These 20% will still make you dependent on foreign country.
For example Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG.
In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels.
Panels aren't burned to make electricity. If literally everyone stops selling you panels (nearly impossible) you continue generating electricity the old way. Nothing bad happens. The panels you already have continue working.
Other countries make panels too. India has a glut right now.
You can't base energy of an modern industrial country on purely solar panels alone, they don't produce any electricity in the night and have electric output reduced by weather. You have always to combine them with other power sources for backup.
So you admit then that using as much solar and wind and storage as possible reduces the need for imported gas. As such it should be a national priority.
It should be a national priority to use as much already installed solar and wind and storage as possible, when the operating costs are low. The big question is: where should the future investments be made, who will pay them? How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas? 2x, 10x, 100x of current yearly spending? Because gas is already very expensive in Europe, it's used precisely when renewable don't produce enough electric energy.
The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake. The French almost made the same mistake.
> The German decision to phase out nuclear power was a very big and very costly mistake
It's time to stop talking about it. It's done. Unless the stopped plants can be restarted (which I'd support) this is completely useless. It doesn't mean anything.
> How much further investments in solar, wind and storage will decrease the need for gas?
The upper bound today (keep in mind battery tech gets cheaper all the time) it would cost $5tn to power Germany on batteries for 6 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45446112
You don't need to run Germany on batteries for 6 months. Even 1 month is more than plenty.
> Germany was dependent on Russian gas (before year 2022), which they later swapped for dependency on US LNG. In addition, Germany is dependent on China for PV panels
There is merit to putting one's energy policy on autopilot by doing the opposite of whatever Berlin is up to.
but much less dependent. Its way easier to stockpile a big buffer supply of LNG if its only 20% of your supply, for example. Its way easier to trim some 20% demand and still keep the country largely running, for example.
"much less dependent" is still a huge win. Sure 100% independent is better. Isnt this obvious? i dont understand the point.
If a kid lives on their own but their mom buys them groceries once per month and their dad swings by on thursdays with pizza and beer, that kid's still pretty darn self sufficient.
Similarly, if a country can use 80% less oil or imported fuel than they would have without renewable energy, I think they're pretty self-sufficient. They don't have to be isolated from trade, it's okay to import some things and export others. Energy sources can be one of those things. But if they rely on energy imports, then when something disrupts their supply then they are in trouble. However if they get 80% of their energy from renewable sources, then they have significantly less of a problem.
They have significantly less of a problem with regards to their balance of trade, but any meaningful dependency on imports means that electricity prices will still be entirely dependent on the price of whatever is imported, at any point in time imports are happening. Still not great, and I wouldn't call that sovereignty!
Also, highly depending on what metric we mean by "80% self-sufficient" (peak capacity? long-time average?), there might either be a lot of work left, or this might be "effective sovereignty".
Losing 20% of your electricity supply is a calamity, not an annoyance. So unless you want the calamity, you're still dependent on imports.
Personally, I don't see an issue with that, as long as the neighboring countries you're importing from are reliable and will be able to supply at the times you need (i.e., they don't have the same possibly spiky import dependency as yourself). The other option is massive storage capacity.
I just don't think it makes sense to just equate renewables with automatic sovereignty.
Dunno about you, but losing 20% of my electricity supply is an annoyance. I just don't run the clothes dryer and hang my clothes on a rack instead.
(And yes, I have solar + battery, and have lost 100% of my outside electricity supply on a half dozen occasions since having it installed, and my actual response has been to not run the clothes dryer.)
That would be the situation in an integrated/"smart" grid. The grid could tell your washer/dryer to defer or worst case shed their load.
In the grid we have, where most people don't have batteries, nor a way to react to (or even perceive) network-side load shedding commands, you get rolling blackouts at best, and brownouts, damaged devices etc. at worst.
That's the point I'm making with my second paragraph. I'm not dependent on the grid. If we get into the situation you're describing, I just throw the main breaker (actually don't need to do that, the inverters switch over automatically) and my home generates its own electricity. It doesn't quite cover all my usage, but it covers all my usage except the clothes dryer, so I just don't run the clothes dryer.
