The last government intentionally banned the cheapest source of energy, onshore wind, from being built in England, by making it so that a single complaint could stop a project.
I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.
I see a lot of irrational online hate for wind power - even going as far as wanting to dismantle offshore farms.
I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry - they have the means, the motive and a track record of flexible morals.
A lot of currently very rich and powerful people lose in a world where most countries and even people can generate most of the power they require.
The conservative media (Daily Mail, Telegraph etc - e.g. James Delingpole, climate change denier) are quite capable of formenting this kind of thing all on their own, simply for clicks. The average reader is old and afraid of change. Anything new is scary to them and can easily be magnified into a massive, largely fictitious, horror.
People might object to the view of wind farms, but they'll also object to any other new building. There are quite a lot of existing power stations in scenic areas! Torness, Longannet, Cockenzie come to mind in the Lothians/Fife area; any one could be seen from miles around, as they were built on the coast for water access. The latter two have been demolished. There is no way you could build them today without a similar huge level of objection. Similarly there is a spot in the plain of Yorkshire where you used to see three coal-fired power stations in relatively close proximity, dominating the countryside.
And if you look around London, you'll see the (long closed and repurposed) Battersea and Bankside powerstations. Yes, people built several massive coal fired power stations right in the middle of the city! No wonder there was a smog problem worse than 90s Beijing or LA. Again, completely inconcievable that you could build them today.
Once you build it and it exists for a few years, the complaints melt away. Leave it long enough and there will be a society for preserving historic wind farms.
I think the complaints have also been that people close to the wind farms don't see much economic benefit from them, and only get the negative (noise, loss of countryside, etc.). I believe that's changing though https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-672...
The same narrative is being pushed on Germany for instance. I think it’s quite simple.
Renewable energy is a route to energy independence for various nations that were previously highly dependent on foreign nations and corporations and there are very powerful fossil fuel interconnected groups / nations that are terrified of that.
Russia wants Germany to buy Russian gas. The U.S. wants Europe to buy their gas’s too. The Saudis want Europe to buy their oil. Wind turbines, solar power and electric vehicles are a direct threat to that hegemony.
The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
I believe that to be the primary root cause of the geopolitical instability we see today globally.
It is not any fossil fuel, it is specifically oil and gas. Coal is not a problem for energy independence as it is much more evenly distributed on Earth.
What Germany has done with its reliance on Russian gas is truly insane. Not only they closed nuclear stations, but they also have been closing coal power stations. They should be pushing electrical vehicles and modernization of coal plants instead as China is doing. Even from green perspective an electrical car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant generates less CO2 than a car running on oil products.
> Coal is not a problem for energy independence as it is much more evenly distributed on Earth.
Not true - it's just more prevalent in Europe than oil, especially in Germany. And the CO2 emissions are much worse, which is where all this starts from.
Note in terms of nuclear - using current technology you still need to dig your fuel out of the ground from very specific places in the world - though a different set of countries ( apart from Russia ).
> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels in all rock, soil, and water. It is the highest-numbered element found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements.[12] Uranium is the 48th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust.[60] The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat[61][62] that keeps the Earth's outer core in the liquid state and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics.
> Uranium's concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million,[11][22] or about 40 times as abundant as silver.[17] The Earth's crust from the surface to 25 km (15 mi) down is calculated to contain 10¹⁷ kg (2×10¹⁷ lb) of uranium while the oceans may contain 10¹³ kg (2×10¹³ lb).[11] The concentration of uranium in soil ranges from 0.7 to 11 parts per million (up to 15 parts per million in farmland soil due to use of phosphate fertilizers),[63] and its concentration in sea water is 3 parts per billion.[22]
> Uranium is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.[12][22] Uranium is found in hundreds of minerals, including uraninite (the most common uranium ore), carnotite, autunite, uranophane, torbernite, and coffinite.[12] Significant concentrations of uranium occur in some substances such as phosphate rock deposits, and minerals such as lignite, and monazite sands in uranium-rich ores[12] (it is recovered commercially from sources with as little as 0.1% uranium[17]).
Now, 0.1% uranium is 1000 parts per million, which is a lot more than 0.7 to 11. But that doesn't mean current technology is incapable of recovering uranium from these 300× lower concentrations. It's just that it requires processing 300× as much rock, which is expensive, so it can't compete in the market with more concentrated sources.
It doesn't affect the amount of energy required to enrich the uranium once it's been extracted from the rock, just the amount of energy required to extract the uranium from the rock. It just requires leaching the uranium from a larger amount of material.
I understand that you might randomly spread FUD like this if you haven't bothered to do any calculations at all because you don't care whether what you're saying is true or false. You're off by orders of magnitude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Nuclear_reactio... says uranium as burned in a breeder reactor yields 80TJ/kg; if your soil contains 10ppm of uranium, you're getting 800MJ per kg of soil. Lignite coal is 10–20MJ/kg, so regular soil yields 40–80 times as much energy as a source of uranium as coal does as a source of carbon.
Or, looking at it a different way, to supply a given amount of energy from uranium, you only have to mine about 2% as much random soil as if you were mining coal from an open-air coal deposit. (Subsequent processing is somewhat different, involving leaching with sulfuric acid.) Since mining coal requires significantly less energy than the coal yields, uranium mining is not close to net-zero on its energy return anywhere in the world.
Nuclear reactors are not economically competitive with solar and PV, but that's a different issue.
Your calculations are ignoring the costs of enrichment - you can't just feed soil into your reactor - whereas you can just feed the raw coal into your furnace.
Now I freely admit I don't know the costs of enrichment. I just used your numbers - you said you'd just have to mine 300 times as much rock - and obviously that's 300 times more expensive - for something which is already not energy cheap.
ie to convince me you have to show the full costs of mining and enrichment, to the point you actually have a fuel that's reactor ready.
And even if that's net positive energy - I'd suspect you'd be much better in investing in wind, hydro, tidal and solar and a decent storage and grid system.
Sometimes I feel nuclear is fetishised because it's cool science - however I'm more interested in practical solutions, and if that means a simple wind or water turbine - so be it.
Happy to be convinced otherwise - but you need to show the numbers.
"Enrichment", in the context of nuclear power, doesn't mean extracting uranium from ore or purifying the uranium. "Enrichment" means increasing the percentage of fissionable ²³⁵U in the uranium. This process starts with extremely pure uranium, for example in the form of UF₆, so it's the same process regardless of how dilute the original uranium was. So the energy required for it doesn't depend on the concentration of the original uranium deposit.
