HN user
Data Centres don't necessarily need to have negative environmental impacts .. they can be made to use water and energy sustainability. This is just a matter of regulation.
Extracting, exporting, and burning fossil fuels not so much.
Not really.
The fundamental costs and margin requirements in the system haven't changed.
This is a government-mandated electricity plan (a default market offer) that competitive electricity retailers are now required to offer. Those retailers still have network costs, environmental costs, energy costs, and administration costs to recover, and so prices at other times of day necessarily go up.
Some consumers may be better off on this plan (generally at the expense of other consumers), and some will be worse off.
It's good politics and only so-so policy.
Meanwhile SoftBank buys ABB’s robotics business .. https://group.softbank/en/news/press/20251008
A similar cultural statement to this X post, just with a higher price tag … https://x.com/energy/status/1950904421669318868?s=46&t=bC_eC...
It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.
The framing in the article is that Germany made a purely technical decarbonization policy choice between renewable energy and nuclear power and chose incorrectly, but this is too reductive.
Germany has a long history of public opposition to nuclear power, going back over 50 years, and this is related to environmental concerns, safety concerns, and the association with nuclear weapons.
Both the USA and the Soviets had nuclear weapons deployed on German soil with the potential to be directed at the German people and this cultural and historical context is important to understand the current policy landscape.
The origin of the popular Green party in Germany is deeply connected to the peace movement and anti-nuclear activism that pre-dates concerns about climate change.
It’s fine to disagree with the policy decisions the German people made, but it’s good to understand the reasons why they made them.
Even China, who nuclear advocates point to as “getting it right” look like they realize this now .. https://johnmenadue.com/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-the-s...
So how would you start phasing out plastic?
Dog whistling.
The phrase "green energy transition" is mentioned only in the headline, and is completely irrelavent to the point being made in article, which is that unregulated mining in poor developing countries is bad.
Somehow? Wild guess, but maybe they will be selling the product of that R&D for more than 10 days.
Being overweight is unequivocally a bad thing.
Every power generation technology needs ‘backup capacity’ and energy storage.
If your transmission line to your nuclear power station trips, you need reserve capacity elsewhere to serve the load.
Gas and coal generation all need storage to run reliably.
If you are going to be an armchair power system designer and you want to ‘gross up’ the cost of capacity and storage into the cost of renewable generation, then be consistent.
I’ve seen one of these in a commercial building: https://www.yanmar.com/global/energy/ghp/vrf/.
But a renewable energy powered heat pump is better.
Although interestingly LAVO is 'pivoting' .. https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2023/11/02/lavo-pivots...
That’s a complete myth and just more of the same ‘concern trolling’ on renewables that is hampering decarbonization
No one is powering a house with a battery, or hydrogen, for 100 hours.
Neither are an energy source. We will power houses with low cost carbon-free energy: nuclear and renewables.
For renewables, interconnection and load and generation diversity will deal with most intermittency issues.
We then provide additional firming capacity with other technology, including energy storage, that in the case of batteries, is probably operating every day, and for pumped hydro and other long duration storage that’s probably operating every week or two, and then some fuel-based generation that’s probably only operating a few days a year.
Hydrogen is probably not a big part of the future power system.
Hydrogen is expensive to produce, store and transport.
We only see Hydrogen vehicles like this because of Government grants .. we only see Hydrogen fueling stations because of Government grants.
Once the grants stop, the cars will stop. Literally.
Extra steps? Not sure about that.
Solar farms are definitely much, much simpler .. thousands or even millions of perfectly uniform panels manufactured in a factory, some wiring and power electronics and some electrical infrastructure to connect to the grid. Projects are delivered in months, and almost all within 1% of project budget.
Nuclear power plants consist of probably tens of thousands of different components: a reactor (containing a reactor core, fuel rods, control rods, moderator, and coolant), a turbine, a generator, a containment building, a cooling system, pumps, valves, and piping, a control system, a safety system, and a waste disposal system, along with all the same electrical infrastructure to connect to the grid. Projects take years to decades and invariably delivered multiples over budget.
“The amount of raw materials in one long-range battery electric vehicle could instead be used to make 6 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles or 90 hybrid electric vehicles. For the same limited resources, instead of replacing one internal combustion engine vehicle, you can replace 90.”
So we’re only concerned with the ‘raw materials’ in the battery, and not the materials in the body, motor, and other parts? Not to mention the fuel of course.
The idea that the limiting factor on Toyota making more hybrid vehicles is the availability of battery metals seems suspect .. there will always be a supply imbalance in growing markets, but supply is rapidly increasing, and it will increase faster if Toyota builds more cars with batteries in them.
Shelley’s poem comes to mind “I met a traveller from an antique land, …”
Wholesale energy prices are uniform, network service prices aren't.
“And on top of that, electricity production is only ~40% of carbon emissions.”
We are electrifying heating and transport. As a result about 80% of end-use energy will end up being electricity.
What’s baseload? If you mean minimum demand from the grid, in Western Australia where I am it’s around 5% of peak demand, In South Australia it’s zero.
In Western Australia coal will be gone by the end of the decade. In South Australia it’s gone already and generation from gas is on a strong downward trend too.
Australia’s conservative electricity system planning is expecting the country to hit 80% renewables. That’s going to end up being the lower bound.
The industry told themselves and the community a lie .. that nuclear was cheap (“too cheap to meter”) and that it was perfectly safe.
But, there were always and continue to be cheaper sources of energy, and when incidents did inevitably occur they had an outsized impact on community perceptions.
VPPs are actually a treatment for this issue. By recognizing the value of these new customer-owned systems can provide back to the electricity system, we can give people a reason to stay connected and to contribute back to the common resource.
MWh
.. appreciate your are trying to get a sense of scale, but it’s important to note that short-duration batteries are not there as a generator to serve load, they are good for providing peak demand support to the system and the local LV distribution network, and to help regulate frequency.
I’m not familiar with the US market environment, but in Australia where we have a number of VPP operators, including Tesla, it the latter service that is the most used.
Frequency regulation services are associated with absorbing and injecting energy into the power grid over milliseconds.
Inverter-based energy systems can set grid frequency and voltage (be grid forming, rather than grid following), and even grid following inverters can provide millisecond-level frequency regulation and contingency response services.
South Australia has reached 100% renewable generation on an instantaneous basis even with most inverters being grid following by using spinning condensers (spinning turbines connected to the grid that don’t generate energy).
And more resources are being deployed/enabled to support longer periods of 100% renewable generation. For example the ‘Hornsdale Reserve’ Tesla battery is now providing synthetic inertia services to the grid (slowing the rate of change of frequency).
‘Virtual power plants’ consisting of large portfolios of small behind-the-meter batteries are being enabled for high-speed frequency contingency response services (rapidly responding to large changes in grid frequency).
And more true ‘grid forming’ battery energy storage systems are in development.
With entirely public money and underwriting.
What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw?
Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.
I understand you are trying to make a general argument, but those dynamics are definitely not true of Australia.
Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal.
The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given the solar and wind resources we have.