That is certainly true, but it's not a full explanation.

I recently was at an information event from our local electricity provider about wind energy projects. And there are those people... There was a conversation going on like: "The people I talked to don't want these things." Event moderator: "What are the reasons?" Guy: "They simply don't want them."

And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.

I have a pet theory about that. The theory is that it is not the facts or the topic of Eco-Things.

I think generally we are at a point where it is too easy for normal people to be against things and eco friendly things are just the lowest hanging fruit. Normal people nowadays are much more stressed with the world at large, overstimulated by doomscrolling all night, obesse or unhealthy, locked in some financial treadmill, etc, etc...

In such a situation it is easy to see a wind farm next door as an attack on your landscape or the needs of EV mobility as overly complicated and so on and so on.

So its not the facts that matter, it is the lives of the 80% of the population that have just taken a dive for the worst over the last 20 years.

EDIT: preface

Hence why the gap between the poor and the richest people must be closed. Take the money from the billionaires and use it to rebuild the middle class and lift up the lower class.

It is easy to judge other people, why they have a nimby opinion. Show me your property, if it has windmills or photovoltaic on them. Then it would be an intellectually honest conversation.

That sounds hypocritical. If you're against wind and solar on some principle, I'd hope you apply that to your own life, not just others.

People don't want to pay for it. The cost of the wind/solar project itself is not the full story - you also need energy storage, and that's very expensive. You also need to rebuild the electrical grid to handle the peak power output to be able to store it.

In EU countries, at least part of these very significant costs are paid for by everyone - not just the company operating the wind/solar projects who profit from it. Some people don't want to have higher taxes just so a business gets profit.

People pay billions in subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, so we can just move those and leave taxes as they are.

Not everyone does. Maybe people in the US, but most EU countries don't have any fossil fuel industry to subsidize.

Where I live people are against solar/wind because they want to go nuclear.

Where you live you are subject to disinformation and nuclear is the last effort of delay and distraction.

You could put up massive solar and wind farms next year. How long would it be until sufficient nuclear capacity came online?

Going niclear is such a FUD anti-renewables campaign, it is almost loughable people still fall it. New nuclear plants take decades to build, and are extremely expensive. So no, no significant nuclear capacity increase. All that campaign does, is making it harder for renewables, and thus easier for fossil fuels. Quite ingenious so, if you think about it.

"Going nuclear" has been _the_ fossil fuel alternative for decades. It has been the only scalable, proven, safe energy base load generation competitor to fossil fuels. The competition between those forms of energy is going back way before the advent of windmills and solar panels.

The fossil fuel industry has a huge interest in spreading FUD around nuclear, and the few accidents have been maximally exploited to hamper the development of nuclear. All the while, it has been known full well that fossil fuels have devastating impact on air quality and climate. Air pollution from fossil fuels alone is estimated at killing >3 million people per year. A great many disasters involving oil and fossil fuels have occurred, killing many more millions.

Yet, we act like nuclear is the danger, but we're happy to accept burning fossil fuels in the midst of our societies and offer up millions of lives each year to satisfy the lords of the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry in 2023 loves nuclear, mainly because the capital costs are so high it doesn't represent serious economic competition with cheap fossil sources. There is a theoretical world where we come to a political consensus, then build out nuclear to France-like levels with massive government spending and intervention. But this requires political consensus that the fossil fuel industry (correctly) recognizes is unlikely in most countries.

The major exception to the above rule is China, but even that (massive!) government-sponsored nuclear buildout is only expected to reach <18% of electricity generation by 2060. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-27/china-nuc...

Thank you! To save some of China's face here: they also push(ed) wwind and solar like crazy. And coal, but that's a different issue.

They take A decade, not decades. You're the one spreading FUD. There are successful new nuclear projects built very quickly in EU.

The only slow thing about nuclear is regulatory approval - hampered by EU that for many years didn't accept nuclear as "green".