In the case of things like coal, the energy cost of mining is significant compared to the energy obtained from it. In the case of uranium, simply because the amount of material processed is so small by comparison, it is not significant. As I showed above, it would not even be significant if you have to mine 300 times as much rock as uranium mining currently does.
Obviously you would be better off investing in wind, solar, and storage than in nuclear energy. (Hydroelectric and tidal are less clear wins.) But that's not because sufficiently concentrated uranium deposits are rare. On the contrary, there's literally nowhere on the planet where uranium is insufficiently concentrated.
Voting behaviors will seem strange if you look at things exclusively through the lens of a young-ish worker when you live in a society that is 35% retirees, 5% wealthy, and 5% living off the state.
It's not Russia, the US and the Saudis, it's Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, etc. honestly Aramco and Gazprom probably have very little influence on decision making in Europe and the US compared to the local interests.
> The other aligned narrative is nuclear and I consider it to be Trojan horse to continued reliance on fossil fuels at least for the next 25-30 years whilst countries like Germany would argue with NIMBY’s and politics to try and even build just one new power station.
Nuclear is not a Trojan horse, nuclear proliferation and meltdown fears condemned Europe to energy dependence. It's too late now, the capacity should have been built 30 years ago, but the successful fearmongering meant there was virtually no construction for the last 30 years[1].
The real Trojan horse is natural gas, they greenwashed it, invested and continue to invest in natural gas projects[2].
Fraunhofer Institute did an in depth study into the costs of nuclear. That it is cheaper is a myth.
Nuclear is a distraction to defocus from renewables and battery tech. There’s a reason this kind of nuclear propaganda is all over TikTok amongst right wing social media.
Never said it's cheaper. What I implied was that if the construction of nuclear reactors had continued in the 90s, today we would be in a position where fossil fuels would be a much smaller part of the energy mix.
In France for example the domestic energy production is virtually free from fossil fuels. [1]
In other parts of Europe, all the capacity that renewables provide has been offset by the shutting down of nuclear reactors. Instead of replacing fossil fuels they replaced nuclear. See Germany's energy mix for example [2].
I’m not sure this is a fossil fuel industry thing. I think there are just people who really dislike the appearance of windmills in the landscape. Onshore, it is often better to put windmills on hills where they will be more prominent and so any one windmill can be ‘local’ to many people. Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.
I come from Cornwall in the UK, and whenever I go back there I am struck by how many on shore windfarms and turbines there are there. As you drive through the countryside they are everywhere.
I have asked hundreds of local people what they think of them over the years, and not one of them have ever said anything about them spoiling the view. The farmers love them as they get subsidies for putting them on their land, and generally people think they are doing a good thing and are happy to tolerate them.
I personally dont think this is an issue with spoiling the view .
Same in Germany. Farmers (most conservative population group) love renewable energy. Every farmer I know tries to get wind turbines build on their land and have their roofs packed with PV. Yet the conservative parties are the biggest blockers for the energy transition.
Farmers love subsidies. Guaranteed price paid for every kWh they produce. Yet there is remote shutdown implemented in new large PV installations and the love is slowly disappearing.
> Offshore, wind farms may ‘spoil’ a view out to sea, though they are also harder to oppose.
In my experience off-shore wind, even off a popular tourist beech has very little impact. Often just about visible in the haze in the distance.
The impact of onshore wind is definitely more notable. I personally don't find it that offensive, I find them elegant in the day way as an aircraft might be. Also, the blot on the land could be almost completely eradicated in hours if something better was invented tomorrow. Compared to the decades long process of decommissioning even fossil fueled power plants that seems like a pretty big win.
It's why I specifically mentioned offshore - there has been huge growth in the UK of these - and most of them are so far out to see you'd be lucky to see them even on a clear day.
The logic against them seems to be - can't rely on wind power alone ( true - but nobody is suggesting that ), so we must destroy them all as a symbol of 'netzero'. It makes no sense.
>I do wonder who is fermenting this - the obvious place to look here is the fossil fuel industry
Yeh, maybe. But then there is a certain class of people who live lives of wealth and leisure who like to go boating on their $10 million yachts, for whom windmills "spoil the view". And I think their opinions are somewhat consistent regardless of whether they are heavily invested in fossil fuels or not.
If it were just about windmills, the gigantic oil companies are flush with cash to invest in them and don't much care where the profits come from as long as they keep rolling in.
As we can see down thread, people have got into a terrible mess of duelling propaganda and gone mad about wind power.
We can have cheap clean energy, it requires a small amount of change, oh no, let's destroy everything instead.
I'm going to start suggesting that planning should have a local referendum: approve this set of projects and you'll get cheaper electricity. Disapprove and your bill goes up. Democratic choice, but with consequences.
As a resident of Scotland, I'm looking forward to zonal pricing. It might also balance out the London centric nature of the UK, as I expect it to end up with higher prices.
I agree with the incentives for zonal pricing to encourage clean local
production. The downside however is that the grid becomes defunded and
a tragedy of commons ensues. We invest in common infrastructure
precisely because of variance, which in the long run we hope to
ameliorate.
Zonal pricing (UK) does not conflict with grid funding, it is the grid funding. It also exposes the economic incentives for allowing new grid infrastructure to be built.
I hope you're right. Incentives both ways and support for national
infra is ideal. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia just showed [0] how
flexible grids can be at the international level. However I think at
the national level some countries aren't that happy to support
national grids.
There is something poetic, about the last charge of dying ideologies being an attack and defense of windmills.
We will see a return of composure as central element communications culture. If you get emotional or irrational angry, you are considered possessed, ridden by loas and not worthy of communication.
"I say Sir, the rabble seems to be quite in tatters and without a plan, all back and forth on windmills, but ultimately in the dark."
That would not work. Just include a few million in your budget to convince the population of SmallVille and you can start building your coal-fired power station.
The UK is still implementing the Large Combustion Plant Directive ( https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/1973/2015-12-31 ), so separate UK level legislation would be required to legalize any new coal plant. Very unlikely scenario.
> Similarly, in the U.K., any individual who sues to stop a new project on environmental grounds—say, to oppose a new road or airport—generally has their legal damages capped at £5,000, if they lose in court. “Once you’ve done that,” Bowman said, “you’ve created a one-way system, where people have little incentive to not bring spurious cases to challenge any new development.”
Not directly stated about wind power, but there is this account of why lawsuits might be common, slowing and derailing projects because the damages if you lose in your complaint are capped at a relatively low figure (not low for the average person, but not that expensive either).
