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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.
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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.
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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?
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In a fair world nothing would have subsidies then the the technology would be able to stand on it's merits.
Agree that privatizing our energy networks makes them totally risk adverse to doing the required capital investments to reform the energy sector, whatever that type of investment is.
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
In a fair world nothing would have subsidies then the the technology would be able to stand on it's merits.
Agree that privatizing our energy networks makes them totally risk adverse to doing the required capital investments to reform the energy sector, whatever that type of investment is.
Subsidies clearly work in providing incentives while new tech is developing - no new tech stands on it's merits from the outset. Govt absolutely must play an important role early on. The key is Govt stepping out at the right time, not supporting the wrong tech, or even the "right tech" for too long.
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
In a fair world nothing would have subsidies then the the technology would be able to stand on it's merits.
in fairness, that would take anyone evaluating those merits to be completely unbiased, no personal interest....which is almost impossible, just look at home many comments around different options being ugly which is completely subjective
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@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
In a fair world nothing would have subsidies then the the technology would be able to stand on it's merits.
in fairness, that would take anyone evaluating those merits to be completely unbiased, no personal interest....which is almost impossible, just look at home many comments around different options being ugly which is completely subjective
I dream of a mythical unicorn world of fairness without bias
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@NTA said in Climate Change:
Which is the common thread:
Renewables need(ed) subsidies
Fossil fuels have subsidies - massive subsidies
Nuclear needs subsidiesNo, they don't. But the only thing that keeps
global warmingclimate change and green energy afloat is untruths. These untruths, and the ugliness behind them (like slave labor), is becoming more and more obvious now.Here's an old article on this subject
The fact that the ODI have resorted to including items which plainly are not subsidies in any shape or form is an indication that their report has more to do with a political agenda, rather than a genuine attempt to assess fossil fuel subsidies.
Evidence of this lies in the fact that they have completely failed to mention the very real tax revenue which fossil fuels generate for the government.
I have already touched on North Sea oil revenue. But by far the biggest contribution comes from fuel duties, which generated £28bn last year.
The reality is that the ODI is yet another part of the green blob, funded largely by the UN, EU and taxpayer funded foreign aid money. (Last year, for instance, the DFID contributed an astonishing £16.8m).
Given their background, this grossly dishonest report is probably what you would expect to see. But why UK taxpayers have to pay millions to such a disreputable outfit is a mystery.
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@NTA said in Climate Change:
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?
It is a price index, which are typically adjusted.
Does the relatively flat period between 2013 and 2019 help the nuclear argument, or hurt it?
Well if my data is correct, then only Grafenrheinfeld (2015) and Philippsburg 2 (2019) closed during that period, which leaves Brokdorf, Emsland, Grohnde, Gundremmingen B and C, Isar 1 and Isar 2, Neckarwestheim 1 and 2, and Philippsburg 1 were still operational.
Do we ignore the fact Germany still predominantly had fossil fuel in its system over that period?
Not really, because the electricity generated from renewable sources has priority access to the grid and the effect of the feed-in tariffs and grid access means consumers pay the price.
What are the market levers that privatised energy can pull to maximise their profits?
Pray for less wind and more clouds so as to require additional firming capacity from the bidder of last resort (typically gas)?
What other tariffs have governments imposed in that time?
Other than those determined by the EEG? I don't know, you tell me.
Germany is not an isolated grid, so what else was happening in Europe at that time?
Germany exports energy and yet still has the higher prices. Riddle me that.
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@Winger https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/57-1b-record-breaking-fossil-fuel-subsides-following-climate-election/
i mean, google gives different answers
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@Windows97 said in Climate Change:
In a fair world nothing would have subsidies then the the technology would be able to stand on it's merits.
Agree that privatizing our energy networks makes them totally risk adverse to doing the required capital investments to reform the energy sector, whatever that type of investment is.
The problem is incentivizing owners to rent seek. Queensland's grid suffered because politicians wanted cheap energy for consumers and also to prop up the State's finances by forcing the State owned corporation to provide a mandated dividend to the owner. Net effect of which was to ensure there wasn't the required capital investment.
On the flip side, you have the moronic effect of paying a guaranteed return to (privatised) transmission companies. No prizes for guessing what the impact of that policy is.
The problem generally speaking with introducing subsidies is someone's picking winners, distorting the market. And often that person isn't the brightest bulb in the room, is making ideological decisions, and or beholden to vested interests.
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@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
@Winger https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/57-1b-record-breaking-fossil-fuel-subsides-following-climate-election/
i mean, google gives different answers
If your source is the Australia Institute, you're better off not posting it. This is the same bunch of clowns that can't come to grips with what a subsidy actually is.
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@antipodean said in Climate Change:
@Kiwiwomble said in Climate Change:
@Winger https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/57-1b-record-breaking-fossil-fuel-subsides-following-climate-election/
i mean, google gives different answers
If your source is the Australia Institute, you're better off not posting it. This is the same bunch of clowns that can't come to grips with what a subsidy actually is.
i mean, there are pages or results from a variety of sources but without know which ones are going to be respected and which aren't i'll step back
Climate Change