Driving through central Kansas, the towers are just this stark reminder of how far we've come, and how little we are. You see nothing, nothing, nothing... then BAM! These massive towers generating energy from the winds on the plains, in a state named for the people of the south wind. All of them impossibly tall, the field going on for miles, your mind doesn't even really process how big an individual one is, let alone the scale of the whole farm.
They always hit me like a monument. Like that feeling you might get walking into a cathedral with a slow whistle up at the ceiling. It's more than that, though, it's bundled up with a bit of futurism from the new tech, a bit like finishing a piece of utopian sci fi at the same time.
There's no accounting for taste, for sure. So maybe some people are just accustomed to the way certain views used to look and don't want any change. Maybe they grew up there and have strong attachments.
It's just hard hearing people dismissing beauty as blight, something that could be sublime if they just looked at it a slightly different way.
I wish I'd been able to go up to the top. Must be amazing!
I don't dislike the design of wind farms, but sure as hell I'd prefer landscape unspoiled by a forest of big white rotating blades. Given the choice, I'd prefer a concentrated energy generator (whatever that might be), that can be hidden away. So in some sense, I do believe they are a blight on the landscape.
Because of the long winters, to do the same with wind/solar will require about 3-5 times as much cost as you might think at first. You need to provide extra capacity to artificially increase effective capacity factor, and then you need about 48 hours of storage. Also possible, but about the same price, is hydrogen for seasonal storage for winter.
...and generally speaking, effectively any carbonfree project being built now needs to be supported. We need everything. Including a lot more off-shore wind.
The energy markets in Europe are connected and the fastest growing source of energy is basically wind. Coal is shrinking at this point and the enthusiasm for building new gas plants is likewise melting away rapidly as their cost seems to be on the high side compared to clean energy solutions. It will take decades to get rid of both of course.
Sweden and Finland actually both have nuclear plants. Finland even built a new one recently. But in general, nuclear is on the way out in Europe as there is no political will to commit to building new plants across the continent. Older plants are shutting down one by one. France has a lot of aging nuclear plants and they don't seem to be building new ones and are actively considering shutting a few down (https://www.france24.com/en/20170710-france-hulot-could-clos...). Apparently keeping their existing capacity online would take tens/hundreds of billions and the political appetite for those investments is pretty low.
Many EU countries are on a path to completely clean energy and it does not seem to involve building new nuclear plants.
David MacKay covers this in his excellent book: https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
As for political will I feel we should first start with the numbers and works out what adds up. If people don't want nuclear but nuclear is the only path to zero carbon then we'll need to choose one or the other.
Right now we can make great progress by ignoring nuclear because there's lots of things to be done. So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice. Does great things for the stats and many people don't like nuclear. Will it take us all the way though?
I've not seen any figures which don't add up except ones which make some rather outrageous assumptions (e.g. no demand side management, no overproduction, intermittency stats based upon smaller, shittier turbines, etc.).
David Mackay's book is good but it's rather outdated - the figures are from 2006/2007 and renewables have plummeted so far in price since then that it rather changes the picture of what's achievable.
>So go all in on renewables and ditch nuclear is a politically easy choice.
I don't believe that's necessarily true. The nuclear lobby has spent a lot of money trying to make their choice politically easier.
The nascent renewables lobby, by contrast, doesnt' spend nearly as much on lobbying.
IMHO clean energy will take us a lot further than just our current base line needs because of these improvements. For example, right now people are reluctant to install air conditioning because of the cost of energy and concerns about global warming. Cheap, plentiful, clean energy changes that. If house owners can generate all the energy they need for a one time cost of installing batteries and solar, this concern goes away.
Hydrogen will be popular for things like heavy industry, shipping and other places where delivering large amounts of electricity cheaply is needed and batteries won't be good enough. These use cases are far fewer than most hydrogen fans hope/expect and IMHO excludes most forms of four wheel traffic on the road I don't see a business case for installing massive solar infrastructure when EV ranges are hitting 400+ miles already with rapidly improving recharge rates.