Of course, but I think a country can't survive long term if it's focused on raising the property prices of those with already expansive houses especially given the demographic slowdown/collapse. Or am I crazy?
I think you misread it. The context was, _not low_ (ie. high) for the average person. For someone with a higher than average wealth however, £5k isn't all that much, especially if it could potentially protect the value of their assets
I'd wager that for the sort of person who has the desire to care deeply about stopping windmills being built (perhaps feeling a need to 'conserve' the old way of doing things), instead of say, worrying about putting food on the table - this is pocket change.
due to the screwed up energy pricing system, if there's a single watt of electricity in the grid produced by burning gas, we pay for the entire grid output as if it was gas
That is how literally everything in a market gets priced. When you buy an X, the price of it naturally trends to match the most expensive X that will be sold. In this case X is a watt of energy. But you can substitute any good or service.
No product on a real market ever works like that (otherwise all goods of the same kind would cost the same everywhere in a country, priced at the marginal cost of supplying it to the most remote island community, which everyone can attest is not how markets work).
Such a behavior only happens on artificial markets that have been designed for that purpose to match an ideological vision of how an “ideal market” should behave.
Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.
> Turns out the “ideal market” is a dystopia instead of the intended utopia.
Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives. You have little to no information asymmetry, you need to strike a price that clears the market because you must balance production and demand.
Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
> Why? This market is pretty much ideal and sets the right incentives.
Says whom?
> Why should sellers of renewable energy be forced to sell at their marginal cost when they are selling a commodity where somebody else gets triple the price?
It doesn't make sense to force them to sell at their marginal cost either (which is much less than their operating cost, consisting mostly of fixed costs).
In fact, in real life, for most good or services the marginal price is decreasing with volume (or even zero for most of the supply curve with occasional spikes), pricing at the marginal cost means you're pricing way below the average cost and will drive all businesses to their doom.
In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.
To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
> In the electricity world, this kind of pricing only makes sense for electricity produced from fossil fuel as the marginal cost represents most the underlying cost, but it makes zero sense for renewable or nuclear where the cost is swallowed upfront and close to zero afterwards.
Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost. Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
> I do and given the practice is pretty common, it seems like most people would.
Definitely not “most people”, only the small number of economists and politicians that designed these scheme.
> To be clear, the incentive is: you make more money when you can produce energy cheaper than everybody else.
Which is a bad incentive for an electricity market, because as I said above, “energy” is free basically free for both renewable and nuclear. What ain't free is “installed power”. And what customers need is “available power”. If you design a virtual market around things that have nothing to do with the underlying physical reality of the actual value being produced, it's simply never going to work well.
> Are capital costs not real underlying costs? If I borrow money from a bank I have to return that money plus interest. I would argue that this is a very real cost.
It is a “real cost” indeed, but it cost you the same whether you produce electricity or not, it's a fixed, upfront, cost, not a marginal cost.
> Also, renewables do require maintenance. That is not as expensive as the ongoing cost of burning fossil fuel, but it’s still a cost
Most of maintenance aren't linked to how much electricity you've produced (for solar, for instance, it only depends on time, and cost you the exact same amount whether or not you've produced any electricity), so it's again not a marginal cost but a fixed one.
And let say you restrict yourself to the maintenance that depends on electricity production (for nuclear, refueling maintenance is like that) you'll end up with a marginal cost that is very low compared to your average cost, and if you price at marginal cost then you're going to go bankrupt.
For illustration say operating your 1GW solar plant cost 200 million a year in fixed costs (including maintenance and the cost of capital) and then it costs 0 to produce a MWh as long as the sun is up. If you price it at marginal cost, then you'll never make any money, so the only hope you have is that in a long enough period the market prices will be high due to the marginal cost of fossil fuel plants, in a way that it ends up covering your fixed costs. But, as a plant owner/manager, you have absolutely no control over that, you aren't being incentivized into doing anything.
The incentive is to sell all 100 units for £infinity. The incentive for the seller to sell at a high price isn't relevant. They don't have the ability to act on it. If they did, they wouldn't stop at £10,000. I'd pick numbers like £1,000,000,000,000 at a minimum if I was a seller and could truly set my own price based on my incentives.
If the UK has banned all companies except one from supplying electricity then they will without doubt see eye watering prices. But that has nearly nothing to do with the pricing scheme they use and a lot to do with the one company part of the picture.
It hasn’t, howver the natural state for these companies is to merge and diversify to maximise their profits, and the cost of entry into electicity generation is not like launching a bbc backed startup.
> In commodities market, the strike price is between the lowest price seller and the highest buyer.
The lowest seller price is the highest demanded price among all the sellers. All the sellers bar one would typically be willing to sell for a slightly lower price. As it is said; prices are set on the margins.
Imagine that every seller has a secret price they are willing to sell for and that is some statistical distribution. The market price will be the highest price in that distribution that actually gets sold. Most sellers aren't selling for their secretly acceptable price, but for a higher price determined by the seller with the highest demands. The distribution, if it is ever discovered, becomes the supply curve.
There are two things you are paying for when you buy electricity - the electricity itself and the guarantee that when you flip a switch you get power.
Different energy sources contribute unequally to that second important factor - the stability of the grid - and that has to be factored in somehow. Nuclear, gas, hydro-electric storage and buying from abroad provide that stability in the UK.
How it's done - I've no idea - but it's not just a question of units of electricity.
One way is to bring in more surge pricing however people like the predictability of stable prices.
If there's a single watt demanded by the grid and NOT supplied by gas, or coal or nuclear, because there sure as shit aren't batteries within three orders of magnitude of competitive at TWh scale, the entire grid fucking stalls and dies. At best guess, we can restart it, once.
Your renewable energy is worth 0 if it can't meet that need. No other power supply anywhere works on the principle of "yay maybe!". It's not a fucking game, it's our capacity to heat, to operate industrial processes that are equally worthless if interrupted. I've been involved in ordering steel. The UK-spec was uncompetitive if free, because of the unpredictability in delivery, directly downstream from the unpredictability in power. THERE IS A WAR ON.
The war is a very strong reason not to rely on imported gas. We've seen that across Europe. Heck, there's a pipeline through the war zone which is surviving because everyone involved depends on it.
Cheapest source is accurate. It may not eliminate the need for expensive LPG, but reducing the amount needed is still a massive benefit to the economy.
It's misleading, and those who use it generally know it's misleading. It's used to persuade the layperson that electricity generated by wind turbines is cheaper to the consumer or industry than electricity generated by thermal sources or hydro turbines, when in fact that is only true if you disregard the requirement for said electricity to be available on demand - a fairly important omission.
