Not really, Germany shut down nuclear because the greens are scared after Fukushima. They just replaced their nuke with coal. Germany produces a shit load of Nat gas and coal but it's more profitable to sell those to their west and import from the east. 2/3 of German gas is sold to Iberia and BENELUX and imports Russian gas for cheap, banking the difference.
Now that has security issues as Russia can just shut Germany out in the winter and cause utility bills to go up 40%.
I believe in solar and wind but there needs to be better tools for storage and to prevent duck billing. I also love nuke of course.
Huh, learn something everyday. I think solar and wind can be great supplemental power sources. Especially at the residential level, as a way to cut power grid usage and a backup when the grid goes down. But there really is no cost effective batteries for home home use right now (I think Tesla has one but is somewhere near $80k last I checked.)
If you dig a little into home power systems, there some absolutely heroic battery bank systems some home owners have put together back in the 80's and 90's.
I've spoken to politicians in my Canada and a lot of them are understanding.
On a grand scale it's more effective to just subsidize the use of more efficient appliances and have demand control, demand is a killer on grids, it's why they charge such penalties for demand spikes and incorrect power factor.
I've consulted with clients who've been able to say 500k a year because they installed a 100k capacitor bank that reduced their power factor error. the ROI on that is way way way more effective than subsidizing solar or wind to generate more.
Our grid is ridiculously inefficient, inductive loads namely motors have such an impact on this. It's easier to not generate in the first place than it is to add generation.
Nuke and water should be baseload, wind and solar can be good with battery storage, wind is actually amazing if you can build it tall enough (at a certain height the wind blows constantly, at that point it's as reliable as nuke and water, like in the north sea for Denmark and Germany), and gas and coal can be a backup for demand spikes since it only takes a few minutes to get them online compared to nuke, nukes take a week to change their output capacity.
Not really, Germany shut down nuclear because the greens are scared after Fukushima. They just replaced their nuke with coal. Germany produces a shit load of Nat gas and coal but it's more profitable to sell those to their west and import from the east. 2/3 of German gas is sold to Iberia and BENELUX and imports Russian gas for cheap, banking the difference.
Now that has security issues as Russia can just shut Germany out in the winter and cause utility bills to go up 40%.
I believe in solar and wind but there needs to be better tools for storage and to prevent duck billing. I also love nuke of course.
Huh, learn something everyday. I think solar and wind can be great supplemental power sources. Especially at the residential level, as a way to cut power grid usage and a backup when the grid goes down. But there really is no cost effective batteries for home home use right now (I think Tesla has one but is somewhere near $80k last I checked.)
If you dig a little into home power systems, there some absolutely heroic battery bank systems some home owners have put together back in the 80's and 90's.
I've spoken to politicians in my Canada and a lot of them are understanding.
On a grand scale it's more effective to just subsidize the use of more efficient appliances and have demand control, demand is a killer on grids, it's why they charge such penalties for demand spikes and incorrect power factor.
I've consulted with clients who've been able to say 500k a year because they installed a 100k capacitor bank that reduced their power factor error. the ROI on that is way way way more effective than subsidizing solar or wind to generate more.
Our grid is ridiculously inefficient, inductive loads namely motors have such an impact on this. It's easier to not generate in the first place than it is to add generation.
Nuke and water should be baseload, wind and solar can be good with battery storage, wind is actually amazing if you can build it tall enough (at a certain height the wind blows constantly, at that point it's as reliable as nuke and water, like in the north sea for Denmark and Germany), and gas and coal can be a backup for demand spikes since it only takes a few minutes to get them online compared to nuke, nukes take a week to change their output capacity.
ok nerd rant over lol.