It's true that there are tragedy-of-the-commons situations where not everybody has a battery, but it's also true that there are higher-level but subnational entities within the U.S. that have invested significantly in renewables + battery storage. This chart of where electricity comes from on a state-by-state level is illustrative:
California, Connecticut, DC, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington are > 95% renewables + natural gas, all of which is produced in North America. If it comes to the point where it's "keep the lights on or sever ties with fossil-fuel states", I'd bet that they choose the latter.
(Note that the table kinda refutes your point anyway: the only states that are > 1% dependent upon oil for electricity are Alaska and Hawaii. Other than natural gas, which is largely produced domestically [1], the other big fossil fuel source is coal, which is also produced domestically.)
If a country were in your individual position, I'd definitely call that self-sovereign, but I don't think that's how "80% self-sufficient" would actually look like. (I don't think that 20% of most countries' consumption is entirely discretionary, for one thing, whether measured by peak or average load.)
At >95%, it's probably a very different story. At that point, you basically turn off your aluminium smelter and you're good :) (And note how GP said "renewables", which gas isn't.)
And my point really isn't about oil specifically, it's about GPs "renewables increase sovereignty" thesis in general.
Because in every thread about EVs someone has to chime in with their niche gas only use case, as if that somehow matters to the overall needs of the vast majority of drivers. Cool, you area niche need. Don’t buy an ev for 10 years or so.
Cars and electriciy are the overwhelming majority of all fossil fuel use. Let’s just focusing on tranistioning them first, and we’ll be in so much of a better place. The rest can wait
It causes massive inflation of goods and food prices, as farming and supply chains are heavily dependent on fuel prices. How is runaway inflation “massively winning in every other way” for regular americans?
yes, there a lot of outdated perspectives in these threads. The world has changed, EVs are the cheaper option now, its just going to take awhile for some places to catch up.
sadly thats not the norm. Various recent studies from the EU based on real world vehicle data show that actual savings from the PHEV category are about ~20% less emissions than a pure gas version. Aka, they are just gas cars. Despite manufacturers claiming ~70-80% for emissions credits. The category is today kind of a scam, in aggregate.
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
I think it is the norm only because people never run the numbers. At least where I live gas costs me 5-10x more than electric (I live in the US, gas is cheap, but all my electric is from even cheaper wind). It wouldn't be hard to teach them to plug the car in when they are at home anywhere (many people park in a garage with an outlet - if this doesn't apply to you then PHEV doesn't make sense - you don't get enough range for your effort to find a charger)
For most in the US what makes the most sense today is one PHEV they use for long trips and towing the boat. The rest should be pure EVs, which have enough range for the typical trips and the few exceptions they just reserve the PHEV that day. As time goes on more and more chargers will be built and eventually pure EV for everything will make sense, but right not there isn't enough charging infrastructure. (You can get almost anywhere in the US, but the trip is planned around where the next charger is, not where either you feel like stopping or where the battery is low - gas stations are at nearly every exit, fast chargers 1 in 30 exits or something in that range)
PHEVs when you already own them cost vastly less in electric mode. That people don't bother plugging them in is because they don't care about cost enough to bother to see if there is a difference.
It’s also because most PHEVs sold are terrible EVs. Weak, short range, cut to gas all the time. Impractical to use as a pure ev. This style of phev is greenwashing and should be sold as a gas car for emissions rules.
EREVs are a different story, and have a place in the transition for awhile.
This doesn't make them terrible! This makes them great. That means they can run 80% of the time as an EV, yet use the ICE just enough to not ever have stale gas in the tank. As a driver you barely notice, and someone outside will have no clue what mode it is operating in. (wind noise is louder than the ICE)
When there are fast chargers on every corner like gas stations are PHEV will make less sense. However in the world I live in today an EV can do a road trip but it forces you to plan your stops around where there is a charger, while with gas can still assume it will be close when you need it. This will change over the coming years, for now I won't take my EV on a road trip, but my PHEV has done it several times.
That’s not the way the energy market works though. The cheapest sources (like daytime solar) will knock your expensive nuclear off the grid. Or force it to sell at significantly below operating cost, which is suicidal in the long term, since nukes need a guaranteed high price nearly 100% of the time to pencil out (pay back the capex).
