decarbonization of our entire society.
I’m not sure why you latched on to hydrogen? Maybe because that is the one you could hope to ”debunk”?
We of course also have biofuels, the ethanol blend in for US gasoline is enough to run the entire grid without help for 16 days.
Just repurpose that, while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize, as we switch our transportation fleet to BEVs.
This does not have to be solved today, it is a problem for the 2030s so let’s not jump ahead of ourselves when Poland still runs 70% on fossil fuels.
What you are saying is that we should force the market to build nuclear power despite the insane cost through subsidies. Vogtle running at 60% is still a completely insane 30 cents per kWh excluding transmission costs.
Please do explain what is scary with grid forming inverters? In the latest Chinese auctions the lots with grid forming inverters added ~$20/kWh to the storage price.
And then you circle back to the completely binary world. You do know that Sweden has a huge oil power plant running a few hours per year in a capacity reserve? It just never gets called in due to not being needed.
With your logic nothing is worth doing until that power plant is entirely phased out even though it runs for a fraction of a percent per year?