Most of that hydrogen will be generated using excess wind or solar and the business case for that will be that that energy is so cheap that the relative inefficiencies don't matter. It will have to compete with other synthetic fuels because at that point fossil fuels will be no longer be cost competitive with that either. Why buy barrels of oil at 50-100$ each when you can just convert kwh + water + air into carbohydrates?
Nuclear is on a slow but steady way out. At this point there are only a handful of countries investing in nuclear and quite a few have non technical reasons for this (i.e. military ones). R&d progress has been glacial and cost is an order of magnitudes from being competitive in the current market already. In most places that still have nuclear, it's one of the most expensive options in the market and there are a lot of nuclear plants at risk of shutting down early because of it.
IMHO fusion might still happen in half a century or so. By then most countries will have shut down all remaining coal, gas, and nuclear plants. At that point it will have to be super cheap to be off interest.
They are still in the process of building it, and it is set to become the second most expensive building built in modern times. [0]
[0] https://metropolitan.fi/entry/olkiluoto-ol3-second-most-expe...
It should be reduce carbon no matter the dollar cost, right?
It's utterly delusional to think that low density generation such as solar or wind can meet the growing energy needs without covering vast areas.
And electric vehicles will just increase the need.
The point is that nuclear is expensive. You get more energy per dollar by building renewables.
(and for the same reason, we should be looking at expanding hydro and geothermal)
So while I definitely think we should build solar and wind, it's ridiculous to just dismiss nuclear out of hand for cost reasons if the goal is 100% clean energy (unless you have, say, massive amounts of hydro power).
Given the climate emergency, it's silly to pit one clean energy project against another when in fact we need all we can get. Particularly in the case of variable renewables, as they benefit tremendously from being in a source-diverse power grid.
What do you mean by this?
Yes, some tiny European countries can rely on hydro or geothermal for baseline generation. Most countries can’t, and even if they’re a net exporter, they’re heavily dependent on fossil fuels (or nuclear) for filling in gaps.
Battery technology is nowhere near sufficient for the need, things like pumped storage are space intensive, and exotic stuff like hydrogen and molten sodium and whatnot are decades off. Something has to fill the gap. Nuclear is a good choice.
I expect more nuclear to be shut down than being delivered during that time. It's not a growth market.
20-30 years from now, several countries are planning to be 100% on renewables and most of those are not planning to build any new nuclear plants. Most of the remaining countries will be making similar plans in the next ten years.
I think it's even longer than that, unfortunately... of course, it depends how much over capacity you have, but those cold fronts in N Europe can kill wind speed for weeks on end sometimes IIRC. It is a huge problem for us to solve.
It's a huge problem in terms of time and finance but not a difficult technological one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Wind
Would have been ~500MW as originally envisioned so still not this big =)
Edit: Missed the 137x in the wikipedia article so had the wrong power rating.
> even the extended operation of existing reactors is not climate effective as operating costs exceed the costs of competing energy efficiency and new renewable energy options and therefore durably block their implementation. Mycle Schneider concludes: “You can spend a dollar, a euro, a forint or a ruble only once: the climate emergency requires that investment decisions must favor the cheapest and fastest response strategies. The nuclear power option has consistently turned out the most expensive and the slowest.”
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/WNISR2019-Assesses-Climat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Nuclear_Industry_Status_...
Hardly an unbiased source it seems.
Regardless, the issues facing nuclear power could be quite easily solved with simple political will. Unlike those of renewable energy, which still do not have economical or technologically feasible solutions to the storage and base load problem.
We need only look to France to see the path forward. After the 1973 oil crisis, they resolved never again to be beholden to foreign oil for their grid needs. So they undertook the Messmer Plan, which mass produced a single standardized reactor design in bulk. France converted itself almost entirely over to nuclear power for its base load requirements in just 15 years, with the project coming in under budget and ahead of schedule. Now France has so much electricity it sells excess to Germany for profit.
Taking advantage of economy of scale, slicing through red tape and NIMBY-ism with political willpower, using a standardized design to expedite the engineering and approval processes of every individual plant - none of these require some amazing new technology or some new economic system be developed. We could literally start tomorrow, and have the entire first world swapped over to nuclear by the 2030s.