Your argument only works in entirely state controlled systems, not in free energy markets of independent suppliers. Which is why nukes don’t get built.
- billions (if not trillions) of subsidies were poured into wind and solar over decades to make them viable while nuclear energy was addled with additional taxes, reactor closures, and very few new reactor licenses
- decades of fear-mongering led to loss of expertise in building new nuclear power plants (and instead South-East Asia has been picking up speed in building new reactors) [1]
In 2015 nuclear was significantly cheaper than most other types of energy across most markets: https://world-nuclear.org/images/articles/REPORT_Economics_R... (Figure 12, in some markets including the then-emerging renewables). And yet renewables were enjoying unprecedented amounts of subsidies and money poured into them while nuclear... Oh we know what was happening to nuclear, just look at Germany.
Renewables: 80-80 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Fossil fuels: 60-140 billion euro in subsidies a year.
Nuclear: good luck finding the thin orange line in the graph. (1% of subsidies)
--- start quote ---
As shown on Figure 4 , solar energy received by far the largest share of subsidies, both historically and in 2023 (EUR 21 bn), followed by biomass (EUR 9 bn) and wind power (EUR 7 bn). Hydropower received marginal financial support (~EUR 1 bn), while subsidies targeting multiple renewable technologies (such as tax reductions on green technology or public aid for investment projects) jumped to EUR 23 bn by 2023.
Subsidies for nuclear energy dropped from EUR 7.9 bn in 2021 to 3.7 bn in 2022 and 4.1 bn in 2023. Of the 14 MS providing nuclear subsidies, France (EUR 2.9 bn) accounted for the biggest share, followed by Germany (EUR 0.8 bn) , Spain and Belgium (EUR 0.1 bn each).
Also corruption. I lived in an area that for some years was trying to build a new nuclear power plant.
It was fraud from the top down and the manufacturer went bankrupt. I paid more for power in SC than I ever did when I lived in “summer all year” Florida. But I guess I got a token check in the mail some years later.
Plant got completely abandoned and I got to help subsidize this failure.
Oh yes. That too. It's one problem after another in quite a few countries: ignore/neglect, make processes, regulations and subsidies opaque, all of this leads to huge construction times and corruption, declare nuclear non-viable.
China: "Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less." [1] Building over 40 reactors since 2005
And still china’s share of energy provided by nuclear is declining y/y, and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Because their renewables buildout is >10x nuclear.
Even china, a nuclear construction scale/cost/time success story, can’t make them compete with renewables.
Share of the total grid is meaningless comparing solar to nuclear. It’s the wrong metric to optimize for - the metric that actually matters and is the expensive one is reliability.
What matters is “share of the grid when solar literally cannot provide the power at any price”.
In a well designed and functional grid share of nuclear power should be close to 100% of the latter and the lowest percentage of the former you can get away with.
It’s better to think of nuclear as energy storage with a really really long lasting battery that costs the same to run it 24/7 or 1 hour a month.
Ideally it would be replacing close to all baseload/reliable power on the grid outside of hydro - with hydro being your peakers instead of natural gas for topologies amenable to it. The power share graph should look like nuclear at close to 100% at night less wind and battery storage that backs wind unreliability - and that graph remaining flat throughout the peak daytime hours with other energy sources kicking in such as solar, hydro, duck curve sized battery arrays, etc.
No one pays you for that reliability though. In free energy markets they pay you for what you supply, at the clearing price at that moment.
Solar is so cheap it will push nukes off the grid during the day, you don’t get credit just because it’s more reliable. People will just build more and more solar till the nukes share in the day is zero. And at night people are incentivized to build more wind and batteries, because you can still undercut the expensive nuke power and push it off. When the wind doesn’t blow at night there’s gas and hydro peakers. And more and more batteries. There’s increasingly no room left for nukes that have to be sold at 100% for 100% of the time to still be the most expensive form of energy.
The only way nukes have a role at scale today is if you have state intervention in the market to force the grid to buy your nuke power at close to 100% at the baseline share you described, because you have a nation-state goal of reliability that you prioritize higher than cost. Essentially subsidizing the nukes. And I’m sympathetic to that goal, but that’s not mostly not what western markets do, and not what they will do. Making power deliberately more expensive is unpopular, and not neoliberal marketism
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