So by this argument all baseload generation prices are a lie too?
The coal or nuclear plant that commits to generating a set amount consistently but never even attempting to meet the actual demand is some kind of hoax?
In reality we're moving from baseload and peaker gas plants to follow demand to renewables and firming (the same gas plants just running at different times). It's a holistic system with parts working together.
The main difference is that renewables are cheaper and cleaner which gets them built faster and displaces more and more coal and gas from the market. With batteries eating the market from the other direction (starting with daily peaks and expanding out from there).
You can see this in carbon intensity of electricity production and the ever increasing share of renewables around the world.
Of course that plan falters a bit if you ban cheap onshore wind across an entire nation for a decade.
Most electricity use is not required to be available on demand, there is a high, constant level of demand and the occassions where there is enough wind to exceed demand are rare enough to generate headlines. World Cup final kettles are the exception, not the rule.
There are also interconnections between the UK and Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Netherlands and Norway. Excess supply can be exported, assuming there's demand.
I often wonder how many people would accept automatic black outs when buying green energy. A process that "happens" here. You can buy for example purely wind powered electricity. But somehow that does not stop being delivered when there is no wind.
Instead there would be electric relay connected to mains in your home and when there is less supply than demand you would get blackout. That would be similar comparison to this.
Assuming you also get closer to wind generation prices not just overall wholesale prices, it would be really popular.
People would install a battery at home the way most of the world installs solar and they’d see massive reductions in electricity bills more than paying for the battery. The UK is absolutely terrible ___location for solar, and it’s still installed because UK’s electricity prices are so high.
That said, wind going to absolutely zero nationwide is extremely unlikely but the more people who signed up for such a system eventually just a little power wouldn’t be enough for all of them. So there’s be an economic feedback loop.
There is no reason for anyone with a wind park to sell cheap if there are customers willing to pay a high price.
That said with a battery and dynamic prices, there are many days where you can charge a battery when the prices are low and use them battery when the prices are high.
Constant pricing means they make more when wholesale prices tank and less when whole prices rise. I’ll sell you X% of my output for Y$/kWh is a perfectly valid strategy and batteries can absorb output spikes just as they absorb blackouts.
Hedges like this are a useful risk mitigation strategy as going bankrupt is a much larger downside than making slightly more money.
This fine. But from the fact that prices are sometimes high, we can conclude that overlll there is a shortage of windpower. Which will factor into the prices. The owner of the windpark can take the prices for each hour, and compute weighted average with production. And set that as the constant price.
Curtailment means there’s a different between what wind farms can produce and what the grid is willing to buy.
Wholesale prices are really just one aspect of grid manufacturing and paying them doesn’t mean you’re getting the equivalent of a percentage of wind farm productivity.
Large users like the supermarkets have agreements with electricity providers that they will reduce their use at certain times in return for a discount.
Tesco doesn't care if the freezers in store run at 04:00-04:15, or 04:30-04:45, and will pick whichever is cheaper.
Which completely ignores the differences between investment costs and running costs across different technologies.
Open cycles gas turbines are extremely cheap to build and expensive to run. For a green future these can be run on biofuels, hydrogen or hydrogen derivatives.
Therefore they perfectly complement renewables.
Nuclear power on the other hand is an awful companion due to having extremely large fixed costs and acceptable marginal running costs.
This may be true, on a watt basis. It also ignores the physics of a synchronous grid. You need to produce exactly what you use at any given moment. If you fail to do that by a little bit bad things happen. If you fail by a lot, the grid fails. You need to be able to get power when you need it, not when it's convenient to your generation plant. If you want to compare solar or wind to something more dispatchable you should really be using numbers from either a pretty massive distributed overbuild or including storage or both. Otherwise it simply isn't apples to apples. I am an electrical engineer specializing in the design of control systems for renewable generation.
That's what over building is. It also requires massive investment in transmission infrastructure because your core assumption is that power in one place get get to load in another. It turns out that transmission costs many many times what the generation does
Check out "The Price is Wrong" by Brett Christophers[1]. It explains at length that what matters is not price, but how profitable an investment is. And how wind and PV don't look great without subsidies in various guises.
You distribute pv and wind over large areas and they get destroyed by weather, get dirty, require significant maintenance. If individuals want to have wind turbines or pv installations that's great - but these things are a giant mess at grid scale - absolutely awful.
We get anything from storms to hail few times a year here. My patio roof got holes in it from the ice balls, but the panels are fine. Are you missing some qualifiers on that one?
> get dirty
You clean them every few months or monitor for issues per group of panels.
> require significant maintenance
Just like every other device out in the real world. Coal, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, thermal generators require maintenance.
What I think the GP is blowing completely out of proportion is:
> they get destroyed by weather
A few of them, every year. It makes a visible dent on their average longevity.
But I don't think distributing them has any impact on this. They just create a risk situation that nobody seems to be insuring and that large farms will self insure without problems. (Anyway, with the price going down the way it is, that will soon become irrelevant.)
> get dirty
Each person stopping to clean their own panels is much less efficient than professional cleaning centralized panels. It does increase your electricity costs.
> require significant maintenance
Home maintenance is an entire other level of inefficiency. That extends to any kind of equipment in your home.
But again, none of those is a big deal. Solar is mostly operation-free, so distribution mostly doesn't matter.
We were originally discussing offshore wind. These things have to function in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. We don't really fully understand how weather patterns will change over time with climate change. The idea that these factors won't represent serious risks to output over 50-year lifespans is delusional. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. Small scale distributed solar in sunny environments is fine - the rest of this stuff is just a massive waste.
That's not a significant issue. O&M costs are a given and not wildly out of step with traditional generation. If you want to talk about cost effectivness the thing that matters is either a)transmission capacity and interconnects for distributed generation b)storage for centralized generation. As long as you're ok investing in 1 of the 2, distributed generation is great.
Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad???
Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid...
Batteries literally solve most of the problems
Nickel-Iron batteries are very good for this purpose: practically unlimited charge-discharge cycles and overcharging/overdischarging won't damage them. They should be dirt-cheap too, but almost there are very few manufacturers so there's not much competition.
Yes it is true, study after study has shown that LCOE for renewables (in particular wind) is the lowest. It is also quite obvious from the fact that wind and solar installations are what investors are actually investing in, in contrast to nuclear which nobody wants to invest in even with large government guarantees.
LCOE omits delivery issues. Energy isn't just about the cost to produce an electron. It's the cost of getting that electron to people when they need it. For things like wind or solar to ever become a major player you need to deal with intermittency and dispatchability.
