Actually, that report is stronger than you're implying.

It's saying solar + batteries is enough to supply 97% of power cheaper than any other way in sunny locales.

It's possible to get 99.99% of your power with solar + batteries, you'd just need a lot of batteries. The news is that batteries have got so cheap that you're better installing enough batteries to hit 97% and leave your natgas peakers idle 97% of the time. That number used to be a lot lower, and that 97% number will be higher every year.

The other cool thing about that report is that it gives a number of 90% for non-ideal places. Sure solar is cheap in sunny locales, but that solar is cheap in places that aren't sunny is far more exciting to me.

I'm afraid I have to ask here for a citation for your very confident but to my knowledge wrong statement that Russia (I suppose you mean the USSR) financed the green movement in Germany. Russia is equally a builder and supplier for nuclear energy, so makes significant profit on that angle and has no reason to fight nuclear.

Also the initial green movement was not against nuclear power per se but rather a peace movement against nuclear weapons, the concept just expanded over time to cover also civilian nuclear power, notably after Tchernobyl.

In contrast Russia is indeed known to finance both the far left (which has a lot of 'Ostalgia') and far right (whereby nationalism works against Western unity and strength) movements.

Thats actually not that wrong, because there were contracts between Russia and germany for over then years, where Russia offered very cheap gas for the German industry (Nord-Stream I and II was build for that).

But beside this, Germany was leading in the anti-nuclear movement, and finally shut down there last nuclear power plant two years ago. Currently, in Germany, renewable energy sources [1] are around 75% in the summer and and 55% in the winter month. Renewable are growing fast [2].

[1] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart....

[2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power_...

Nuclear power is great if you have it. Not even the French seem capable of building new ones at a timescale or cost that is relevant in todays world dominated by renewables together with storage recently kicking into overdrive.

Whether or not this was true historically, its not really relavent now, where the primary green thing is solar which competes with russian gas.

So blowing up their own nuklear power plant in 1986 was a Soviet-Russian plot to make the German Green party popular? I find that a bit hard to believe ;)

(because the German anti-nuclear-energy movement and the rise of the Green party all got kickstarted by the Chernobyl disaster)

My spidery senses after engaging with online anti-nuclear power propagandists in Sweden: they are still at it.

More, but not as much more as people often naively expect because it turns out converting liquid fuel into motion by burning/ exploding the fuel isn't very efficient on a small scale whereas electric motors are very efficient, so 1TW year of "People driving to work" in ICE cars does not translate into needing 1TW year extra electricity generation if they have electric cars instead, let alone 1TW year of extra network capacity to deliver it.

Where we're replacing fossil fuel heat with a heat pump we don't get that efficiency improvement from motors - burning fuel was 100% efficient per se, but the heat pump is > 100% efficient in those terms because it's not making heat just moving it.

Nuclear is much less popular than almost any generation technology, so you're fighting a significant political battle to make that happen.

One of the bigger other sources of emissions is transport; transport requires some of the electricity is condensed into a portable form regardless of the specifics — batteries, hydrogen, chunks of purified metal to burn, whatever — and that condensation means it doesn't get any extra novel benefit from expensive-but-consistent nuclear over cheap-but-predictably-intermittent renewables.

The scale is such that if we imagine a future with fully electrified cars, the batteries in those cars are more than enough to load-balance the current uses of the grid, and still are enough for the current uses of the grid when those batteries have been removed from the vehicles due to capacity wear making them no longer useful in a vehicle.

The best time for more nuclear power was the 90s, the second best was 10 years ago; unless you have a cunning plan you've already shown to an investor about how to roll out reactors much much faster, I wouldn't hold your breath on them.

>we should scale up nuclear too.

With a 5x higher LCOE and lead times of 15-20 years instead of 1-2 for solar/wind deployments, allocating money to scale up nuclear as well will just make the transition happen slower and at higher cost.

I see transmission lines mentioned a lot, but surely keeping the lines we have loaded 100% of the time is part of the equation and batteries can help with that too.

