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Why would you even say something so stupid? I highly doubt that you are interested in a discussion.
Please keep it civil. You provided very little context in your original argument, which made it very hard to give you a meaningful response.
Your link regarding Dunkelflaute helps to provide context, thanks for that. I had not heard of this phenomenon before. The research paper in the citations does mention that while it occurs somewhat regularly for an area e.g. the size of a country, it rarely happens simultaneously for say the EU-11 mentioned (most of northern Europe). The page also mentions importing power during these periods from other regions would mostly resolve this problem. Seems important to take into account, but not an impossible problem to deal with, especially given that it already happens and we already use inter-grid connections to handle it? What’s your perspective on this?
People spend their whole career figuring this out, it is obviously not as simple as you make it out to be.
I certainly don’t mean to pretend this is a simple problem by any means. Conceptually, sure, it’s “simple”, but bringing it to practice is much harder. It’s also why I’m perhaps more pessimistic about the timeframe in which we can execute these plans, particularly also because we need to scale up battery production by a factor of at least 10. It’s why I think we also need to invest in research regarding higher-capacity batteries made from easier to procure materials. Certainly a difficult endeavor by the way, but absolutely necessary. We’ve made promising progress on that front at least, but we’ve got a long way to go still.
In my opinion, focusing on renewables + storage has the highest long-term chance of success combined with manageable costs. If you’re willing to up the chance of success offset by incurring higher costs, adding nuclear to the mix is perfectly acceptable to me. But even longer-term (especially post net-zero) I think it’s almost inevitable that fission reactors will end up not economically competing with alternatives.
Well, on overcast days most solar panels these days still produce up to 25% of their normal output. Nothing to sniff at I’d think. Perhaps not enough, but certainly not nothing.
I think you may be a tad pessimistic here. Consider Europe, even during a Dunkelflaute not the entire continent is without renewables, only a region of it. If northern Europe has one, southern Europe is very, very unlikely to have one as well for example. And inter-continental power lines aren’t as rare as you might think! I believe the UK is currently building one to Morocco, and there’s plans to build one via Greece and Cyprus to the Middle-East.
I don’t fully agree here. Certainly on a more household level battery storage is already perfectly feasible and being installed a lot these days. The growth of this sector is also staggeringly high. Year-on-year the sector nearly doubles, as costs are coming down quite quickly and the economic picture starts to maie more and more sense. We don’t produce enough now, but in 10 years that picture might be radically different.
Experience learns that new nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, from planning to end of construction. If the focus is on nuclear, any CO2 savings will likely come too late. And then there’s still the economic problem of nuclear being far too expensive compared to solar/wind. Barely any investor is willing to touch it unless the government super-heavily subsidises it, resulting in expensive power and higher taxes (e.g. what happened in France). And then there’s the issue that we don’t have enough expertise and rare materials to build enough reactors to cover enough of the world’s production. We have a hard enough time building just a couple reactors, let alone thousands. And having poorer 3rd world countries finance their own reactors also seems unlikely.
I believe I saw research that suggested the fastest route to net zero, whilst still being affordable and feasible without emitting too much CO2 in the meantime was a very heavy push for renewables, investments into energy infrastructure (which are mostly required regardless of the route taken) and research into battery tech so that in 25-30 years we may have enough storage to ditch the last fossil fuel plants. In the meantime keeping gas power plants open seemed the least polluting backup method in case of power generation dips, plus potentially shutting off heavy industry during those periods to save power (fairly cheap, requires little investment to do). Nuclear doesn’t have to disappear, but the cost-benefit analysis just didn’t tilt in its favour. But it might make sense on a more local level perhaps, that’s always an issue with those super macro-economic studies.
I was hoping to find it but I’m having a hard time doing so. If I find it I’ll link it to you, it was an interesting read.