Who is GW? And why do you bring him in?
Comment on Spicy Air ☢️
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 days agoThere is a set amount of budget for replacing power infrastructure, and a set amount of capacity to be filled.
Any time a nuclear plant is starting to be built now, they could have instead already finished a renewable plant.
There is no longer any exclusive niche nuclear plants can fill, renewables and batteries beat it on all metrics now, even where stable baseload is needed.
If you need a GW of plants, you won’t build both a nuclear and a renewable GW plant, you pick one. If that GW replaces a coal plant, then nuclear will see the coal being burned for 10 more years while under construction.
The grid produces as needed, prices don’t vary enough anyone will use less power because low-emission sources are not yet available. Any nuclear power capacity under construction that could have been renewables will cause their equivalent capacity in fossile sources to be used an additional 10 years compared to if renewables had been built.
quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Redjard@reddthat.com 6 days ago
Gigá Whatts, inventor of the plant. To this day we honour his invention by using GW to refer to a plant the size of his first plant. It’s roughly equivalent to an oak with stem circumference of 20m.
quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Thanks, that makes sense. I’m not used to see abbreviation of units without a number next to it.
What I’m seeing is that renewables farms are being built AND fossil fuel plants. Nothing is being substituted only added more of the same.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
I would love to see a source on that, and how much overdimensioning it would take to achieve.
And every time they build a train, they could have easily built 10.000 bicycles instead. Not saying bikes aren’t incredibly useful, because they are. Not saying you shouldn’t build bikes, but I am saying they are very different things. If you try to replace cars with bikes, you’ll fail every time someone wants to travel more than 20km. If you try to replace cars with trains, you’ll fail ever times someone wants to travel less than 20km and not spend a billion bucks.
What you need to do is replace cars with trains AND bikes. But if you oppose trains “in favour of bikes”, you’re actually promoting cars. And vice versa.
Redjard@reddthat.com 5 days ago
I’ll try to find some more sources later, for now I only have appeal to authority, sorry. I took a lecture on modern grid design for renewables and had a lot of coverage specifically on the state of renewable profuction and storage and the pricing.
At a cursory look the numbers online are hard to parse because articles usually are not clear on the specifics they base their costsbon, like what sort of stability the renewables can achieve at a stated cost. From what I have seen a lotnof numbers do have to be about still varying supply over the day and accross seasons.
There is another argument (that used to be used before this recent price crossover), which maybe makes it easier to accept without up to date numbers: Because of the long build-time, you can buy the batteries 10 years from now, comparing to a nuclear plant that starts construction today. Surely you can see that the battery improvements over the next decades, specifically for grid batteries, will be huge. Currently batteries are still often very similar to car batteries, there are entirely new chemistries that will be in production 10 years down the line.
It’s not like I am saying we should scrap ongoing constructions.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Sure, but that’s a shitty comparison, because I can also build 20 nuclear powerplants, and bring costs WAY down. And that’s the thing. These comparisons are always “If we keep boosting X, and supressing Y, then X will perform better!”. Yes. Duh.
Look at what China is doing. They’ve built dozens of plants in the past years, and have >30 under construction right now, with ~150 planned. They’re building them for a fraction of the cost, because they’re not completely reinventing them every single time.
Fair, we shouldn’t. But my worry is that even in 10 years, we’re still going to be using lots of fossil fuels, and that will always be lower if we ALSO build nuclear. Or at the very least stop heavily opposing it.