Energy Discussion

[sevenhelmet]

Paywall.

I remain skeptical that renewables are going to have any significant impact on decarbonization, particularly when you take the full life-cycle of renewables into account.

An intellectually-honest argument to reduce fossil fuel use for energy involves increasing nuclear power capacity, particularly as electrical demand is increasing with population and demographic shift (e.g. electric cars) much faster than renewables are being built.

 

[Randy Daytona]

I am skeptical - there is neither enough sun nor wind to go renewable in Germany. Despite the billions upon billions of euros, their transition to renewable power has been a failure. With interest rates going up, its only going to get more expensive to install. And if Germany can’t make it work / can’t afford to make it work - then it looks like coal for a longer duration for Germany and Eastern Europe than anyone wants to contemplate.

And everyone said coal was dead….

Interesting article on the finance side of renewables:

Building wind power, canceling coal — it’s all drowning under borrowing costs

Central banks' efforts to tame inflation have made it harder for both wealthy and poor nations to shift away from fossil fuels.

www.politico.com

 

[Randy Daytona]

Happened to see this interesting discussion in regards to the recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal:

From MIT Technology Review

Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout?

and Zeihan on Geopolitics

 

[Griz882]

Happened to see this interesting discussion in regards to the recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal:

From MIT Technology Review

Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout?

and Zeihan on Geopolitics

Interesting when considered with this…

China has installed kill switches in solar panels sold to the West

Using the rogue communication devices to skirt firewalls and switch off inverters remotely could destabilise power grids, damage energy infrastructure and trigger blackouts

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Brett327]

Happened to see this interesting discussion in regards to the recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal:

Did solar power cause Spain’s blackout?

Let's start with this basic truism: If the headline for the story contains a question mark, you're about to read some bad journalism.

The cause of this outage is now fairly well understood. Phase asynchrony along transmission lines. Zeihan more or less gets it right until he starts talking about turbines vs renewables and exotic batteries. I don't know what batteries Spain uses, but all the PV systems on Kauai use lead acid batteries, and all the inverters have failsafe logic. This was a transmission problem, not a generation problem - so all the clowns flailing their arms, saying that this was because of renewables, can sit down and STFU.