In other words you need to deal with times when the wind isn't blowing, or when people need more (or less) power than you're producing. The way you'd do this is through excessive production during good times, and then storing the surplus in batteries, artificial hydroelectric, or other such means - and then delivering from those sources as necessary. But doing this sends the real cost per unit much higher. The storage process also entails some (to a significant amount - depending on the type of storage) energy loss as well, so you end up needing to produce more than 1 unit of electricity to get 1 unit.
FWIW I'm a huge advocate for solar, so this isn't some random smear on renewables - it's something that needs to be accounted for and which LCOE fails to do.
I find them much more appealing than the power plant near me that dumps columns of soot into my skyline.
> and remarkably bad for wildlife
This talking point is really exaggerated. It's effectively fossil fuel propaganda. The effect on wildlife is downright cuddly compared to the effects of burning fossil fuels. You might have an argument if you're comparing wind to solar.
I never heard this term before so I Googled it. Gemini (Google AI) defined it as:
> "Low capacity factor power" refers to a power source that generates electricity at a significantly lower average output compared to its maximum potential, meaning it doesn't operate at full capacity for a large portion of the time, typically due to factors like weather dependence or intermittent availability; examples include solar and wind power, which experience fluctuations based on sunlight and wind speed respectively, resulting in a lower capacity factor compared to more consistent sources like nuclear power.
Ok, sure, makes sense, but what are the alternatives to wind and solar for carbon neutral power sources? (Yes, we all know that nuclear power can do it, but almost no highly developed countries are interested in making large nuclear power investments at this point.) Our power supply structure will need to fundamentally change over the next 30 years. Probably, home- and utility-scale batteries will play a much bigger role.
Another point: Isn't the purpose of building wind turbines on the open ocean to capture more regular winds (compared to land-based wind turbines)? Wouldn't that improve capacity factor power?
About "soul-crushingly ugly": I never once saw a chemical refinery, nor a large-scale, modern hospital, that was anything other than "soul-crushingly ugly", but we need them in a modern society. So we try to carefully plan where/when/how they are built.
This is why the Netherlands builds them out in the sea. Just far enough so that you cannot see them.
Even the biggest reactionary NIMBY has no complaints.As for wildlife come on man who the fuck cares?
Minus the last sentence, this is a great point. Do any downvoters have any issue with everything but the last sentence? If anything, the Netherlands is probably Europe's most intensely developed country. There is hardly a square meter that hasn't been carefully planned out over the last 500 years.
No, I don't have an issue with anything but the last sentence, but the down arrow is all or nothing. We're facing a biodiversity crisis of massive scale (call it the 6th mass extinction if you like). "Fuck wildlife" isn't an appropriate policy position.
The Netherlands still produces 64% more CO2 per capita compared to France, despite having only 45% higher GDP per capita. And France has way more dirty industry, if we looked purely at power generation they would look even better.
This is what significant investment in nuclear does. Even the countries that invested the most in renewables can't beat it, yet. I'm very curious to see how long it will take the renewable-only countries to catch up, especially considering that emissions accumulate.
Many great points. Thank you to reply. I have read a few times calling the UK the "Saudi Arabia of Wind". I must say: They have a metric-ton of great sites, both onshore and offshore for wind. That said, great sites don't automatically become energy production sites unless they get funded, approved, and built.
> France has way more dirty industry
I'm not here nitpick, but do you have source? I know, this one is very hard to debate. On a per capita basis, the ports of Rotterdam and IJmuiden must have a staggering amount of polluting industry (steel, chemical, etc.) And, while Antwerp (Belgium) port isn't in Netherlands, it is literally right on the border. From Google maps sky-view, you can many, many chemical plants in the area. To be clear for all readers: I'm not here to point the finger specifically at NL/BE as being any worse than other highly developed nations.
Unfortunately no, and maybe I should have phrased that with a little more doubt. Still, I think it's very likely true, given the sheer size difference between the two (geographically), and the fact that France has a massive auto industry, while the Netherlands does not.
Capacity factor is calculated into lcoe, what's your point? Moreover, downtime for wind turbines is much less of an issue for a grid than large power plants (even with a significantly higher capacity factor), because you run into much bigger issues if your GW plant is down, compared to a couple of MW (and no the probabilities of all your renewables mix going down at the same time is very low, unless you're Luxemburg).
Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.
Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
The effect of overcapacity is null or negative price, which has the property to make more storage viable (who cares if it only gives back 25% if the input is free or very cheap), so I'd say intermittent sources overcapacity is an enabler of on grid storage.
E.g. today in Germany you can buy MWh at 14€ at 13:00 and sell it back at 180€ at 18:00. I didn't look all of Europe but it looked like the biggest spread today... You can make money with crappy storage under those conditions...
This is precisely why intermittent sources aren't viable without a breakthrough in energy storage. Existing storage mechanisms aren't capable of delivering at the tens to hundreds of terawatt hour scale required to make intermittent sources viable.
Remember, 66.8 TWh of electricity is used daily. Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuations, but seasonal fluctuations lasting days or weeks. Even 12 hours of storage would still leave us with periods of insufficient production multiple orders of magnitude more frequent than the status quo: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
> Capacity factor is calculated in. But intermittency is not. The issue is that once demand is saturated during periods of peak production, the excess energy is wasted so the effective capacity factor drops as adoption grows. E.g. once you saturate daytime energy demand, further investment in solar energy yields no more useable energy.
>
> Intermittent sources are a good way to supplement dispatchable sources of energy like gas plants or hydroelectricity. But as a primary source of energy, they're not feasible without a massive breakthrough in energy storage.
Intermittent sources are baseload, your argument applies to any baseload system, I.e. you always need some additional dispatchable energy source (unless you over build by large amounts). Again if your main energy would be e.g. nuclear you need even higher amount of dispatchable power because if your nuclear plant goes down (planned or unplanned) you need to compensate for a lot of power.
This statement is about as incorrect as it is possible to be, as even a cursory attempt to check this before posting would show.
It is difficult to understand why anyone makes claims such as this, unless they are consciously or unconsciously attempting to redefine a word that already has a well-understood meaning.
"Base load" refers to electricity demand, not sources of electricity. Things that consume electricity are a "load". The "base load" is the level of energy demand that is always present in the grid. E.g. if a grid consumes 5 GW of electricity at peak demand, and 4 GW at minimum demand, then 4 GW is the base load.
For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.
For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation.
For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
The only categories that I guess could be easily shifted is process and boiler heating. But some industrial processes need to run uninterrupted for weeks. Machine drive, perhaps, but then workers would not be able to work a regular schedule. Not to mention, industrial applications in total is less than 25% of electricity use.
