It is striking to see real life examples of countries achieving high rates of renewable energy production with large amounts of pumped storage and without nuclear power.
You cannot have a proper good faith discussion about renewables without nuclear and fossil fuels.
I don’t know the answer, but renewable +storage is trending down. Nuclear is up. So at some point (which may have already happened) nuclear is just going to be a bad faith argument.
When nuclear (and other forms of fuel) stop providing base loads when main types of renewables don't work (aka a night with no wind), then this will have happened.
If the sun doesn’t rise one day… we have bigger problems.
In most countries, during most seasons and on most hours of the day you don't even get 80% efficiency on a sunny day! Heck, even in the most sunny deserts, the average daytime efficiency of a solar panel is barely 60%…
But yeah sure in fantasy land solar panels give you a daily average 80% efficiency on a cloudy day…
And I said 60% average on a cloudy day.
If you live in fantasyland where the “average on a cloudy day” is in fact the the value that exists in the Mojave desert, then sure…
But maybe you're forgetting that days aren't 12 hours of noon.
Maybe the “average at noon, including sunny and cloudy days, across landmass is 60%”, but that's very much not the same thing as “the average on a cloudy day is 60%”…
But then again, how does that relate to your previous points:
> you know solar still works even through clouds right?
> So you could say 60% efficiency on a typical overcast day.
We were talking about the impact of clouds on a particular spot, and now you're telling me that you're counting the average across landmass because it's never cloudy everywhere in the world…
I suppose it means you retract your previous statements about solar panels working well even in the presence of clouds?
Getting away from fossil fuels is not a pie in the sky proposal these days. You could look at the success of the lithium storage battery in Australia, previously serviced by fossil fuel peaker plants. There is pumped hydro, and all manner of other non-chemical storage that is possible.
There are certainly a range of options that are 100% renewable with storage, but at this moment don’t compete on price with natural gas or even coal if you only factor the cost of the input to the system. Can we agree on that?
I would say the inexpensive nature of fossil fuels ignores the total cost of the fuel. We’re basically setting up future generations for a complicated terraforming process to recover the atmosphere to something that supports our farming needs and temperature needs to support life, not just our own but the natural world we rely on.
This cost might not factor in to the per/MW cost of coal or NG, but it should. This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous.
So do most calculations of renewables. Most of them don't ask how much it costs to build enough storage for the energy, or how much terraforming needs to be dun for pumped hydro storage, or how much we need to overbuild (and most renewables take up a lot of land) etc.
> This is factored into nuclear (waste storage) so to ignore its cost for fossil fuels is disingenuous.
That I definitely agree with.
- 42% gas
- 26% nuclear
- 20% wind
- 4.4% hydro
- 0.5% solar
- "negative" from hydro storage (as it was depleted by this time, and was being filled back up)
And Spain only has 7GW of nuclear installed, so it's not difficult to surpass that