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@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
Any reason why Australia hasn't gone full solar for all it's energy needs?
If Musk says 100 miles by 100 miles for entire USA, then in theory you should only need 20-25 miles for Australia. Given the amount of sun and arid land, isn't this a straight no brainer? What am I missing?
It's prohibitively expensive.
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@antipodean said in Climate Change:
@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
Any reason why Australia hasn't gone full solar for all it's energy needs?
If Musk says 100 miles by 100 miles for entire USA, then in theory you should only need 20-25 miles for Australia. Given the amount of sun and arid land, isn't this a straight no brainer? What am I missing?
It's prohibitively expensive.
not to mention the length of cabling required.
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@mariner4life which is why aus is building lots of smaller ones closer to demand
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
taxing billionaires to build nuclear power plants
good luck taxing them! Billionaires tend to be very slippery ... the idea always sounds great, but is hard in practice.
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@nzzp said in Climate Change:
@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
taxing billionaires to build nuclear power plants
good luck taxing them! Billionaires tend to be very slippery ... the idea always sounds great, but is hard in practice.
the guys doing the Billionaires' tax returns are generally the same guys that wrote the tax laws, soooo....
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@nzzp said in Climate Change:
@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
taxing billionaires to build nuclear power plants
good luck taxing them! Billionaires tend to be very slippery ... the idea always sounds great, but is hard in practice.
It will never happen.
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@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
@mariner4life which is why aus is building lots of smaller ones closer to demand
Which would make these redundant then?
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no, your still going to need connections between areas other wise you end up with the situation in texas where in the cold snaps over the last few years they couldn't draw from a national network because they were an isolated grid
but more local farms connecting into local substations requiring smaller levels of upgrade is just a reasonably logical way to change the grid without tearing it all up and starting from scratch
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@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
no, your still going to need connections between areas other wise you end up with the situation in texas where in the cold snaps over the last few years they couldn't draw from a national network because they were an isolated grid
but more local farms connecting into local substations requiring smaller levels of upgrade is just a reasonably logical way to change the grid without tearing it all up and starting from scratch
The point being we're actually doing all of these because of the increased renewables share in the NEM. Which makes siting largely irrelevant since demand can be anywhere and the result is making "cheap energy" fucking expensive.
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@antipodean said in Climate Change:
@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
no, your still going to need connections between areas other wise you end up with the situation in texas where in the cold snaps over the last few years they couldn't draw from a national network because they were an isolated grid
but more local farms connecting into local substations requiring smaller levels of upgrade is just a reasonably logical way to change the grid without tearing it all up and starting from scratch
The point being we're actually doing all of these because of the increased renewables share in the NEM. Which makes siting largely irrelevant since demand can be anywhere and the result is making "cheap energy" fucking expensive.
The enormous irony here is that the "cheap energy" due to a lack of generation then creates scarcity. Scarcity then increases the prices.
This doesn't even take into account the price of the capital which your then trying to recoup off a low generation rate which again makes it expensive.
In short renewables have caused energy prices to increase, not decrease.
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
@NTA It's occurred in Texas and Germany where unseasonably cold weather has frozen up the wind turbines
Lol ok Tucker.
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
@antipodean said in Climate Change:
@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
no, your still going to need connections between areas other wise you end up with the situation in texas where in the cold snaps over the last few years they couldn't draw from a national network because they were an isolated grid
but more local farms connecting into local substations requiring smaller levels of upgrade is just a reasonably logical way to change the grid without tearing it all up and starting from scratch
The point being we're actually doing all of these because of the increased renewables share in the NEM. Which makes siting largely irrelevant since demand can be anywhere and the result is making "cheap energy" fucking expensive.
The enormous irony here is that the "cheap energy" due to a lack of generation then creates scarcity. Scarcity then increases the prices.
This doesn't even take into account the price of the capital which your then trying to recoup off a low generation rate which again makes it expensive.
Why wouldn't I invest to get some of these sweet, sweet returns?
In short renewables have caused energy prices to increase, not decrease.
Yeah, it's not as if we don't have a good longitudinal study to look at:
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It is great for the sceptics that the charts finish in 2022 - wonder what was happening in Europe around that time? And whether it affects the price of... say... gas?
The tweet could have easily stopped at "phase out nuclear" but of course goes on to say wind/solar is the problem.
Which, of course, is too binary. I'm not clear on whether this is retail or wholesale, but questions must be asked:
Is the chart adjusted for inflation?
Does the relatively flat period between 2013 and 2019 help the nuclear argument, or hurt it?
Do we ignore the fact Germany still predominantly had fossil fuel in its system over that period?
What are the market levers that privatised energy can pull to maximise their profits?
What other tariffs have governments imposed in that time?
Germany is not an isolated grid, so what else was happening in Europe at that time?Denmark has high retail prices, but low wholesale. Mainly due to taxes (bloody socialists!) and retailer markup (bloody capitalists!).
France has lower prices across the board, due mainly to heavy subsidies at the wholesale and retail levels. And a nuclear fleet that is going offline due to age.
Australia's pricing will continue to fluctuate and therefore spike occasionally, due mostly to the market mechanisms.It isn't as simple as generation source.
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@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
@NTA Yep, all great questions Nick. I'd add one more though:
Overall electricity generated. Not all resource gets cheaper as you consume more.
Agreed - market forces at some point are going to make a few developers hesitate as @antipodean points out. Overbuild is not a guarantee in every network.
However, in Australia's case, negative pricing is not the norm, just like market cap is not the norm.
Distribution of generation for solar/wind will be important, and our network is big in terms of area. Unlikely to be windless everywhere all the time so land grabs important.