I’d love to know how well loaded the lines are and a cost analysis of batteries at every sensible junction. Things like charging batteries close to solar and discharging them at night and having residential batteries to cope with peak demand.

It's OK to be inefficient sometimes.

How up-to-date are you on industrial battery installations? I ask because we're literally in the midst of an energy storage revolution, with battery capacity exploding massively in the last 2-3 years and no slowdown on the horizon. You may be arguing from a point of completely outdated information.

If you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to make all your vehicles electric, you have enough battery manufacturing capacity to cover a week or two of not just dunkelflaute but even "why is the moon hovering directly between us and the sun, isn't it supposed to be moving?", which is darker than that.

Let's take the worst case scenario and use it as an Argument.

You do t have to handle dubkelflauten because there is still gas capacity and gas can cover the 1% of times that it is necessary.

The Spain blackout was caused by a multitude of reasons. Lack of stability was one of the factors, but there were other causes, such as energy generation facilities disconnecting while the oscillations were still under a nominal range, or a generator ordered to become online to induce stability, that started driving the load in the wrong direction. All this was compounded by a distribution network unable to redistribute or at least isolate the problems to individual regions, resulting in a complete blackout.

All in all, it's several things that need to be reinforced. The distribution network needs to be smarter. The energy generation facilities need to be tested through their entire voltage range, so they can be counted upon. And there has to be more voltage inertia available in the network.

That is more or less the recommendation from the report, except it wasn't a shortage of intertia, more a shortage of grid voltage control, which current rules prevent renewables from participating in, even if they are capable of it (it's mostly a case of the inverters, not the panels/turbines they draw from. Same with inertia). The blackout was mainly due to a failure of multiple participants in the grid to do what they were supposed to (failing to provide the voltage control it was contracted to do, in one case potentially failing to not drive oscillations into the grid, and failing to remain online within the required voltage range). A lot of the recommendations in the report are 'we should check the plants are up to scratch'.

Yeah, I've seen this with our own solar installation - when the grid frequency dips even a bit, our house cuts itself off from the grid, including whatever power it was feeding back. It seems like a recipe for instability - grid is overstrained, so the frequency dips, and suddenly tons of distributed solar generation drops off and makes the grid even more strained.

And with UPSes that beep when they kick on, it's become very apparent that this happens basically daily during the summer, when power demand for air conditioning is high.

The investigation has shown it was in fact nothing to do with renewable energy sources despite the noise made at the time - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/what-caused-iberian-...

The root of the issue here is underinvestment in storage. The weather is unpredictable, but the Sun is not. It doesn't suddenly get vastly brighter. Oscillation occurs within a predictable range. But partially because storage keeps getting cheaper, countries are investing at the bare minimum right now. Why buy $100 worth of batteries today when you can get it for $80 in three years?

I don't think you will find a day where there is no sun and no wind in all of europe. The costal areas usually gave constant wind and the south constant sun.

And we do have and build much more high voltage transmission lines.

And otherwise there is no technical limit to build lots of rare earth free batteries. Once they are common in allmost every household and once electric cars can be used for that, too, I don't see any technical problem.

It takes time and investment of course. And pragmatism till we are there. I don't like coal plants, but I am not in favor of just shutting them down now.

We will take the day off I guess as we run the critical stuff on nuclear. I don't fancy nuclear because it's too involved, takes forever to build, its a big deal, needs long term planning. I also don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to take care of a nuclear infrastructure that powers the world for generations, disasters will happen. Let's use the quick, simple, safe and unlimited potential. Nuclear has its place for sure though.

> What do you do during a windless cloudy day or (any) night? No solar, no wind, no nothing. Small clouds, large power fluctuations, and you get grid failures.

Even when it's cloudy there's still light, it's not as if it's pitch black when there's clouds, what do you think is illuminating everything still?

But efficiency in solar panels needs to increase, which is happening.

I hope someday the word 'crisis' gets a breather. That poor, abused, overworked and misunderstood word :(

Why would they be less likely to be bombed? Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant got bombed in 2022.

