Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors.
In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!
Enerhodar is not the only example. World war two ended roughly 77 year ago. The US civil war was less than 160 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
For example, I am willing to bet that nuclear-related deaths in the Ukrainian war will be a minuscule percentage of the total loss of life caused by said war.
They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
This is ridiculously biased and not a constructive way to deal with political disagreements.
All political factions engage in rampant cronyism. To think it's confined to one faction is unbelievably naive.
Where do you think left wing parties receive the bulk of their campaign contributions from? It's members of public sector unions, who receive trillions of dollars in tax dollars every year in Europe.
Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.
Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.
At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.
I was thinking more about pollution or nuclear waste management. A coal plant that just buys coal at market prices and sells electricity at market prices isn't paying for externalities unless they're taxed on CO2 and particulate emissions.
Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully history now.
I think it's a waste that we've not maintained the reactors well enough to still have them able to run at a profit.
And generally that we've (the government, both sides) haven't done anything about it in the last 10-20 years when they had a chance to invest in alternatives (whether building new nuclear or other types of energy sources).
If it's just a matter of taxes then I'm sure it would be easy for the new government to remove them and start back up the old reactors - but obviously that's not the plan. Most likely it's all quite complex and lots of factors leading to this outcome.
Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.
Anyway, what you asked for; here are the high level notes of the insanity. There are lots of insane but largely inconsequential things that I won't focus on.
Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Because of that: Shuts down functioning nuclear power plants "in the name of the environment".
Attempts to replace plannable nuclear power with wind power. ("It produces the same number of GWh annually.")
Ridiculous. Of course they do.
> Shuts down nuclear power.
You don't know what you are talking about. It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power. A majority of the parties in the parliament has supported this for decades.
Despite that. The government hasn't actively closed down nuclear power. Shut downs have been decided based on the economics of running the plants.
And don't start about the "effektskatten" (a tax on nuclear energy in Sweden), it's older than the green party.
You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The Swedish green party rejects nuclear. The parent commenter hasn't expressed a rejection of renewables.
Anyway, one can perceive a rejection of a particular energy source as "insane", especially if they are a green party who claim the rise in CO2 levels is the world's most pressing crisis.
And because these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices with unemployment as a result, thus both undermining employment and welfare, it actually violates what the winning proposal stipulated in the referendum.
Furthermore the tax on nuclear power was massively increased three times as consequence of influence of the two green parties, Center party and the Green Party, 2006, 2008 and 2015, and the same time subsidizing renewables, thus making nuclear power not economically sustainable. There was even a referendum in parliament about these latest shutdown with only one vote difference. No, it was intentional.
No they have not. Sweden has been a net exporter of electricity every year since 2010. There is no electricity deficit in Sweden.
Prices have increased because we've become more integrated with the European electricity market. Not because electricity production is lower or more expensive. The energy companies make unprecedented profits because they are able to sell cheaply produced electricity at expensive rates.
The last year prices have increased because of the energy/economic warfare waged between the EU and Russia.
The idea that a couple of Swedish nuclear reactors could alter the whole European energy market significantly is ludicrous.
A 1980 referendum where the three options were
1. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible.
2. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible. Work on reducing electricity use (by e.g. stopping new homes from being built with electric heating), invest in renewable power, and nationalize power generation to be able to control its future.
3. Decommission the nuclear power within 10 years.
So, it's no wonder that "Decommission the nuclear power" won that referendum. Anyone who brings up this referendum as a reason to decommission nuclear power 40 years later is being disingenuous.
We've had to ask you this repeatedly. That's not cool.
No option available to continue with nuclear power
> The Moderates, the People's Party and the Social Democrats held separate negotiations to formulate a joint yes option with the implication that the reactors would be allowed to be used during their technical lifespan, which was estimated at 25 years. These negotiations finally broke down mainly because the Moderates could not accept the additional proposals: that the state or the municipalities would own the nuclear power plants and that so-called surplus profits from private production of hydropower would be withdrawn through taxation.
Translated from:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkomr%C3%B6stningen_om_k%C3%...
If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.
The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.
In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.
Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.
Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines.
On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.
Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.
Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.
In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.
There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?
There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)
This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics.
Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.
Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.
We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".
The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.
If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.
Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch. China! Authoritarian alleged communists! That is what policy failure in the EU has led to.
On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.
The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.
Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.
https://birdwatchingbuzz.com/do-windmills-kill-birds/
Interestingly the article claims that the power lines that connect the wind mills kill more birds than the wind mills themselves.
But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-eu-german...
Nuclear is NOT liable for a major nuclear disaster. No insurance would cover it. So I don't know where you got your knowledge from but it is not based on fact.
Edit: OK I should have been clearer. They are liable like everyone else. They have (unlike solar installations I suspect) strict liability which means the damaged person does not have to prove fault. However, the amount of liability is limited (in time and amount) and the state takes over. This is what I was referring to with they don't have liability (admittedly incorrect the way I wrote it).
Source:https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
The article you linked says that TEPCO paid out USD ~65 billion after Fukushima, but it was insured only for USD ~804 million.
Naturally what happened is that the government didn't want to be without electricity, so to prevent bankruptcy TEPCO was nationalized. This is the typical scenario for nuclear power: profits are privatized while losses are socialized.
Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.
I should have said they will not insure fully for the consequences of the disaster, in particular not long term effects. Nuclear has limited liability and does not need to cover the full cost of a disaster.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.
2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).
3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/vattenfall-vill-forlanga-re...
That was an interesting referendum. There were 3 options to vote for:
1. Nuclear power would be phased out
2. Nuclear power would be phased out, with added support for low income groups
3. Nuclear power would be phased out in 10 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Swedish_nuclear_power_ref...
I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors.
I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.
Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.
