Comment on Spicy Air ☢️
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 days agoBut solar and nuclear aren’t the same thing. You can’t compare a solar kWh with a nuclear one. If you want to guarantee the same constant output from solar as you get from nuclear, you need immense battery storage or hugely oversized solar.
The choice isn’t “Solar/Wind OR Nuclear”, the choice is “Solar/Wind AND fossil fuels” or “Solar/Wind AND nuclear”. Every time someone opposes nuclear power in favour of something else, that something else is fossil fuels, even if you personally think you’re promoting renewables.
Redjard@reddthat.com 5 days ago
That is priced in yeah. Until recently that would have made it more expensive, but we now have the tipping point where overbuilt solar and batteries beat nuclear in price so finally there are no more caveats. Solar is cheaper, even at high latitudes like in northern europe, even for baseload application with big battery buffers right next to the solar farm.
I see a ton of them being spammed out like that now, solar fields with batteries in a small house in the middle, or in boxes along one side of the field.
Solar itself is so cheap, that overbuilding or latitude hardly factor in, it’s mostly about the batteries.
The solar costs are also mainly the land and the construction of the frames.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Honestly, that sounds extremely unlikely. I don’t live that far north in europe, and while I manage about 0kWh on my residental panels on a yearly basis. Thanks to seasonal changes, I would either need 5 more rooftops to keep the power on during january, or I would need to bank something like 700kWh to make it through 3 winter months. That’s not counting the electric car, or heating. Heating would roughly quadruple the numbers (being almost entirely clustered when solar isn’t producing), and the car would add roughly another house on top (assuming 50% is charged away from home).
Quick maths that I did because I wanted to try going off-grid: I would need ~100m2 of solar panels, and 2500kWh of battery storage. Or on a national level, 63 TWh of storage as well as just under a 1000km2 of solar panels if everyone lived as low-footprint as we do. And that’s just housing, it doesn’t include commercial buildings or industry.