Demand shifting is a lot easier said than done. I see it proposed very frequently, but I've yet to see a detailed plan for what electricity uses will be shifted, and how.
> For residential uses, heating, cooling, and refrigeration are the main uses.
Heating and cooling can be offloaded into grid peak availability hours relatively easily with the price serving as a reliable trigger. This assumes proper insulation for the most part, but is viable and using the price as an indicator automatically sets up the right incentives. As for refrigeration, the energy use for that in a private household seems to be overstated.
> For commercial electricity use: computing, refrigeration, cooling, and ventilation
For cooling the same applies as for private households, maybe to a lesser extent. The other loads remain pretty static in their demand, but once a commercial operation has a certain scale building out the own battery storage to optimize for purchasing price (assuming a flexible price that reflects spot pricing) may be a viable strategy.
> For industrial electricity use: machine drive (lathes, mills, etc.), process and boiler heating, facility heating and cooling, electrochemical process.
For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses. For other energy intense workloads, demand shift is already frequently happening because the ROI is fairly quick. It’s not easy to assess from the outside because you do need an in depth process understanding that you just cannot provide as an outsider. But I have personally witnessed plenty of examples that demonstrate it is well within the realm of possibility
Heating and cooling cannot be easily load shifted. Daily fluctuations in energy production aren't the only forms of fluctuations. Seasonal fluctuations are large, too. And the seasonal variation has the unfortunate tendency to line up with periods of high energy demand. "Just don't heat your house in the winter" is not a viable form of demand shifting.
> For boiler heating and facility heating and cooling the same applies as for commercial and residential uses.
Note that this refers to "process and boiler heating". There's plenty of industrial processes that need to be kept at temperature for long periods of time, otherwise the batch is ruined. Titanium smelting is one example. I've yet to see a breakdown of what specific industrial processes can be shifted.
Heating and cooling can only be offloaded in extremely wellinsulated houses. A lot of the ones in the UK do not make the cut. Even some new EU ones do not.
If you try to offload it otherwise you just waste power heating/cooling yourself at wrong hours.
A boiler in this setup is a thermal battery. These are good, but space consuming and relatively failure prone and expensive to maintain.
Inefficient compared to central too.
Nuclear power is indeed a silver bullet. France supplied > 85% of its electricity demand with nuclear (with the rest being filled by pre-existing hydroelectricity). As is hydroelectricity and geothermal power for those countries with the appropriate geography. E.g. Norward produces 100% of electricity through hydro. Non-intermittent sources of energy don't need to be supplemented by alternative sources of energy.
They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand. Again, non intermittent sources don't need supplemental sources of energy, as long as there's sufficient supply. By comparison, a country cannot possibly run their grid entirely with solar on account of intermittency.
I'd suggest reading people's comments in greater detail, before accusing people of lying.
So now you suggest that we should build peaking nuclear plants in an attempt at covering your previous blunder with pure insanity.
Lazard expects peakers to run at 10-15% capacity factor because you know, how often do we have cold spells in France or whatever other reason causes them to run? A couple of weeks a year at most. Lets say 15%.
Lets calculate what Hinkley Point C costs when running as a peaker. It has a CFD at $170/MWh for 30 years. Lets assume it runs at a 85% capacity factor and that $20/MWh are O&M costs.
153/0.15 + 20 = $1040/MWh
You want to solve the problem by forcing electricity costs on the consumers at double of the peak of the energy crisis.
All because you view the world in nuclear fanclub fantasy land glasses.
If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost. Alternatively, you can just keep operating at full capacity, and give energy away for free and use it for energy-intensive tasks like desalination or arc furnaces. The idea that we'd build nuclear plants that only operate a few weeks per year is a strawman of your own construction.
You're right that nuclear is more expensive than continuing to burn fossil fuels. And the reality is nobody has a plan to build fossil fuel free grid based on wind and solar. Absent a miraculous breakthrough in energy storage, solar and wind will always have to be deployed in tandem with fossil fuels. If we're looking at actually eliminating carbon emissions, nuclear is the only viable option besides geographically limited sources like hydropower.
> They could always build more nuclear plants to fill additional demand.
And then
> If you've already provisioned enough nuclear plants to meet peak energy demand, producing less energy has no marginal cost.
If the magic tooth fairy comes with free nuclear plants... Nuclear cult member fantasy land.
So at what capacity factor will the entire fleet run at when built out to manage both outages and cold spells requiring 30 GW of fossil fuels to handle?
France currently run their fleet of 63 GW at a ~70% capacity factor. Add another 30 GW (lets call it 100% reliable when a cold spell hits) and the capacity factors vastly lower due to extremely low utilization factors of the last 30 GW.
You can spread out the lower of capacity factors across the entire fleet or just let the peakers bear them.
But in the end the results are the same because you still need to finance the your fleet now delivering a measly 45% capacity factor.
Lets translate a 45% capacity factor to Hinkley Point C numbers:
Now you are forcing the consumers to pay $355/MWh or 35.5 cents per kWh for all electricity delivered the whole year.
All you have done is take the ~$1000/MWh cost from 15% of the time and spread it out over the whole year.
Do you see the pure insanity of what you keep proposing now?
For the third time, I never said nuclear was cheaper than contuing to burn natural gas. It has the distinction of being the only non-intermittent source of carbon-free electricity besides geographically contrained sources like hydroelectricity and geothermal power. It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.
What's the alternative to nuclear power for reaching a carbon-free grid? No doubt, your plan will assume a breakthrough in energy storage that delivers orders-of-magnitude more scale than existing solutions.
Why do you keep trying to alter what you said? Can't you stick to the truth?
> It is the only viable path to decarbonization for most countries.
The research disagrees with you.
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":
You are being purposefully aggravating here because your argument is weak but it's been socially supported for some time now. Nuclear power lagged behind renewables due primarily to proliferation fears and subsequent over-regulation in most of the world, not technical flaws, missing out on innovations like modular reactors. China’s pushing ahead with 150 GW by 2030, leveraging nuclear’s advantages: it’s compact (1-4 sq mi/GW vs. solar’s 10-20), reliable, and resilient to extreme (and simply changing) weather, without reliance on rare earths or massive storage (with their own host externalizations and supply risks). Costs can drop to $50-100/MWh with new tech and long lifespans, rivaling renewables when accounting for their hidden expenses (storage, grid upgrades). Proliferation risks exist but can be managed with oversight. Nuclear remains the best bet for scalable, clean energy.
Nuclear power has famously had negative learning by doing throughout its entire life.
There was a first large scale attempt at scaling nuclear power culminating 40 years ago. Nuclear power peaked at ~20% of the global electricity mix in the 1990s. It was all negative learning by doing.
Then we tried again 20 years ago. There was a massive subsidy push. The end result was Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto and Flamanville. We needed the known quantity of nuclear power since no one believed renewables would cut it.
How many trillions in subsidies should we spend to try one more time? All the while the competition in renewables are already delivering beyond our wildest imaginations.
China is barely investing in nuclear power. At their current buildout which have been averaging 5 construction starts per year since 2020 they will at saturation reach 2-3% total nuclear power in their electricity mix.
China is all in on renewables [1]() and [2] storage.
Then rounding of with some typical ”SMRs” nonsense!!!
SMRs have been complete vaporware for the past 70 years.
Again, why are you talking about cost, when the real question is viability? How does the study you linked plan to accommodate intermittency? The answer is just a vague statement about storage mechanisms:
> Storage of energy is an important element of 100% RE systems, especially when using large shares of variable sources
like solar and wind [14], [40]–[42], and it can take various forms [43]–[45]. Batteries can supply efficient short term storage, while e-fuels can provide long-term storage solutions. Other examples are mechanical storage in pumped hydro energy storage [46], [47] and compressed air energy storage [48], [49], and thermal energy in a range of storage media at various temperature levels [43], [50].
Nowhere do they actually outline how much storage of each system they will provision. How many TWh of batteries? How many TWh of pumped hydro? Totally unanswered. They just mention the existence of storage, and avoid any tangible discussion of scale. Like I said, there's no realistic plans for a grid primarily powered by intermittent sources. The storage required for such a grid is orders of magnitude larger than what can be feasibly provisioned.
This isn't a tiny insignificant detail. It's is a foundational part of a primarily renewable grid. And nobody has a plan to solve it that doesn't amount to "assume some different system, which has never been deployed at scale, can tens of terawatt hours of storage".
Love that you try to avoid the issue of cost. Yeah, in the land of infinite money and resources you can do anything.
In the real world the energy crisis was a cost crisis. But you seem to no care the slightest about massively increasing the ratepayers bills and by that creating a new self made energy crisis. This time fueled by nuclear subsidies.
So you skipped the first two studies. I suppose because you found nothing to complain about in them. Good to know.
Then you go on a meta-analysis on the entire field and demand them to produce a TWH figure for some energy system you can't even specify.
You truly are grasping for the straws.
Here's the quote you missed:
> Much of the resistance towards 100% RE systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276]. However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]– [282]; storage [40]– [43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]– [92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
With the conclusion based on the meta-analysis:
> The main conclusion of the vast majority of 100% renewable energy systems studies is that such systems can power all energy in all regions of the world at low cost. As such, we do not need to rely on fossil fuels in the future. In the early 2020s, the consensus has increasingly become that solar PV and wind power will dominate the future energy system and new research increasingly shows that 100% renewable energy systems are not only feasible but also cost effective. This gives us the key to a sustainable civilization and the long-lasting prosperity of humankind.
Since the study was released in mid 2022 has it become easier to harder to create 100% renewable energy systems? Easier.
Labour have pledged to bring it back down to 2030, but when they begin the talks with the motor industry to try to achieve this they will fold like they have done several times so far in this government.
Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage. To put this in perspective, the world uses 60 TWh of electricity per day. By comparison global lithium ion battery production was 1.1 TWh [1]. Remember, production capacity is distinct from the actual production figures. It's typical for actual production figures to be ~50% of production capacity.
Intermittent sources don't just experience daily fluctuation, but also seasonal fluctuation. Even just 3 days of storage amounts to an impossible amount of batteries to provision, even assuming growing battery production capacity. Not to mention, even modest amounts of battery grid storage would severely hamper EV adoption, which would increase emissions.
There's a reason why most plans for a primarily wind and solar grid assume that there will be some technological breakthrough that solves storage: hydrogen, compressed air, alternative battery chemistries, etc. are really common to see in plans for a primarily renewable grid.
Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.
There will likely always be some gas peaking but we're talking less than a percent per year (maybe a few single digit percent in some places where solar isn't as good but still not much).
Australia is a hot country, with lots of sunshine, lots of windy coast and not a lot of people per square mile. And peak demand (summer days for AC) corresponds for peak solar irradiation.
Europe, for example, is the other way around for most of the above.
> Modelling in Australia with simulations that multiply up current wind and solar (using real-time data of actual renewable generation) [1] showed that well over 99% of demand can be delivered with only about five hours of storage, so we're not really talking about days.
That's still a gap two orders of magnitude larger than existing standards:
> Meanwhile, reliability standards in industrialized countries are typically very high (e.g., targeting <2–3 h of unplanned outages per year, or ~99.97%17). Resource adequacy planning standards for “1-in-10” are also high: in North America (BAL-502-RF-03)18, generating resources must be adequate to provide no more than 1 day of unmet electricity demand—or in some cases 1 loss of load event—in 10 years (i.e., 99.97% or 99.99%, respectively)19.
Even leaving 1% of demand unfulfilled amounts to multiple orders of magnitude more frequent electricity production shortfalls. Figures like "fulfill 99% of electricity demand" might sound promising, until you compare against the standards of reliability modern society expects of the electrical grid.
And that's in Australia, quite literally the best-case scenario for renewables. By comparison, in Germany even 12 hours of storage would only satisfy 80-90% of demand.
The thing is you can calculate when there will be short falls and you can amount to that perfectly.
We now know the weather pretty much 1 day before it happens. adjusting that 1% of course amounts to maintaining natural gas facilities but it's really not that big of a deal.
Using natural gas means climate change still progresses. Not to mention you'll be paying all of the overhead cost of maintaining natural gas plants, but only use them for a fraction of the time. So net cost per watt hour will be very high.
> "Batteries aren't produced at remotely enough scale to be viable for grid storage."
The idea that if we can't have a renewable grid identical to the fossil fuel grid, then we may as well stick with the fossil fuel grid even if it means the end of the world is a bit weird.
The UK's biggest energy need is heating, but the housing stock in the UK is famously shitty, 38% of homes were built before 1946 and it's the worst value for money of any developed country[1]. It isn't well insulated, triple-glazed, heat-pump fitted, using local industrial waste heat for home heating.
Heat is harder to move than electricity, but easy and cheap to store - this 2019 pilot project can store 130MWh of heat for up to a week[2], something we couldn't reasonably or cheaply do with 130MWh of electricity.
It's possible that energy and electricity requirements could be reduced meaningfully without dropping quality of life, and that meaningful amounts of energy could be stored in heat and synthetic gas[3] rather than in more expensive electric charge storage.
[Is this used Nissan Leaf at 30kWh for £2,000 the cheapest battery storage I could buy in the UK right now?[4]]
Nobody, really nobody asks for the whole world consumption to be stored in batteries.
This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light.
You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level. Who cares about the 5% of times where we have to burn natural gas to stabilise the grid.
95% renewable is orders of magnitude better than today. Anyone saying different is literally a grifter.
Also battery storage cost prognosis is 50% less in 5-6 years. Batteries are already cost effective and there are a lot of grid storage options build right now.
If we are heating with electricity and cannot use gas storage to make up for the seasons, chemical batteries are nowhere near price effective, or even physically or projected to be available.
You can find out how much energy Europe stores in gas fields to get through the winter. You can divide that number by what you think is a reasonable sCOP for your heat pump. That number you can put next to total battery capacity ever produced, and I'll even let you add any other convertible energy storage capacity. You will find a gap off by orders of magnitude, and powerwalls in every home are not going to cover it. As you said, they'll cover a day, maybe a few, which leaves us 3 months short in the season where we have virtually no home solar.
Of course burning that gas to generate electricity for use in heat pumps would get you the same heat for half the gas even before you include any wind power (or hydro etc.)
That then doubles your storage for gas that you may or may not need to burn depending on the weather.
So really the path to fully renewable just goes through a series of win-wins on the journey to fully phase out fossil fuels.
Sure, switching to heat pumps doubles (probably triples) your storage, or, cut the storage energy in the form of gas by 66%. But, I thought we were discussing decarbonzing the storage too. Looking at that amount of energy, (chemical) electrical storage isn't even in the right ballpark yet. And other forms neither.
Because fuel costs only matter so much. You will still need exactly the same number of natural gas (or similar) plants with 12 hours of battery vs. 1 hour to cover seasonal events in most places on the planet. Until your battery backup can supply a week or more worth of power you have simply created an inevitable disaster in the making.
No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.
Battery storage is headed in the right direction but the fact almost all articles on the subject can’t even get the units correct as it would betray how ridiculously small the deployments actually are is quite telling in itself.
The grifting are those pretending magic natural gas backing plants are going to pop up out of nowhere and not including that capital or maintenance expense when quoting intermittent power source costs.
Right now those sources have been able to cherry pick the cheap and easy problems to solve since they’ve been using someone else’s power when they can’t meet demand. Eventually you run out of it though.
Cheap intermittent sources have their place, and should be used maximally wherever possible. For example every watt of hydro production should have a watt of solar or wind built on top of it. Store the water for when the intermittent sources can’t keep up with demand.
> No one is building a natural gas plant to staff it and let it sit idle for 95% of the time. The natural gas burned is only a fraction of its input costs.
Serious question: why do you think that’s true? If it costs X per year to run it 5% of the year and you save more than X with this strategy, then the maths is simple and someone will build it. Several energy companies could probably be convinced to each pay a share so no one is left footing the whole bill but everyone benefits from the existence of the facility. If the maths works, potentially even some of the cost could be passed on to the taxpayer.
In the UK we already have a couple of facilities that operate exactly like this, Cruachan for example (it’s not gas, it’s water). Over the years, ways to improve its utilisation have been found, but it’s still sitting there at a relatively low portion of its capacity so that it can black start the grid if it’s ever needed.
Because it has been, at least thus far. Perhaps in the hazy future this will change, and some regulatory/capacity/energy market will evolve into making such things profitable by paying someone to build underutilized power plants. I know of no such market currently.
I'm only somewhat familiar with the US market, not the UK. But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand. It can be considered a cost of doing business to have such a plant be useful for "black starts" - but that's all a single plant will ever be useful for. If it's ever being used for such a purpose you've already lost the game.
The scale is what matters. A single power plant that is 1% of your grid capacity being utilized 5% of the time is an expense that can probably be justified. Hundreds of power plants that match 100% (or close to it) of your grid capacity used 5% of the time would be an economically unjustifiable expense as you've effectively built your entire generation capacity twice.
Right now that's what we would be talking about building since every regional grid seems to experience week (or longer) periods where intermittent power generation is extremely unreliable due to weather events. It's not 100%, but it's close to it. You need to plan for the 1000 year event for something as critical as a national grid or folks literally start dying and the economic impact is astronomical.
I don't know what the exact capacity factor you'd need to have for a reasonable intermittent:dispatchable ratio, but it's certainly quite a lot higher than most would seemingly believe. Once batteries get to the point of backing the entire grid for a single night while the wind doesn't blow there might be signs of change. In most markets in the US where batteries are considered huge successes they have only recently (in the past year or two) transitioned from providing ancillary services to actual energy production for regular daily usage during the duck curve.
This can all be solved in time and in theory with a number of technologies and additional grid interconnection. But the trends simply are not as positive as one would like to see when you start delving into primary sources.
> But a single plant is really not interesting for the discussion at hand.
Maybe, but the UK has 4, and is building another 5 in the next 5 years.
Average grid consumption is somewhere around 30GW, the existing facilities have around 30GWh of storage. The additional 5 should bring around another 100GWh.
So we’re already at 1 hour’s worth of grid capacity stored, by 2030 we’ll be at 4 hours, and that’s assuming absolutely zero energy from other sources (wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, biomass, other countries), although to be fair the existing facilities can only deliver at around 3GW, and the new facilities will only bring that up to 6GW.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever been to the UK, but a whole week without either sun or wind seems a bit unlikely, especially when half of the UKs wind comes from offshore wind farms.
Stick in a few more of these, and keep a couple of the existing fossil fuel plants around in case of emergencies, and I can definitely see how this continues to be just a “cost of doing business”.
I appreciate the situation in the US may be worse.
> This is such a bullshit argument it really paints the rest of your comment in a bad light.
I responded to a comment stating that excess storage can be stored in batteries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249008 I'd suggest reading the comments people are responding to before calling them bullshit.
> You can get so far by just storing up to 12 hours OF NIGHT TIME on a local level.
"only" 12 hours of storage is 30 TWh of storage, at the world's current electricity consumption rates. This is an immense amount of storage, amounting to decades worth of global battery production. And that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of batteries are going to electric vehicles, not grid storage. It's true that battery production is growing, but electricity demand will similarly grow as fossil fuel use in transportation and industrial processes are electrified. Out of all of our fossil fuel use, electricity production is only ~40%. