Yes but the grid doesn’t carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You’re putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it’s supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there’s not enough power.
This isn’t just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there’s too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they’re expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you’re basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that’s been done at scale, that’s why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I’d love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
Actually, the industry is fully investing in wind and solar and wouldn’t touch nuclear with a long pole, because excessively expensive.
In case of Germany, they’d quite literally fire up coal over nuclear. Like holy shit…
Looks like I’m a bit behind on the latest news, I mean in 2015 it (basically) alone was still half of their energy production. That’s quite the explosion, too bad it’s largely wind power and…biomass??? Right it’s “renewable©® (in theory)”, not “sustainable right now or benefitial to the current situation”. Same to the natural gass growth, guess it’s better than coal, but come on… And to my original point, in your graph we can see a negative corelation between coal+lignite over nuclear at a few ranges (when they shut down nuclear over fucking coal), roughly starting after 2005. Also wow, they actually fucking killed nuclear last year… JESUS…
Coal, gas and oil could be zero instead of nuclear.
They solve different problems. Nuclear is cheaper than the batteries needed to make solar/wind reliable.
Overproduction is cheaper than batteries
Overproduction doesn’t cover when large swaths of land have low wind speeds at night
Wind is always blowing somewhere
Yes but the grid doesn’t carry power efficiently over extremely long distances. You’re putting undue load on the grid if you expect wind blowing 500 miles away to cover all the power needs of the area it’s supposed to supply as well as every neighboring area where there’s not enough power.
This isn’t just an efficiency issue you can solve by throwing more windmills at the issue. If there’s too much power flowing through the lines we have currently, things break. Usually with fires and exploding transformers. Our power grid is designed for distributed production, but with on-demand generation as a backup for when intermittent generation is underperforming. Batteries are one option to achieve this, but they’re expensive to build in the scale we need them. Hydrogen fuel production is an interesting candidate to fill this niche and for all-renewable power, but the efficiency is quite low so you’re basically tripling the cost per unit energy produced.
But one way or another, you need additional infrastructure to power the grid with zero fossil fuels. Nuclear, batteries, hydrogen fuel, or a total revamp of transmission infrastructure all require expensive construction projects. Nuclear is the only one that’s been done at scale, that’s why I want to see it given a fair chance again. But I also think plenty of other options are promising BECAUSE they are novel, and I’d love to see a future where a combination is used to make a carbon-free, brownout-free power grid
I’m all for keeping existing nuclear infrastructure but building new nuclear is mad.