Is nuclear more expensive that rebuilding the electrical grid and building enough storage to handle the wind/solar peaks and use the energy later? I don't think it's so clear. The solar/wind power plant itself is not the full cost.

The Hinkley C site was approved in 2010, it is estimated to go live in 2028. It was laready two years late in May 2022, and already overshot the budget by 50% by then. As of February 2023, the delay increased by another 15 months (resulting in the 2028 go live) and costs increased again to now 32.7 billion pounds. And already in 2020, new wind and solar utility scale projects were cheaper per kWh than Hinkley, withbsolar becoming cheaper and cheaper every year (Moore's law is still valid there).

Hinkley C is 3,260 MWe. In 2022 Europe installed a total of 41.4 GW of solar capacity, up from from 28.1 GW in 2021. That means more than 10x Hinkley C in a single year (2022), and cheaper per kWh.

Facts to found here:

https://api.solarpowereurope.org/uploads/5222_SPE_EMO_2022_f...

Nuclear is great stop gap until more renewablea are installed, not more not less.

And before ypu start, no, the German nuclear plants couldn't be run any longer (maintenance, fuel, safety), run time has already been extended multiple times, and the last nuclear exit, the badly organized one, was put in place by tze conservative CDU let government (not that you go and blame the Greens for it).

If that's the reason then those people are misinformed.

Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

The cost advantage is not true everywhere but the future is clear. Coal and gas will not become cheaper. Solar and wind is most expensive today it'll ever be.

Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

You can add at least two more zeros there, and possibly three or more. Storage right now is mostly dams and all the easy places have been done. Battery storage is really at the proof of concept state and if you take hydro out of the equation you're looking at a tenth of a percent at best.

A continental-scale mix (wind, solar...) is an efficient way to reduce the impact of intermittency on electricity production, and therefore storage ( https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-... ).

V2G ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid ) and gas turbines burning green hydrogen (generated by water electrolysis using over-produced electricity) are ramping up.

There is a good chance that with present day technology we could satisfy all of our energy needs using HVDC transmission lines. The main problem is that these are going to be easy infrastructure to attack in case of war or through terrorism.

True, however continental-scale grids interconnecting more and more interdependent nations/states are needed whatever the type of energy source used (even nuclear), and at least as exposed to terrorism as long-haul (U)HVDC lines.

>> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

First of all, I'm not aware of any large scale battery storage facilities anywhere, they are prohibitively expensive.

Second, coal and gas plant's main cost, at least in EU, is carbon tax. So the fact that they can't compete on price is a result of political decision, not of any shortcomings of the technology itself.

>> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half.

Battery costs will be rising for at least the next decade, before they can fall: we need to ramp up lithium production first, before we can do that there will be significant shortages driving the prices up. The more popular EVs will become the worse it will be.

Gas can't compete, because gas is too expensive. Coal actually could compete, it usually was the second type of power plant able to sell on the electricity markets, becasue CO2 certificates are just dirt cheap, way to cheap to move the needle, and coal as fuel was the least expensive (sun and win being free).

Sun and wind aren't 'free' but they have the lowest operating costs compared to alternatives and they have the lowest capital cost per W of installed power. But you probably should account for a storage component as well once those hit deployment in volume. I'm holding out for the next generation of storage batteries and then I'll pull the trigger on a system large enough to do both arbitrage and cover the day/night cycle of this house for a week. That works out to 70 to 100 KWh of storage, which is right now both too expensive to make sense (we still have net metering here) and a safety concern. But I expect the next generation storage to both be substantially cheaper and safer than what's out there today.

True, sun and wind aren't free. In terms of energy markets (too lazy to look up the up to dtae details, so it might have changed in the last 5 years), only the variable costs for producing one kWh of electricity are taking into account (so basically fuel plus CO2 certificates, over simplified a bit). In that sense, sun and wind are free. Don't ask me why fix costs aren't considered...