There's no strong deterrent there. These plants don't blow up like nukes, or even Chernobyl. Nuclear disasters require very precise conditions to sustain the chain reaction. Blowing up a reactor with conventional weapons will spread the fuel around, which is a nasty pollution, but localized enough that it's the victim's problem not the aggressor’s problem.

Why do you even mention transformers and cables as an implied alternative to nuclear power plants? Power plants absolutely require power distribution infrastructure, which is vulnerable to attacks.

From the perspective of resiliency against military attacks, solar + batteries seem the best - you can have them distributed without any central point of failure, you can move them, and the deployments can be as large or small as you want.

(BTW, this isn't argument against nuclear energy in general. It's safe, and we should build more of it, and build as much solar as we can, too).

Solar plants are fairly resilient to bomb damage: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/06/02/ukrainian-solar-plant...

Bombing solar infrastructure works about as well as bombing a farm. Solar is way too cheap to be worth bombing.

That is true, but I'd rather deal with a busted solar farm than a busted nuclear reactor

You chose oil for your example, but what about natural gas? If Europe needs natural gas, they can just buy it… and give money directly to their enemy, Russia. Just buying what you need isn’t without second order effects. The second order effects of solar and energy diversification are more palatable than directly funding an enemy.

“Look at Japan”. Ok, let’s look. They attacked the US in 1941 because of the US oil embargo. Their current situation is predicated on the US continuing to be the world’s policeman, ensuring that shipments get from point A to B. There will come a time when that assumption will not hold.

Things change.

> If Europe needs oil, they can buy it, it's completely fungible and sold at auction in huge volumes every day

That didn't end well when the oil and gas supplier decided to invade Europe. They even run clips showing how Europe will freeze in the winter and be poor if keep supporting the invaded ally.

Check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvdBzZVVovc

If EU wasn't heavily invested in green tech and efficiency, the Russians film might have had become a reality.

Just use the fusion in the skies.

Energy independence. The US fought wars for oil before fracking. Supply chains are complex and disruptable. Dependence on Russia for fuel leads to... dependence on Russia. Or Iran. Or Saudi. Whatever country it may be, it's dependence, and dependence can always be weaponized. This is pure geopolitics. "You can just buy oil" is deeply foolish.

We now see it's not sensible to depend on other countries be it for oil, ore, nuclear umbrella or cloud computing providers.

I think we cannot buy oil and gas only from sane countries or we would already.

How can you regain sovereignty? Installing solar and heat pumps is part of this process.

> The reason for the switch to wind and solar is the global warming argument

I hate this argument. Why should one care about global warming in order to switch to solar? It just makes sense economically. Even if you think that the world is flat, solar energy is still cheaper than anything else.

This was true a couple of years ago.

This is no longer true.

Storage has become a lot cheaper very rapidly. The LCOE of solar with storage covering the night is now competitive.

Power used to drive the wheels of cars & trucks, energy used to heat houses.

It's crazy that the US generates so little from solar, given the vast sunny deserts they have available.

I think the month matters for this comparison.

Rebuilding nuclear?

You mean like OL3 or the political noise with hundreds of billions in subsidies needed to get the projects started?

In the summer, yes. Winter... I'm in the UK and my entire roof is solar panels (6.5 kW). I get about 35 kWh a day typically in the summer which is plenty (don't have an electric car or heat pump so usage is 10-15 kWh).

In the winter though... In February there were 7 days where the average we produced was about 2 kWh/day, so I need about 5 times more roof areas and £50k. And that's without a heat pump.

Fortunately we have wind... But even so it's hard to see how we can get away from gas completely without either a lot of nuclear or some crazy changes to the market.

The only thing that turns in this conversation is Earth and solar output in December would slightly differ.

Absolutely, and buying fossil fuel has definitely been working, and it'll probably continue to work.

But if in the future we don't have to buy as much fossil fuel as we do today, it'll probably have sizable effects on our economies.