News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by Roark66 on Friday October 14, 2022 @06:22PM (#33209498)
You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU grid is pretty well interconnected so excess capacity is pretty easy to sell (up to a point). This is one of the reasons why renewables can be used as a large piece of the total supply.

However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.

The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.

Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.

People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.

All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by quelsolaar on Friday October 14, 2022 @06:54PM (#33209744)
Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden? We could put them anywhere. Sweden is already producing enough low cost energy to meet its needs, only prices are high because we are exporting it to other countries willing to pay. If Sweden wants to invest in power for export, we could make that investment anywhere.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by barry-cotter on Friday October 14, 2022 @07:05PM (#33209843)
> Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden?

Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by tored on Friday October 14, 2022 @10:05PM (#33210921)
In the direction the world is going, the breakdown of globalization, every country will be required to be self sufficient.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by adrianN on Saturday October 15, 2022 @12:50AM (#33211846)
Lucky for Sweden then that they already are?
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by kzrdude on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:03AM (#33212161)
Time to increase generation capacity by +50% to feed everything we want to use electricity for.
Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by tored on Saturday October 15, 2022 @05:18AM (#33213181)
Not self sufficient enough and also depending on weather.

There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.

Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.

But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.

Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.

The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.

It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.

Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.

This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by Gravityloss on Friday October 14, 2022 @07:17PM (#33209921)
Sweden does have great mountains and hydropower, which makes integrating wind power easier. (Or even some solar too. It's bad in the winter but otherwise tends to anticorrelate with wind, which is good.) And nukes as well.

Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by cycomanic on Saturday October 15, 2022 @02:53AM (#33212443)
> You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity.

Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)

Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by doikor on Saturday October 15, 2022 @04:27AM (#33212940)
This is because Germany does a lot of direct gas/oil heating. If you scroll further down on your own source you will see that gas consumption is actually bigger than renewables.

Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.

Re:Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will ... by fyvhbhn on Saturday October 15, 2022 @05:16AM (#33213174)
> The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side,

And before that you set the lithium battery straw man. Read no further. And you are talking about missinformation.