Grid stabilization is priced in, usually using specific contracts with producers and large consumers (read steel, chemical, paper industrial sites and other with huge electricity needs). In that regard, the European markets are working fine and as intended.

Long term, we have to solve the issue of electricity storage. Short term, we are totally fine with renewables producing <60% of our electricity, and on some days even more. Base load became much less of a problem, most hige consumers in the industrial sectors found ways to be much more flexible in their demand, driven in no small degree by being to make extra money on the spot markets (and we talk 10s of millions here).

Yes, consumer flexibility will be a huge part of the solution. You can already see this with power intensive industries operating when power is cheap (or even on surplus power) and reducing or even stopping their output when power is expensive. Obviously not all industries have this option, sometimes energy is only a small fraction of their expenses. But it is good to see at least this part of the market aspect of energy production and consumption operating as it should. Meanwhile I'm sitting pretty with 7.7 MWh net returned to the grid on my private installation.

Lucky you, we lookes at PV when we built our house. But back then, well, we just didn't have the necessary 15k left for an installation. As soon as we get an EV, for now the required size for four people is just to expensive, there will be PV installed alongside a wall box. Our roof is large enough, albeit propably tricky (almost flat, but not completely, covered by bitumen). But we'll see!

Flat roof is very doable, I have 34 out of 50 panels here on less than 10 degree slope on a flat roof. What's nice about it is that even though it isn't optimal when the sun is out it works very well when the sky is overcast, sometimes even better than the panels that are oriented towards the sun.

Good news! And since our house is pretty much running north-south, with an unobstructed view of the sun until around, say, mid-afternoon, the aide of our roof facing east should be quite suitable (to get more sun on it, we'd have to remove all the trees, moat of which are 30+ years old, something we don't want to do). One day, there will panels on that roof!

Neat, if you need any mounting tips let me know, I've had a few 'trial-and-error' runs at it.

as things are, that'll take a while (as in years!), but I'll come back to it!

CO2 certificates are not "dirt cheap", for Polish coal-based power plants they amount to 59% of the cost of producing electricity.

Still cheap enough to make coal one of the cheapest source on electricity markets, measured in generation cost per kWh. Since coal is the dirtiest fuel we have, those certificates should be expebsive enough to price out coal most of the time. That would be an ingenious combination of setting incenzives for market players im way that the result of market activities benefits everyone.

Then we'll ramp up production over the next few years. It's already happening at a phenomenal rate [0]. The world does not need vast amounts of storage in 2023: the goal for the next decade should be to build out renewables from 1% to ~50% of production everywhere, and to use storage mostly to smooth out the demand curve (which is currently highly profitable and happening quickly in places like CA [1].)

[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... [1] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/batteries/chart-the-rem...

No way they are misinformed, look at German power mix. Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

> Coal and gas plants are closing because they cannot compete on price with solar/wind + battery storage.

That did not happen anywhere in Europe. New gas plants are being constructed right now, and coal powerplants had to be restarted when Germans dropped nuclear.

> Storage in particular is so early in the cycle that we can expect the cost will drop at least in half. We've barely started making battery storage, the industry has 100x growth ahead.

We need to decarbonize today though. People don't want to pay the high prices, so how does the drop happen?

> And this is without pricing the real costs of using oil & coal & gas like all those people who have asthma (or worse) because they inhale the fumes.

Again, ask Germans about that. Their universal healthcare is going to get expensive soon if they continue on their "green" path.

> Even living in a city (cars) has clear statistical link to increased asthma and other respiratory diseases compared to places with less cars.

Completely orthogonal, people mostly agree on that, but they (where I live) want to charge the electric cars from nuclear energy.

Can you elaborate, to a fellow (?) German, about just how a "green" political agenda will increase public health care costs? Or a re you just mixing multiple talking points (renewables bad, nuclear good, public health care bad, private health care good) without making any sense at all?

