Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

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"?

Ruins the view, kills birds, noisy is the usual trifecta. Or to quote one site I won't deign to link to, "Protecting the marine environment and ecosystems from the industrialisation of our oceans."

Of course, the same folks have no objections whatsoever to offshore drilling.

Those are the weaker arguments. In the UK, I've heard many more convincing arguments against wind power.

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.

Offshore wind is indeed expensive and requires high CFD's. For onshore it's still manageable (yet). The reason is solar eats part of their profits and payoff becomes too long

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

Nordics (Sweden, Finland) are expanding nuclear as well. Their energy ministers are very pro-nuclear, for some funny reason.

Politically Sweden the current government is wanting to expand nuclear power through the largest subsidy program in Swedish history.

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.

I'm not sure about largest subsidy program. Large reactors make more sense but since Korea was banned by US, realistically it's better to pick Hitachi to get something on the grid

Nothing even comes close. We’re talking tens of billions of euros.

”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?

Sweden did spent similar amounts for ren subsidies over years, that's why I'm not sure it's the biggest. If the goal is 1.5gw nuclear, that would be about 20bn for bwrx if fully funded by govt, looking at Canada. 20bn is a lot, but on the other hand Sweden for sure did spent similar amounts for ren over years.

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

Please stop guessing and making stuff up?

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...

I'm suggesting phasing out fossils including gas firming.

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