The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time.
I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users paying more than they would for new renewables.
I'm mostly convinced where you, or anyone else, lands on the matter, is heavily biased by preconceptions...
and generally tend to think we have the resources to do a many-pronged approach, and that success is less technology dependant and more dependant on the competence of governments and bureaucracies, and the people who constitute them.
So in fact my cost, as a consumer, is lower than it was.
You clearly wish this were not so.
"Subsidies to nuclear had varied between €3.2bn and € 4bn between 2008 and 2019 but surged to (€6.3bn) in 2020 due to payments for early closures of nuclear power plants."
"In line with anticipations in the Commission Study, the financial aid to renewables in the EU27 is increasing at a low pace since 2015 to reach €78bn in 2019. Our preliminary estimations show a slight reduction in 2020 to around €77bn. Among the 14 identified subsidy instruments, the feed-in-tariff and feed-in premium schemes remain by far the MS preferred tools to promote RES technologies. They represented 79% of the total RES subsidies, i.e. €61bn in 2019"*
They don't account for theoretical subsidies of money, as then there would be more money in subsidies than there would be money. The theoretical subsidies that currently goes into fossil fuel to pay for global warming is reaching the point of infinitive money in the case that global warming goes beyond the tipping point. Theoretical subsidies are fun thought experiments but they aren't very valuable, as is infinitive money.
The report do account for decommissioning subsidy if there is actually government money going into the hands of power plants owners.
I would love renewables as much as the next guy but there's simply not a chance that Sweden could sustain a winter with the current supply. Importing helps with survival but the prices are insane, since their neighbors are cold as well. Dispatchable or baseload energy is necessary, and thus nuclear is the only carbon neutral option. Sure, it's more expensive than solar panels midday in the desert, but the comparison is irrelevant.
Starting nukes with the hope of power in ten or fifteen years will not help keep anybody warm in the meantime.
Transmission lines ought to be quite a lot quicker to complete.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/svenska-kraftnat-miljardinves...
Yes, the north is oversupplied, because they have most of the hydro. Remember though that hydro is a form of storage, so even if the transmission capacity was higher, it'd deplete faster. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I highly doubt that transmission alone can solve the issue long term, even less so the short term ones. Again, dispatchable and/or baseload energy is a MUST. And the people who yesterday sold solar dreams are today selling energy storage dreams. It's the same great story, but it doesn't exist. Nuclear exists, and it's carbon neutral. It's better to start now, then to not start at all or resorting to oil/gas.
There is one good short-medium term effect of the government change, for nuclear. Maintaining and/or restoring the existing reactors could be done much faster than building new ones. Not all reactors in Sweden are operational today.
Here in Finland we do. They can't coerce the rate payers as the customer is free to buy their electricity from whomever producer they want here and the only government subsidy is helping with the insurance.
edit: For example TVO at Olkiluoto
https://www.tvo.fi/material/collections/20221014135458/HnAXI...
On page 8 you can see that they have been producing cheaper electricity then the average nordpool area price for Finland for the last 10+ years. (and even before that but the graph starts at 2010). The difference is basically what their owners make as profits. TVO does not sell directly to end users. It only sells to its owners at production costs who can then flip that on the market if they feel like it or cover their fixed price contracts (or just use it themselves for the owners that are big energy heavy industrial companies)
The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1].
A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries.
In which case, I'll bite: what then?
1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery.
There are few countries with better opportunities for renewables than Sweden.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but so is wind for Sweden. We already have a lot of wind but high pressure areas with little wind do exist, even in winter. Nuclear looks kind of good from that point of view, but I strongly feel that Sweden is way too small of an actor to buy reactors on her own, and should actually co-order reactors with other countries, getting the costs down (maybe not even costs, but risks. There have been a lots of bankrupted players in nuclear lately).
However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.
The remaining problem is building factories for electrolysis equipment. Building factories takes an appallingly long time. But the problem is only of time, not technical maturity.
Not in northern Europe. For example at the southern most point of Finland there is 3 months in the year when solar produces less than 1% of its name plate capacity. It does get slightly better in the southern part of Sweden but still not that great.
Around Mediterranean is where solar starts to get really good though the Africa side of it is even better.
I see this manipulative arguement used all the time with lithium mining.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
"No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastructure for fossil-free energy.
And there is a challenge. Given the estimated required number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) of different vehicle class, it is clear that there are not enough minerals in the currently reported global reserves to build just one generation of batteries for all EV’s and stationary power storage, in the global industrial ecosystem as it is today."
Also moving pulling back this debate to more general topics:
1.We don't need to replace all cars, many older gas powered cars will still be on the road for a long time which buys time for points 2-4
2. There are other types of batteries, like NiMH, which don't contain lithium. Although these aren't as efficient many hybrids use them, I think the new Mavrick hybrid does (or some truck hybrid)
3. There could be new battery technology that will be invented
4.New technology has helped Tesla make more energy dense batteries and have them last longer
A 2016 model s with the 70kwh battery pack has a 200 miles of range
A 2022 Model s performance with a 98kwh battery pack has a range of 326 miles (this is a touch comparison because the new performance has much more power)
sources: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15104936/tesla-model-... https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
For every 0.6 kg of Uranium it produces, it produces 20kg of copper and 4.5g of silver.
Monosilicon PV is made of sand, copper, silver and aluminum.
A kg of uranium going through a pwr produces about 500GJ (with 3-10% of that being required for milling and enrichment). The 7.5g of silver in the ore that produced that kg of Uranium will produce about 200GJ in its lifetime with technologies in the pipeling that will push this to 400GJ. This silver usage is going down faster than production is increasing. There will be a huge surplus of copper from this source.
The silver is recyclable.