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar - is the most polluting country in the whole EU.

Are they? Looks like it's Poland who is generating the most CO2 for electricity production.

https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...

I frequently hear that talking point (about Germany) from my fellow Czechs, and it's incredible, because we need more fossil fuels than Germans and also are poorer. (Even more paradoxically, more than a decade back, Czechia was ahead of Germany in solar power.) The conservatives have just taken over.

Germany’s repeated renewables efforts were long subject to the fact that Germany was Russia’s European project to keep fossil fuels going as long as possible.

No other European country with as much technical competence has inexplicably failed so hard at renewables over and over.

Now Germany is experiencing a transition in market conditions that is uncomfortably quick.

> Germany - the most vocal proponents of wind/solar

According to whom. There is lots of pushback against renewables - in particular wind- in Germany. It takes something crazy like 7 years to approve a wind farm here. The current government is trying to improve the situation. But I would strongly question the premise of your comment e.g. Denmark seems a lot more successful.

Yeah, its called free will, you know. I dont have to like everything, period.

Most thinking people move beyond this position. An arbitrary position is no position at all.

A weak opinion, strongly hold. Or some such.

A 5 whys analysis will likely get to "people benefiting from fossil fuel pollution not being costed in" one or two steps back from that guy who doesn't even know why he objects to wind power.

I think it is mostly a confusion of identity.

We are used to the people pushing against technological progress being someone other than older and somewhat tech-capable men.

These people have been holding out and formed their arguments back when they first learned about renewables, which was twenty or more years ago. Technology has continued to progress but their positions ossified early.

Now that the future they denied is here we are seeing vanilla guilt-backed rationalizing. We just aren’t used to seeing it from these guys because they were always excited back when technological progress generally proved them right.

I read a comment lately along the lines of "80% of conservative outrage is caused by understanding how things work fornthe very first time". There is some truth to it.

Which is as insightful as "80% of progressive outrage is caused by not understanding how things work at all". The is some truth to this too.

>And I am pretty sure that was no fossil fuel lobbyist. It was just a guy who is against things. And there are plenty of those.

That's how all propaganda functions. Fossil fuel/nuclear lobbyists pump ideas into the heads of the easily duped via mass media at a range of different intellectual levels and then the readers will absorb it like it was their own idea and echo it back.

The only difference between the upper and the lower intellectual levels of propaganda is that the upper level of propaganda might rely more on logical consistency, misdirection and attempts to make the reader feel smart while the lower levels will rely more on repetition of a simple message.

I think it's just coming from experience. They remember how every past attempt at making cars eco-friendly eventually resulted in worse personal experience via taxes, prices and worse repairability, so any new one gets a "no" by default.

This. And this is generic: since the first oil shock (50 years ago) many Western nations were nearly always bathing into some economic crisis, therefore many think that experience shows that any attempt, on any front, leads to a new downturn.

It also seems true when it comes to innovation: an innovation today becomes/creates a problem tomorrow.

The ugly truth is that propaganda works, especially over long time periods. The fossil fuel industry has been funding propaganda for decades now, longer than most people have been alive. They commissioned studies about climate change in the 50s and knew exactly what was going to happen and how it would affect their businesses so they got ahead of it with continuous ad campaigns and political activism.

This has been going on for so long we are now in an era where for a sizable percentage of the population truth no longer matters. That was the long term goal all along, once climate change became otherwise undeniable the people would be disassociated from reality and still support the fossil fuel industry.

There is that and then there is Greenpeace campaining against nuclear non-stop because Choronobyl'.

And three mile island and Fukushima. Nuclear has some serious concerns that are clearly not addressed enough.

Usually this is when the low death toll is brought up but it's not just about deaths. It's about environmental destruction. And the potential to do so in the far future through its waste.

I don't think we should move away from nuclear altogether but use it as a buffer only for the times when the real green sources are low (eg solar and wind). And we should find a permanent waste solution.