I hope nobody does that. France is running several overdue reactors, has a history of under-reporting issues, the main electricity generation and distribution company EDF (owned by the state) runs with a net debt of €70 billion and is responsible for the disastrous over budget numbers for Hinkley OP mentioned above.
> Now France has so much electricity it sells excess to Germany for profit.
Germany sells excess electricity also...It's a flowing market depending on daily prices. The overall price development however showed that it rose in France while it fell in Germany: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/4/...
With the continued rise of renewable energy in Germany this development won't stop while France will at some point have to start moving some of their overdue reactors off the grid while new ones are being dropped because of the market situation outlined in the Status Report above: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-nuclearpower-astri... while the only other new reactor they build Flamanville 3 came up in the news with messed up welding seams...
Red tape is there for a reason. Red tape is the rule of law, it's emissions standards, and fines for polluters, employment rights, and safe drinking water.
Red tape isn't something to be cast aside to get your own personal pet thing done.
I mean, what's the difference between your 'political willpower' and dictatorship?
Meanwhile... The British approach makes it illegal to give government funding for the Channel Tunnel rail link. 12 or 15 years later, another Act is needed and we start bothering with HS1. HS2 and HS3 were allegedly "coming soon" while the Chunnel was being built. Hmm.
Plus the British approach has just built the biggest offshore wind farm. Why is that inferior to Frances nuclear power?
Plus France also signed up to the Channel Tunnel treaties, so its also illegal for them to fund it, but yet it still got built...
And which approach gets to claim credit for Concorde?
I'm not even sure what the French approach is. They still have to follow EU red tape, I could just as easily roll out a stereotype about long lunches, etc, etc.
The French were the driving force behind Ariane. Britain would most likely have walked away after the failure of Europa (Blue Streak). We did after all walk away from our space programme right after achieving orbit. Still we became a much smaller participant in ESA than we had been in ELDO. Germany took our place as the other key player with the French.
The point about the Tunnel was the British Tunnel Act specifically ruled out state aid - Thatcher's government expected the private sector to stump up the whole cost. Which it pointedly failed to do. France happily took the SNCF proposal and built a national network from it using the power and purse of the state. Britain took the BR APT prototype, pushed for far too early demo, cancelled it, sold it to Fiat then bought them later as Pendelinos. We chugged along with HST.
Concorde is a brilliant pick, thanks for the perfect example! I'm going to say 95% "The French" (politically. We contributed much more fairly technically): The British really, really wanted to partner with the US who weren't interested feeling they would be giving "their" lead to the UK. We were most surprised to find the French were the most serious about SST too, and Thorneycroft (destroyer of Supersonic Harrier) found himself with only France as realistic option. The treaty was written with very heavy cancellation penalties. Roy Jenkins tried to cancel it with TSR2 in 64. He went to France to tell them. The French responded by breaking diplomatic contact[1]. :)
Actually, scrub that, it wouldn't have progressed nearly as far as British project. Treasury were against, cabinet was against, but, we were trying our first attempt to get in the EU and de Gaulle wasn't keen (he felt we were too close to the Americans to be good Europeans. 2019 hindsight thinks he may have had a damn good point). Concorde was an EU/EEC bargaining chip. Yet still we tried to cancel it.
[1] https://history.blog.gov.uk/2019/04/09/concordes-first-briti...
> The TGV was the world's fourth commercial and third standard gauge high-speed train service,[15] after Japan's Shinkansen, which connected Tokyo and Osaka from 1 October 1964, the Russian ER200 around 1974 (full service in 1984), and Britain's InterCity 125 on main lines such as the East Coast Main Line, which entered service in 1976.
It was far enough that it would have been faintly visible from Bournemouth beach. I strongly doubt that a few dots on the horizon would have bothered any tourists.
This project wasn't killed because of the view. There were other financial (probably carbon based) interests involved.
Based on the expenses scandal??
As a contrast, it was also reported today that Hinkley point will be £2.9 billion over budget: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49823305 luckily for them, they get to charge £92.50 per megawatt hour upon completion - locked in for 10 years. While wind power is costing us £40 per megawatt hour, not guaranteed, and likely to decrease.