Portugal and Spain lived within their means energy wise, and have enormous renewables and hydro storage capabilities (and while they both burn some fossil gas; they have plans to rapidly finish moving to renewables by the end of the decade; Portugal burns no coal, Spain is phasing it out). France and Germany are in their own special hell because they prioritized politics (nuclear and coal, respectively) over energy security.

Swing by https://app.electricitymap.org for the detailed capacity and generation info.

Edit: I wrote a reply to a deleted comment, so enumerating the comment and reply here.

> France and Germany are also industrial powerhouses. They require a lot more power and a lot more natural gas specifically for chemical precursors to produce stuff like fertilizer and silicone.

Until suitable alternatives are found, there will always be a minimum amount of fossil gas required for industrial processes. But, BUT, that doesn’t mean you can’t lean into renewables, storage, and transmission to offset as much fossil generation as possible (prioritizing fossil gas for industry, and staying within your fossil gas infrastructure and LNG import constraints).

It is even worse than that. For all the talk about my current country (France) being a nuclear power house, we have actually been buying electricity from Spain and practically every other neighboring country for about 2 decades by now.

which is highly ridiculous because during my stay in Spain around the 2000s I was definitely paying significantly more for electricity than I _ever_ have in France. Someone would really need to explain that to me...

I have recently studied that exact link which gives an extremely good insight.

Offshore wind (the main segment for large/powerful wind turbines) generates just fine throughout, including the peak consumption periods. The failures of EU (or should we say German, as the rest of the Union mainly subsidizes its power bills now) energy policy are mainly self inflicted damage of tying to hydrocarbon supply from terror states.

Yes - sometimes there is a lot of wind and then it is... fine. But actually not since then they generate too much power which can not be used (in the country) and then it is sold cheap. The main problem is it can't be stored for later use.

It's not that much of a problem. Wind in the sea is quite predictable (and in certain areas near constant) and turbines can be geared down.

It is a big problem, low wind periods can last for days, just this Feb-March, UK wind generation stayed under 20% capacity (mostly between 5-10% I believe) for more than 11 days straight [0].

[0] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...

Generating too much for the grid isn't an actual problem. Modern renewables can shut themselves off quickly. Most serious national plans involve overprovisioning.

You've never seen anyone credible worry about how we'll cope with that terrible excess of cheap power because it's not a problem, merely an opportunity.

You've probably mostly been reading complaints of the operators of non-renewable plants that can't do this and are annoyed they're being asked to do it when renewables are plentiful as it costs then money to do so, even on top of the lost electricity.

> Generating too much for the grid isn't an actual problem

Yeah, tell that to people who's devices and houses you have burnt down because voltage in the outlet was not 230V but 300V.

The article is precisely about nuclear reactors not working all the time.

The reactors are mainly down for maintenance. Whereas wind/sun is very unstable like - you know - the weather.

It's not hard to build storage, it's just a bit expensive. The European grid is still quite far from the amount of renewable deployment where storage starts to make financial sense, which is why right now we don't have very much of it.

They obviously don't work all the time, look at their uptime it is not glorious. But sure they work at night solar and they work with no wind etc... That's why we need a mixed energy panel with heat storage like Finland is starting and energy storage (inertial or gravitational seem to be the best bets these days)

Nuclear isn't flexible either, sudden high demands or the opposite are also bad for the nets

You are saying wind and sun don’t work? O_o

It's less that they don't work and more that they don't work optimally in the affected areas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD0sq5GN7xc

Zeihan is a bit US-centric overall, but his energy talks are sound (or I'm too biased to realize they're just confirming my own views.)

> (or I'm too biased to realize they're just confirming my own views.)

If you genuinely care, this is the real answer.

Lignite is a poor fuel for many reasons, but that handwavey part about solar and lignite being worse than lignite and it's all a big scam that the silly greens are too stupid to notice is just totally wrong.

As is the bit about green collapse he predicts when it is discovered to "not work" in Europe.

It's a very weird argument, since he's admitting it works (sort of) in California and Texas but still has a weirdly negative tone about it and Greens.

Basically, it's just yet another fallback position for people who have been consistently wrong about energy policy for decades and still feel able to poke fun at Greens for being unrealistic, because their audience is so misinformed.

California imports 90% of its natural gas from other states. If that was somehow threatened to be cut off, California would struggle too. It would tell us nothing about renewables, and tell us everything about how your neighbours being dicks to you can be a hassle. Which is actually a selling point for renewables and helps drive Chinese interest, since they don't won't to rely on others for fuel.

Seems like good points made in the video, I’ll watch a few more before I sub.

Probably intended that there is not full warranty of output. But for other more traditional sources is the same - and this very submission is about the matter. Traditional energy plants in the North of Italy, suffering droughts, are currently emitting reduced power because less water flow decreases output.