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A comment on Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies. Parent comment

Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by Faark on Thursday September 19, 2019 @04:22PM (#21020331)
I love how these "failed" efforts did produce a quarter of germanys energy in 2018 [0] and heavily accelerated R&D of those technologies when they were far from profitable. The original article this discussion is about states pretty explicitly how this only changed due to such subsidies. Afaik, the german one was one of the first / biggest at the time. (edit and yes, solar is less optimal in germany and was subsequently scaled back)

Btw, storage tech will never be developed unless there is significant demand to shift load and thus a significant financial incentive. As such it naturally can only happen after a lot of "unreliable" solar/wind has been deployed.

More nuclear would not have made germanys grid that much cleaner. Laying off all those strip mine workers from otherwise underdeveloped areas is a political issue, according to our current news landscape. Doing it is kind of hard, thanks to the rise of populism, among others.

By the way, nuclear is a political issue as well. If the US doesn't allow e.g. Iran to meet their energy needs with nuclear, then this isn't a suitable solution to power the world. R&D subsidies should benefit the whole world, not just politically stable first world countries, if you care about CO2.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&perio...

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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by russdill on Thursday September 19, 2019 @06:02PM (#21021167)
California has gone from virtually non-existent solar to generating 14% of it's power in well under 10 years and the growth is accelerating. In the same time period, the amount of power generated by wind has more than doubled.

Given how much of California power generation is natural gas (nearly 50%), if we can move to a future where batteries aren't a solved economic problem but natural gas plants are used to provide supplemental power to "unreliable" renewables, that's still an absolute win.

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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by philwelch on Thursday September 19, 2019 @09:46PM (#21022587)
You can also do carbon capture within natural gas plants.
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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by tonyedgecombe on Friday September 20, 2019 @06:46AM (#21025192)
Has anybody actually done this on any scale yet.
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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by philwelch on Friday September 20, 2019 @05:12PM (#21031328)
Here’s a Vox piece on a successful carbon-neutral natural gas plant: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...
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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by tonyedgecombe on Sunday September 22, 2019 @05:26AM (#21040445)
That’s a small pilot plant, I did ask at any scale.

I know I’m being sceptical but CCS has been talked about in the UK for a long time and we haven’t been able to move forward on it for some reason. I now worry that it is mostly a distraction from other technologies and changes that we know will work.

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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by philwelch on Saturday September 28, 2019 @06:23AM (#21099544)
Generating all of our baseload power with renewables isn’t exactly a more plausible short-term solution. The energy storage problem is outright enormous. We don’t know that any of it will work because we haven’t done any of it at scale, that’s why we still have the problem.

What has been proven to work at scale is nuclear.

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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by russdill on Saturday September 21, 2019 @02:22PM (#21036986)
Technology is also approaching from the opposite side, producing synthetic fuels from captured CO₂ or atmospheric CO₂.
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Re:Solar and Wind Power So Cheap They’re Outgrowing Subsidies by philwelch on Sunday September 22, 2019 @02:36AM (#21040001)
Though you would want to use cheap, non-hydrocarbon-based electricity to do this in the first place. But this does provide a mechanism for safe, civilized countries to have nuclear power and essentially export their energy to less secure countries we may not trust with that technology.
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