And Windscale (whitewashed to 'Sellafield') and an endless series of near-catastrophes.

Oh yeah totally, they had a meltdown too. Though it was an idiotic operation at that time, with such a cavalier attitude to safety that I should hope will not be repeated in this day and age. They even opposed the air filters that were introduced anyway and reduced a lot of the contamination during the meltdown.

I didn't remember to mention it because it was not an energy generation operation but a military one for nuclear weapon manufacturing.

In NL we apparently almost had a major incident at Petten.

https://www.trouw.nl/nieuws/bijna-meltdown-kernreactor-pette...

And that's the one that is public, there is at least one more that is still under wraps and possibly more than that. Nuclear is only as safe as the people running it and that is a major issue even before you bring in economics. You can't treat safety as a cost in installations like these and inevitably that's what happens. What I also find disingenuous is that in calculating the cost of electricity production from nuclear power capex required for the eventual dismantling isn't taken into account at all, and those costs are inevitably massive.

Wow I had no idea of that one. I actually lived pretty close to there.

Seems like the incidents happened in part because the operators couldn't see in the dark after a power outage, and the emergency torch had been taken by someone to fix their car... :X You can't make this stuff up.

Yes, that's how it happened (I heard it from a person that was closer to the source). And because you can't make this stuff up I don't think it is possible to responsibly operate a nuclear reactor because the normalization of deviation is impossible to guard against over the career span of a typical human. Everywhere people work they make mistakes and do stupid stuff and over time this accumulates to the point where the 'experts' are themselves the danger but because they've done it for so long nobody can do a better job than they can in the short term. And then there is aging gear, embrittlement and a thousand other things that can (and do) go wrong.

You can't fix human nature and that's the root cause of many of these problems. And because of that I'm very much against nuclear power, no matter what the short term advantages may seem to be. Sooner or later every plant needs to be de-commissioned, will have an incident or will end up as a target or a casualty of something or other. Multiply that by the number of power plants that you'd need to make the world reliant on nuclear power and the number of accidents would quickly rise above what is acceptable (if we're not already there).

Nuclear proponents are quick to argue that this was all with old technology and newer designs are safer but people are still the same and even new technology resulting in working installations will eventually see those same installations age.

Financial liability on nuclear plants for nuclear disasters is capped at ~0.5% of the cost of a cleanup like Fukushima/Chernobyl because sophisticated private insurers fully understand the risks and categorically refuse to shoulder them.

Thats why the taxpayer is forced into providing free insurance for every nuclear power plant. The private sector would only ever build solar and wind and storage if externalities like this or CO2/coal pollution were fully priced in. Since the government has a vested (military) reason for wanting a thriving civilian nuclear industrial ecosystem, however, they provide lavish subsidies - some costed, while others (like this one) are not.

There are a lot of articles in the media sourced from profit driven pro nuclear lobbies telling us that it's totally 110% safe now though - none of which acknowledge the private sector's categorical refusal to shoulder the financial risks, obviously.

So, presumably Greenpeace, who are apparently motivated purely by a desire to protect the environment, must be the ones that are misleading us.

The irony: we borrow money against our future selfs assuming endless economical growth. But when we extract finite natural resources and use up a finite pollution buffer, we do not pay our future selfs the opportunity costs.

> we borrow money against our future selfs assuming endless economical growth

No, we do not.

On social media it's the conspiracy theorists and "compulsive contrarians" who oppose photovoltaics and EVs. They might be the useful idiots of the oil/gas industry but their stupidity is organic.

> utilizing or selling "free" energy from fossil fuels? Companies extract these, they often don't pay for the energy (just the cost of extraction)

Is "solar" and "wind" energy not free in the same sense?

Also: are the balancing costs of the network paid by those people selling the "free" renewable energy? As I see they often don't pay for that (not to mention the pollution that causes, which is still not paid by any energy producer)