The uranium will require special storage for millenia or reprocessing at a cost not even massively subsidized programs are willing to bear.
The solar energy can be stored in a battery made from sodium, carbon, iron and aluminum. This is basically the composition of dirt. These are being mass produced now and full industrialisation of the supply chain is expected by 2024.
The nuclear reactor requires large quantities of zirconium, molybdenum, chromium, silver, cadmium and many other rare metals. Much of this is radioactive waste at eol.
The nuclear reactor requires more steel than the solar panel requires silicon, and more concrete than the solar panel requires glass and concrete.
A uranium mine can provide nearly as much energy from PV as it does via fission, and will soon produce more. Let that sink in for a bit.
I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach.
That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh.
Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.
Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)
We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?
Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.
Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.
This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.
In short, this is not a zero sum game.
Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.
Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).
Take the hydro which is currently doing baseload, convert as much capacity as possible to peak loads. And replace the lost baseload with new Nuclear.
That way you can unlock even more capacity for more solar and wind (well... that far north, it will be mostly wind)
However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.
The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.
Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.
People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.
All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.
Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.
There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.
Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.
But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.
Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.
The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.
It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.
Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.
This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.
Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic
Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)
Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)
Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.
On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.
The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.
There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.
You also don't need to build unlimited hydro plants.
And they only have to pay to shut it down if a future government forces it to shut it down before the plant stops being commercially viable.
The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
Loan guarantees are actual money, especially if the builder defaults.
> The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
Well-run governments can borrow money much cheaper than private actors. Lower interest rates means a higher chance of success for a long-running project.
And in most default scenarios, the government wouldn't have to pay the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between the foreclosure sale price and the remaining loan amount.
> So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
First, Solar/wind projects are typically smaller. Less risky to do hundreds or thousands of small projects, spread out over country (or world). The chance of all the projects defaulting at once are small.
Second, one of the biggest risk to nuclear projects are government related. The risk that they might introduce expensive new regulations. Or that the general population (who are typically anti-nuclear) might vote a new anti-nuclear government into power. By having the current government guarantee the loans, future governments will be motivated to not mess with them.
Third, you can't always trust commercial funders to do what's best for the nation, especially from a national security perspective. They might (for example in Germany) decide to rely on cheap natural gas imports from Russia as the primary source of energy, assuming that Russia will always be a stable source of energy forever, and would never start randomly invading it's neighbors.
It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues:
In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Perhaps if we account for an additional unexpected half year of delay for every year that passes, we might see it in operation in Spring 2024?
In 2015, lawmakers made it mandatory to reduce Nuclear energy to 50% of existing installed capacity. So, pretty much all changes of mind post that point mean that previously shelved projects are re planned with FROM scratch with the new market rates.
> I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.
You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."
So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world!
Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.
They even have cold temperatures to boost power plant efficiency and make district heating very useful.
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency because consumers can chose to say lower the thermostat and spend money on something else etc. People will argue for subsidies to deal with externalities, but markets can equally respond to simply taxing those externalities.
Oh, and the war in Ukraine does not show the glaring weakness of 'Unplanned economy' and just choosing the cheapest supplier?
Subsidies and incentives do not a planned economy make.
Folks in the west seem to have taken the failure of hofhly corrupt planning system of USSR as an indication that they dont need to do any thinking or planning at all.
There are many different levels of panned economies. With say US food subsides and tariffs as a less extreme than Maoist China or the USSR, but they still have huge and well known problems. Messing with Food production has resulted in inefficiency, waste, pollution, corruption, etc but also overconsumption with it’s extremely negative health impacts.
It’s just really hard to improve on the feedback loops of market economies without running into diminishing returns.
The market has no concern for our survival, and by extention it's own survival, past 1/2 quarterly reports
Take the invention of Penicilin, Alexander Flemming raised our standards of living while working at a public hospital. It was british and US governments who established mads manufacturing of it, not markets. The inventor never became a billionaire.
Most inventors never do.
Years mean nothing, you have to invest in decades.
And you still haven't addressed the issue of western co.panies selling weapons to regimes that want to see us dead - that's quite a critical flaw, don't you think?
Generally people couldn’t arbitrarily start a business without permission. Rulers would limit who could say sell salt and permission it’s self was quite valuable. Think Arrakis being handed over in Dune, only one house had the right to mine spice and that would change based on politics not just competence.
And that’s just the start as slavery, guilds, gender, etc all limited markets.
Throughout history you can track a huge wealth boom whenever places opened up their markets. England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places. It was actually far more influential than inventions like the early steam engine.
As to penicillin, invention is onky part of the story having a society where people had free time and resources to do research was it’s self a major hurdle. As would having surplus labor to manufacture such complex medicine.
So let me get this argument straight: 1. Slavery and serfdom are bad for the economy. We are talking pure economics, not morality 2. Markets have freely sold and bought slaves for thousands of years 3. Slavery predates the concept of a government, it predates writing and predates ancient egypt 4. Abolition of slavery required intervention of government and violence
5. Therefore you have just made a pro-regulation argument while arguing against government. You cannot claim that unregulated markets magically and efficiently organise economy towards it's most efficient state.
The same situation applies to child labour. The exact same situation arised with health and safety. The exact same situation arises with our markets selling precision weapons to bloody dictators that use our weapons against us.
So we have 4 spesific cases of markets delivering rettible outcome and not a single counterexample from you for marktes delivering optimal outcome.
This is part of a long term global trend which relates to the overhead of slavery and then serfdom. Serfdom outcompeted slavery in Europe because it was simply more efficient, and Serfdom in turn failed for the same reason.
Child labor was more an outgrowth of the industrial revolution which initially reduced the need for complex skills or physical strength. Kids going back thousands of years would help with harvesting etc, but it was also common practice to pay tradesmen to take on apprentices because child labor was effectively worth nothing when averaged across a year.
It was only when jobs got ultra specialized that child labor became valued. Though eventually flipped back where collage students are talking unpaid internships because Google etc has no use for their services. Obviously collage students can do some forms productive labor, but ignoring the law what can 10 year olds do? Acting and here it’s surprise surprise perfectly legal in western countries for 10 year olds to actually work. Suggesting it’s more a question of economics than morality.
There was no problem with nuclear cooling demands, the problem was if the nuclear plants put more heat into the rivers, it would be bad for the wildlife living there.
Just this summer the French had to shut down half of their nuclear reactors because of the heat
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
This is mostly an issue for ("partially") landlocked countries. Those french reactors use rivers for cooling. Also the summer period neatly coincides with the yearly maintenance period, so...
On the short term we might need something before those nuclear plants are up and running.
In my neck of the woods (50 deg North, not as North as Sweden), I get a reasonable amount of sunlight. Let's just imagine that 1/3 of the days during winter I get 5 hours of sunlight. I'm going to ignore electricity and just concentrate on heating, because heat is way easier to store. From my meter readings, in the depths of winter I seem to use an average of 2.2kW-worth of gas, most of which goes to the boiler for hot water and heating. Some of it would go to cooking, but I'm guessing not much.
So, if I wanted to collect that much heat from solar, assuming I get 5 hours every 3 days, I would need to collect 2.2×72/5 = 32kW while the sun is shining and then store it for use later. Sunlight is just over 1kW per square metre, so I'd have to have about 32 square metres of parabolic mirrors concentrating light onto a black water pipe. The South-facing side of my house is easily that big.
Then storing it. Water is extremely good at storing heat. Water stores 4194J for each kilogram for each degree centigrade in temperature. If I were to get five 2.4m×1.2m×10cm polyurethane foam insulation boards, I could build an insulated box capable of taking a 2000l hot water tank, which could be put in a shed or something. If that were heated to 90 degrees centigrade, it would be able to return 80kWh of heat before dropping to 55 degrees (which is the lowest acceptable temperature to run a heating system at, before you get Legionnaire's disease). The insulation would lose about 250W, which is small compared to the heat demand from the house.
Yes, there would be times when the stored heat runs out. A sensibly-designed system should hopefully be able to fall back onto the existing gas-fired heating when that happens.
So, these numbers are all very feasible. It'd cost a fair bit to achieve, but it would probably pay itself back within a couple of years, which is way quicker than PV. One of the key factors in that is efficiency and cost. Collecting solar heat is very efficient and uses cheap materials. PV is expensive and still not very efficient.
There are three main requirements for such a project: Enough sunlight when it is cold (and you can adjust the collecting surface area to compensate, so this basically means anywhere outside the polar circles). Enough space to put all the stuff (and as a corollary enough patience from family members to put up with it). And finally a suitable control system that pipes the heat around in an intelligent way, prevents the water tank being over-heated, falls back on gas when necessary, and satisfies the various building standards laws.
mantra is cheaper.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale.
You are exactly right - this is the only way.
They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane.
Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden
Build all the solar, wind whatever you want. Doing so while ignoring the low return on energy security alone is a fools errand.
I’ve sat through meetings where carbon credits have been touted as the greatest weapon to transition the world away from fossil fuels. Carbon credits.
I’ve heard very reliable stories from China about business entities solely set up to generate unbelievable volumes of carbon credits to take advantage of this accounting trick.
I think the opposition you see is to the counterproductive moves of the past two or three decades where enormous amounts of money have been thrown at present renewable strategies and the world is worse off from an energy perspective.
Surely, you know that wind power has had a lot of trouble expanding in Sweden due to huge opposition from every community against building wind turbines on their land. Everyone likes the idea of wind power until they try to build a huge turbine on their backyard.
Sun power, in Sweden, in winter, is clearly not going to cut it... even in the southern areas that still get a little bit of sun in winter, you don't get nearly enough power.
Hydropower is great and Sweden produces lots of it, but again, highly unlikely it can build new damns with the current regulations.
The only options left seem to be coal and nuclear. I hope you don't propose to just use coal.
Nuclear power, while expensive to build, is reliable and plenty. No one proposing that it should be one of the options for countries like Sweden is insane.
Couple that with off-shore wind in one of the windiest places on earth[1] together with solar during the summer wind lulls and you have all you need.
This is why storage is not being built in Sweden, energy is simply too abundant and cheap.
From this one can see how the idea that somebody will bomb out a nuclear power station somewhere in Europe gets non-trivial probability.
So nuclear power really cannot be safe when this planet allows crazy guys to gain enough power.
As for coal then consider that an electric car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant with over 40% efficiency generates less CO2 than a gasoline or diesel car.
So rather than building nuclear power, the states should invest to upgrade older coal power plants from their 30-35% efficiency to 40-45% and quickly phase out petrol cars while expanding on renewables.
This is an argument that ignores reality completely. How many attacks have there been against nuclear power plants by crazy guys even when we've had nuclear power throughout some of the most dangerous periods in history, including the Cold War and the current Ukrainian conflict?
Militarily they are a liability too.
To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.
Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place.
But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW.
40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source.
A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today.
The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.
We're talking about Sweden that has high amounts of hydro power available for storage.
https://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pl...
The decommissioning of several large generating stations in southern Sweden has indeed affected the effective transmission capacity from the north.
Yes, local electricity bill would go up but if the price is often extremely low, selling some for higher price is a net win. Ie this is why we have trade as concept in the first place.
Not a good sign when right-wing governments are complaining about market based price signals and trade.
Just because Germany destroyed their electrical system it should not mean that companies in Sweden should go bankrupt. Germany tampered with the EU market, they ought to pay fines.
That said, the coalition also wants to improve the transmission lines.
Also, a lot of the new energy needs comes from "green steel", which would give massive reduction in the green house gas production required to produce steel.
But for that to make sense we need lots of clean energy.
Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the total electricity bill. We got a really good network but it does come with a cost.
Obviously with the current market prices the cost of the transmission capabilities is a rounding error but if we get back to the electricity prices of a year or two ago the costs of transmission could start to dominate the price again so you have to be careful about investments like this (just like you have to be with nuclear plants for the case that the price on the markets is goes permanently under your production costs)
And transmission capability upgrades are really long term investments. Sweden started lately to try and fix this issue. If that project finishes on time it will take 14 years to finish. These are the kind of timescales where building a new nuclear power plant can be a faster fix.
Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.
Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.
That's a strawman. There is energy transfer to all these places, but the capacity is limited in each case.
This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.
This feels like your splitting hairs because the root cause is ultimately the same: if it wasn’t necessary then it wouldn’t be profitable.
Logical fallacy
Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market.
A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plant, and out of hundreds of hours operated during this year something like 1-5 hours were not matched by equal or more electricity being exported than it produced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGy0Vhgt7E
In Swedish, sadly without subtitles, but an amazing overview of the Swedish electrical system.
To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.
Why the electricity is expensive is because the electrical grid is connected to northen europe and the expensive prices there makes the prices also goes up in Sweden because it is the same market.
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...
Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?
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[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/08/09/watch-heres-ho...
If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.
Short Version is here - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263861/download
Pessimistic scenario: A mix of mostly fossil fuels (natural gas) and wind power by 2050.
For those interested. An overview of the energy in Sweden. https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/Home.mvc?ResourceId=20876...
If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.
Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.
I'm not saying it should be an unregulated free market - we've seen those don't work (exactly because of the externalities). But this does not mean there cannot be regulated markets and partial markets. The grid is infrastructure that shouldn't be run as a company, but production and storage capacity can be bought from markets as long as the grid rules factor in the externalities.
Read: You cannot even run this as an unregulated market, it wouldn't work. That requires every company having its own electricity grid, and for example the possibility that your house has 10 different power connectors available, so you can actually choose which one to pick. That is conceptually broken. And just the grid as infrastructure doesn't work, either, because of reasons outlined above.
Maybe forcing the idea of a market on everything is a dogma which we should eradicate out of our heads, the sooner the better.
https://kristdemokraterna.se/download/18.715f6f45183890627fc...
Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
> France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.
It's just an conservative artificial limit set to ensure that Nuclear is indeed the most ecological source of power since it even has higher standard than anything else.
In case the power is really needed, this limit could be lifted. Oh, this is exactly what happened https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-asn-nuclear-reg...
Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.
Ocean temperatures are already on the rise and causing havoc.
I could say the same about your comment! The ocean is a big place with more than a billion billion liters of water, you can't meaningfully heat it up with a power plant.
With that logic, you couldn't build any power plant with air cooling either since it would heat up the air.
If you want to make a general argument against all power generation that's fine, but singling out ocean cooling specifically doesn't make sense - especially since ocean and air temperatures obviously affect each other.
Geothermal is not having a heyday because it depends on the same sort of expensive-to-operate steam turbines as nukes do, so is uncompetitive.
Anytime steam turbines have to compete with no steam turbines, the steam turbines tend to lose.
At the moment, existing nukes can still be operated at competitive marginal cost, neglecting original capital cost, and carefully not counting continuing subsidies in opex. As renewables costs continues on down, even just nukes' subsidized opex will be unsustainable.
I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs. I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.
We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
Surprisingly, this argument is wrong. I have once verified the math for replacing all of vehicles in Germany with electric vehicles. Charged with 100% solar. The required surface area for solar farms would be about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded (used typically in personal cars, AFAIK freight and public transport run on diesel without such additive).
But yeah, according to EU studies a zero-emission grid with nuclear for base load is way cheaper than without it.
To be fair, that is a metric fuckton of land to start with. In the end there's only so many watts per square meter available and a physical limit on conversion efficiency, so you eventually have to expand outwards to to compensate for ever growing demand + land used for battery capacity (which may or may not be negligible). Meanwhile population increases also keep continuously driving up the scarcity of land.
Sounds like an interesting calculation though, do you still have any notes on that?
If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...
In particular, nobody back then anticipated how quickly solar PV prices would drop.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
Don't get me wrong, I very much support renewables. I just don't see how renewables could supply our entire energy demand without sufficient energy storage capacity. That's why I think a hybrid solution that includes nuclear power plants is the way to go.
Nuclear energy is expensive, nuclear power is cheap.
Or put another way: Sun shine at noon is free. Sunshine as midnight isn't.
Have you been to Sweden in winter? What sunshine are you talking about?
Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever.
the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient.
gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power.
why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?
someone's not telling the truth in this story.
The fact that it is not evenly distributed is a real concern, though.
The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the number of wind turbines is tiny. In the Gothenburg area I'm aware of maybe 10 (only one is really close).
Sweden (unlike Denmark or Germany) never really invested in renewables. If they would have invested in wind like those countries (and let the north south connections go to rot) they would be fully renewable already. I suspect the 40B would also pay for enough wind to achieve that goal.
Bulding more wind when it is not blowing in the winter does not help. Should we freeze at -10C for days until there is wind again?
What we need is a mix, but thinking that Wind can solely solve things are a bad idea, especially considering the very limited amount of minerals required and what is available.
FWIW, units 1 and 2 at the Finnish Olkiluoto NPP posted a capacity factor of 92,8% for the year 2021.
The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability. Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
> The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
Actually this year many countries were pushing energy to France were most nuclear plants were not operational for maintanance and heat.
> The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability.
Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
Or are you saying it was because of the introduction of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Fund? I would argue that paying for waste storage should be part of the operating cost (just as CO2 costs should be covered by coal operators btw).
>Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
> The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
> The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
> In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
> Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
Both statements are true.
They weren't commercially viable because if the extra taxes the government introduced.
So yes they were shut down because they were too expensive, and yes the government indirectly shut them down by making them too expensive.
This is not in any way in contradiction to what I'm saying. In fact: this supports my case. Because the amount of nuclear power generation is down, prices surge. This is my point. Your point was the opposite, remember? More nuclar power will increase prices?
> Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
If you read what I said, I said that nuclear power was artifically made inviable because of extra charges and taxes. It was perfectly viable and economically sound before these.
> You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
Right, because the political climate is such in Sweden that there is risk in investing in this, there won't be any interest in investing in this area. I said this as well. A free market would work here but we don't have one. The reason for government guarantees at this point is as an offset to the perceived political risk. A nuclear powerplant is a 20-40 year investment and if there's a very large risk that a populist government were to negate this in 5-10 years, then noone wants to invest in it. This is where we are.
> HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
Losses are part of the problem, yes more investment here is needed but this is not the biggest problem. Another commenter here mentioned the fact that because there isn't enough capacity to _receive_ the transfers, they can't be made. This is to do with the lack of inertial reserve(?) (svängmassa) after having switched off so many large powerplants over the years.
> What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
I'm going to have to call that 60% number.
The consequences are visual (i.e.: ugly), noice, birds as well as the fact that they are niether degradable nor recyclable because of the types of material needed. Do note, though, that I am in no way anti wind power.
> That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
Right. So you need batteries, we need improved tech in that department, someone has to make them and this requires a number of let's call them "troublesome materials." "I just need to store that energy" is as reasonable a thought as: we just need to feed them, about starving people. That just-word there is quite powerful.
> Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
Well I am not one of them. You started out with the big I-word here and it is my honest opinion that it is better served the other way around, and for these reasons: a number of the problems we have in sweden with the power (and heat) generation is to do with the fact that we did turn away from nuclear power. The same can be said about Germany and both for the same reason: ideologically (or at least populistically) driven policies.
I'm not in love with nuclear power in the slightest. But it is one of the least bad solutions so we must really put away ideologically driven dreams and deal with reality. This is in regards to Sweden's current nuclear technology, which is to say, really old tech as it's basically from the 60:ies. Quite a lot has happend since and saying no to that without understanding the complexities and nuances to this and because Someone Puleaze think of the ch... environment? That's just poor judgement.
What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities?
Just like Russia is playing "games" around the Ukranian nuclear plant? What's to stop that being used as the new threat? We won't turn your gas off, we'll threaten your nuclear plants?
Genuine question.
Nothing, unless you yourself have leverage. Every resource or dependency is a potential weakness. The idea is to be able to say "ok, if you bomb our fission plant, we'll shut off your fresh water supply."
It's all a huge game of chess.
Clearly some actors are willing to throw the board across the room
In which case, why are 'we' considering creating that weakness?
I understand there is a strong wave behind nuclear right now, but it does feel like we're just creating the instruments of another, different, mess.
No? People play "chess" all the time without sitting down at a board. You're twisting the metaphor.
> Clearly some actors are willing to throw the board across the room
And like I said, there would be consequences for that.
> In which case, why are 'we' considering creating that weakness?
Having a large body of fresh water is a weakness. Maybe we should send it all away to another country...?
> I understand there is a strong wave behind nuclear right now, but it does feel like we're just creating the instruments of another, different, mess.
The mess has already been created. It's called an enormous population of 8 billion people. How do you produce all the things they need without destroying the planet? There are more existential issues at hand than "well, nuclear is a perfect energy source, but people who don't like us might hurt our energy production so we should just do ..."
Do what instead? Any power source can be attacked. I don't even get your position here. The only way to mitigate attack is complete distribution. Solar is great for that, but unfortunately unbelievably underpowered to drive the entire productive system. If you want a happy medium, then smaller, modular nuclear reactors would be the way to go.
For most of Europe, the main answer is membership in NATO.
Without the investment to date in wind, coal dependency would have been massively greater.
While Germany is a net exporter for electricity, it does import a large chunk of its total energy usage (electricity plus stuff like fuel for cars, heating, et). Stuff like coal or gas or oil. In 2017, it was from 70% of imports and 30% from energy harvested locally [0]. It's quite impossible that this can all be converted to renewable power sources originating in Germany.
So what will likely/hopefully happen is that the closer partner countries will supply electricity to Germany via cables, while countries from further away will send Hydrogen generated from renewable sources, that will then be burned in the already existing gas plants.
[0]: https://www.weltenergierat.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/810...
If 30% coal today is bad, >>30% coal, the alternative, would have been correspondingly worse.
But it's difficult to use them in old buildings and gas is said to be to most cleanest heating technology based on fossil fuels.
Even if every German building was using heat pumps, they would still be burning TONS of natural gas to keep the electricity flowing consistently, because they have no long term energy storage solution to pair with renewables, especially through the long, dark winters when the sun rarely shines.
It would be stupid to build storage there is not renewable generating capacity to charge. When there is such capacity, they will then build out storage. In the meantime the correct place to spend is on generation. Which, in fact, is what they are doing.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/ger...
https://www.dw.com/en/european-commission-declares-nuclear-a...
(Does that count as gaslighting? Sorry.)
So no, they don't want to label it green energy, they only prefer it to other fossil fuels and nuclear but the goal is to phase out natural gas as well.
Is the state-owned DW/ARD not a trustworthy news source?
So the news itself is correct but the headline abbreviates this very badly.
https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/future-drax-old-...
Even in the best case, when you cut down a tree, burn it, and plant a replacement you've still released a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere. So carbon in the atmosphere will be raised for 20-50 years.
When people have looked into the source of these wood pellets the claims of the pellet companies often don't line up with official records - like saying they didn't log an old-growth forest, when they held the logging license at the time it was logged. Or claiming they only use sawdust and low-quality wood, when their output volume is much greater than the amount of low-quality wood you'd expect [1].
And supposedly the trees get replanted - but the company doing it got paid when the pellets were delivered. If in 5 years time they decide to do something else with the land, they can do.
The government turns a blind eye to this to hit their 'renewables' targets.
Global warming is a global, long term issue.
Focusing on a single tree is pretty much the canonical opposite of the wrong perspective to bring to it.
For the replanting side to work, growing fuel trees needs to be profitable. When it is, capitalists will replant out of greed, and the system will hum along by itself.
Nuclear fission is clean energy.
> Georgia Power announced tonight that fuel load into the Vogtle Unit 3 reactor core has begun at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga. The fuel load process marks a historic and pivotal milestone toward startup and commercial operation of the first new nuclear units to be built in the U.S. in more than three decades.
"Public credit" for these massive corruption festivals does not lead to good results.
The money that will be spent on these new reactors would buy a hell of a lot more wind power than these nukes could produce. But money for renewables would not go into the pockets of right-wing blueblood Swedes, which seems to be what matters to the incoming government.
When the nukes are mothballed early, every kWh they ever produced will, instantly, have actually cost much more than had been reckoned, as the fixed costs are amortized over fewer total.
The most expensive serious storage solution is LiIon, and even that's merely the same cost (or at least, the bell curves of their prices mostly overlap) as an equivalent nuclear reactor.
(I'm deliberately ignoring any claims about future battery costs; while I'm expecting them to come down, they don't need to in order to make this argument).
citation needed.
• LCOE for nuclear, analysis based on new nuclear worldwide but priced in Euros, €67-€82/MWh, (2020): https://energy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2020-10/final_repor... page 40-41
I thought this should be clear to everyone today, when energy price whent up 10x because yoy can print euros but can't print jeoules of energy or natural gas.
Renewables and nuclear use different resources and manufacturing capacities.
If you think I'm exaggerating, remember when the Royal Statistical Society asked "if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" and 47% of Conservative MPs and 77% Labour MPs got the answer wrong. Many technical people cannot even fathom this, and tend to assume that people who cannot answer such questions must be severely mentally impaired in general. That is completely wrong; you have lots of people who are near geniuses verbally but incapable of or unwilling to do quantitative thinking.
Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.
Those do exist, but I'd estimate 90% of the world don't have them.
In your fantasy land a housing crisis is impossible!
The decent answer is that housing will be built there are enough construction materials to build them from. So a housing shortage will never happen.
What, Britain has housing shortage? Did they run out of clay to make bricks? Did they run out of buyers? Did they run out of money, while housing prices rose 10x? Did they run out of Land while 97% of the land is not built on? what could it be?
Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
renewables will provide for 80% of Germanies energy needs by 2030, and close enough to 100% in 2050.
There does not seem to be nearly enough construction of pumped storage or battery to cover the unevenness of German wind power. In fact, their prices have gone negative repeatedly in the past, which is not in fact a good thing. (OMG help, we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up!)
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.
I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography.
Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as the U.S. uses (as electrical energy) in 24 hours. The idea of moving that amount of water around on short time scales is hard to fathom.
Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".
Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).
The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.
If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).
Sweden has lots of high mountains that may have shallow reservoirs built cheaply on top of. Reservoirs with earthen dikes are radically cheaper than the sort of dams needed for traditional hydro power, and may be placed almost anywhere, because they do not need or destroy a watershed. Lots of small ones, placed close to users, are better than one big one like Lake Mead.
1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...
2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...
As you already knew.
> Batteries will probably be cheaper,
The above commenter clearly thinks that batteries are going to provide cheap storage.
If you have some alternative plan for storage at the scale of tens of terawatt hours, please do tell.
It's great for countries that have it, but you're not going to be storing much hydroelectricity outside of mountainous regions.
that's not how that works.
also:
Dunkelflaute is 0.5% - 1.5% per year and only very rarely for longer than 24h. peaker power plants are turned off most of the time today and a combination of those and decentralized battery storage will easily buffer Dunkelflaute in Germany.
The idea is that the hydrogen can then be used in existing gas power plants.
It's reasonable to keep ICE power plants around as an emergency backup; if you have to use them for a week in January or when infrastructure breaks for whatever reason it's not the end of the world. Ideally things would run smoothly enough that they'd never be used.
You also assume that power plants can just be flipped on and off like a light switch. They can't.
There is a political risk that the governments of those countries change and they seize the energy-producing assets and sell surplus power to someone other than Europe. Perhaps a mutually-beneficial arrangement would be the best way to reduce the risk of it falling apart; for instance, if Morocco has the solar panels and Switzerland has the pumped-hydro storage facility to buffer out day/night cycles, both sides can trade power to their mutual benefit. Without both parts of the whole system, the other half is less useful.
So is nuclear fusion. You have provided no evidence or even argument that it is practical.
Proposing that you can compensate day night cycle with transmission is surely a joke, no infrastructure of such scale has ever been built.
Anything not built yet has not been built. After it is built, it will then have been built.
On the other hand, we know how to make high-voltage DC transmission lines -- the only real questions are: how much will it cost, and is there some way we can do it better and cheaper?
There have already been DC lines over 2,000 miles long built that run at 800 kV or more. That's already long enough to reach several time zones away, and it's not a conceptual stretch to imagine linking several of these together to reach further. According to wikipedia:
> In 2010, ABB Group built the world's first 800 kV UHVDC in China. The Zhundong–Wannan UHVDC line with 1100 kV, 3400 km (2100 miles) length and 12 GW capacity was completed in 2018. As of 2020, at least thirteen UHVDC transmission lines in China have been completed.
> While the majority of recent UHVDC technology deployment is in China, it has also been deployed in South America as well as other parts of Asia. In India, a 1830 km (1140 mile), 800 kV, 6 GW line between Raigarh and Pugalur is expected to be completed in 2019.[58] In Brazil, the Xingu-Estreito line over 2076 km (1290 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2017, and the Xingu-Rio line over 2543 km (1580 miles) with 800 kV and 4 GW was completed in 2019, both to transmit the energy from Belo Monte Dam. As of 2020, no UHVDC line (≥ 800 kV) exists in Europe or North America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Ad...
Numerous politically stable European countries have plenty of room for solar installations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
in my book 98.5% easily fits the bill of "close to 100%"
so the answer is exactly what we do today: have a reserve capacity. part of that may even be traditional peaker power plants that remain turned off most of the year just like today.
I'd be curious about climate data on the distribution of Dunkelflaute duration, by region.
So, we'd have to build a large number of peaker plants, which are really expensive in that they have to amortize their costs over a small amount of uptime.
It's a political problem, not a technical one, and we do not, absolutely not have to build up new parallel peaker capacity. we can simply keep select plants alive.
Simply stating that no new peaker plants are needed "because storage capacity will be there" is a bit too simplistic.
I'd be glad if that's the case, but I'm not convinced it's actually true.
it took 1 year to build and start operation of giga Shanghai, and not much longer for giga Berlin.
it's a political challenge, not a technical one.
however back then Germany was between a rock and a hard place for our energy supply and we simply added a new supply channel, in addition to US LNG and Saudi and Qatari LNG.
Relying on hyperbole like this undermines your own argument.
The nuclear exit was supported by the population and not decided against them by politicians.
And to your criticism: A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers. Are they allowed do decide for the country? Do they have an idea about nuclear topics?
How about with their very friendly neighbors across the Baltic Sea who are about to finish a facility for exactly this purpose? https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
Even ignoring this, pearl clutching about the nuclear waste storage problem without directly contrasting it with the CO2 waste problem is highly problematic. Nuclear waste is a contained, tractable problem even if challenging. We barely even know where to begin with tackling the problem of removing gigatons of CO2 from the high atmosphere.
Can’t see that getting any better climate wise
And France is still building their nuclear waste dump site not that far from the border. Many also have a problem with this.
Most of the time people who wrote this argument have no concept what nuclear waste actually looks like.
Have you actually seen what nuclear waste looks like?
It is a solid substance, it doesnt go anywhere. Waste is compact, It fits in a small warehouse. Its in a radiation proof container and doesnt kill anyone who isn't trying to eat it. Of you leave and come back in 100 years thos nuclear waste will be exactly where you left it.
Instead of generating this nuclear waste that we can store, transport, or handle in any way we please.
We have replaced nuclear capacity with coal and gas.
Generating billions of tons of CO2. That cannot be stored. There is more CO2 produced ina year that we could fit in every gas canister himanity has ever produced. Also a gas canister doesnt stay sealed for very long by itself. Every attempt at economic carbon capture has not produced very much so far.
> A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers
Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
Yes, it has numerous forms. Most high-level radioactive waste is stored in dry cask storage. Until you destroy the cask and the things in it, it's pretty safe. But if you keep too much at one place it becomes a great target for terrorists. If you put them below the surface you must find conditions which doesn't degrade the cask.
Medium and low-level radioactive (dry) waste is often stored in plastic bags in normal steel barrels. When they rust through, you have a big problem. And steel barrels tend to rust faster than radioactive waste decays. Germany put a lot if these barrels into the former mine Asse and had to get it back at really high cost after saline water entered the storage location. After that there was even more waste to store because you need new barrels and have to store parts of salt from the mine as well. So Germany practically had a nuclear waste storage. It didn't work out so well, so people there are skeptical when someone else says it's not a problem.
And then there are radioactive liquids in storage tanks. The only solution I have heard so far is to dilute them so that they can be dumped into the sea. That may work for small quantities of waste, but if it's done globally, we have a problem.
> Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
I just wanted to say that a formal degree doesn't necessarily qualify you more on the subject and I don't like someone saying "you haven't studied this shut up". I judge people by their arguments, not by their title.
But I think more expertise among politicians can never hurt.
More people die every year from radiation from coal, excluding accidents, than have died from nuclear (including accidents) since the beginning of time.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
The previous government had basically said the same thing. Neither will actually built anything in the near future.
They know the writing is on the wall, but profits can be good right up to the end.
Sweden is after all located in one of the windiest places on earth.
It's true that in the winter it's a bit crap but in the summer the long days of the north are a boon. It doesn't need to be great in all times of the year to be "feasible" though since it's just one part of the production palette.
Besides: Are they going to buy Uranium from Russia as the US are doing for their reactors?
Sweden has been anti-nuclear for several decades, and one of the laws that has been passed is to forbid Uranium extraction, even though Sweden has quite a bit in its soil.
So if this development is any sign, maybe they'll do away with that silly law as well and make it so Sweden doesn't have to buy it from someone else?
Also, Russia isn't the largest exporter of Uranium.
„Russia is a significant supplier of both uranium and uranium enrichment services. According to the latest available data, the European Union purchased about 20 percent of its natural uranium and 26 percent of its enrichment services from Russia in 2020. The United States imported about 14 percent of its uranium and 28 percent of all enrichment services from Russia in 2021.“
https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-nuclear-power-industry-grap...