The thing that will get most projects through to completion is a PPA - Power Purchase Agreement - to help get a set price (and profit) the first 10 years or so.
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@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
Any reason why Australia hasn't gone full solar for all it's energy needs?
If Musk says 100 miles by 100 miles for entire USA, then in theory you should only need 20-25 miles for Australia. Given the amount of sun and arid land, isn't this a straight no brainer? What am I missing?
You are missing the fact that Musk was utterly full of sh1t when he said this, unfortunately.
He understates the area by a factor of 25.
To really power the world, you'd need 1.8 million square km of panels. For perspective, the total built area of the world including all buildings and infrastructure is ~1.5 million square kilometers.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/refuting-the-myth-that-just-a-small
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@Snowy said in Climate Change:
@MajorRage said in Climate Change:
@MiketheSnow He's telling the truth, but in a typical government hating way. It's very boring, and predictable.
None of the points he raises are unsolvable.
The real issue with Net Zero is electrical production vs electrical storage. Between wind, sun & tidal, I do believe there is sufficient energy to power the UK. But I don't believe there is without storage for peak times.
The dude basically read this Guardian article and put his own Government whinge on top of the existing Guardian government whinge.
Only just found this about wind generation. Completely agree with @MajorRage all solvable and yes those are good alternatives. Storage definitely an issue but again solvable.
The biggest issue is that everyone wants governments to do it in the first place. Macro generation, storage, and distribution is costly and wasteful. The whole system needs to be approached on a micro scale. Governments can play their part with subsidies (we really need to address some of the ways our whole societies operate wrt transport - power or otherwise) but if I stay on topic with power, it is far more efficient done as close to the user site as possible and can also be tailored to the local met conditions. The grid can still be used for surplus distribution where local conditions are over supplying.
I'm considering a 3kw vertical axis turbine to charge my battery because we still have wind at night and there is often a decent breeze on cloudy days to supplement the solar system. I have largely been forced into this as our grid is so unreliable (utter shit actually). If we get a decent breeze a tree somewhere will touch a wire a few times and we great brown or blackout. I could change that from a negative to a positive with a turbine on site. Electricity is getting so expensive that self-production and storage is becoming financially viable with a reasonable payback period.
Disclaimer - I have no idea who funds "statista". They may be vulnerable (bribed) to (by) green lobbyists and "contributions" as much as politicians are from oil and gas companies.
Anything metric that uses LCOE is effectively junk science, unfortunately.
Lazard themselves, who created it, now no longer use it, as to ignore intermittency renders most analysis pointless.
This is the second most annoying thing in the energy debate after Musk's solar panels gaffe above.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-debunking-of-solar-and
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@Winger said in Climate Change:
@voodoo said in Climate Change:
@Winger said in Climate Change:
@NTA said in Climate Change:
clean energy,
I hope you don't mean solar or wind. Both seem to be anything but.
My view is the future will include as a big contributor
Clean coal
Gas
Mini nukes (not the big expensive monsters). That can use up so-called nuclear waste. And use 99%+ of Uranium's potential as opposed to under 1%And hopefully dreadful wind and solar will be kicked into touch.
Clean coal
BTW by clean coal, I don't mean storing CO2.
I finished my PhD in this a little over 10yrs ago. The tech works, and has been rolled out at bigger scale in China. Its appealing because the world effectively has infinite amounts of coal (for the Chinese, its the only natural resource they DO have) and even if you ignore climate change, the local pollution effects of burning coal are terrible. The only reason clean coal hasn't caught on faster is the shale oil revolution in the USA effectively gave the world a lot more cheap oil and gas from 2008-today, meaning the economic forcing function for "clean coal" disappeared. Its now reappearing, as post-Ukraine war the idea that wind+solar+(non-existent) batteries+hope can power a modern country is now being rightly called into question.
My own view is that nuclear is the longer term solution, and is mostly expensive due to regulations/legislation since Chernobyl effectively criminalising it. Every other human technology displays a positive "learning function", in that it gets cheaper the more volume is produced. Nuclear since the 1950s has shown a negative learning function - that, to me, has to be a man made distortion caused by external factors, not inherently due to the technology itself.
Nuclear still takes a long time to build, mostly because a lot of the engineering knowledge base has been lost in the past 30yrs. Clean coal is much faster, particularly as it can be augmented to existing plants fairly easily, and will serve as a useful bridging technology in the 2030s/2040s as the "nuclear renaissance" takes off.
Wind/solar are fine in places they make sense, but can't really be more than 5% or 10% of a grid without drowning it. Solar in particular is artificially cheap as its mostly made in China using coal fired energy and slave labor as inputs; it never has to earn its cost of capital in actual markets like other technologies. The mining ethics and supply issues with battery materials are well-documented, and imagining they can scale up to be most of the vehicles AND balance a mostly wind-and-solar grid is fanciful, to say the least.
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@TeWaio said in Climate Change:
Solar in particular is artificially cheap as its mostly made in China using coal fired energy and slave labor as inputs; it never has to earn its cost of capital in actual markets like other technologies.
Nothing appears out of thin air, though, right? If using coal to make renewables allows renewables to make renewables, that's progress.
We're still ultimately going to have to dig stuff up and turn it into stuff that emits less carbon, to offset the stuff we can never decarbonise.
While clean coal is absolutely possible and should be implemented on existing plants, you're not going to find the operators racing to do so, at least in places like Australia, without massive incentives from the government.
Which is the common thread:
- Renewables need(ed) subsidies
- Fossil fuels have subsidies - massive subsidies
- Nuclear needs subsidies
So why the fuck did we ever privatise our energy networks?
Climate Change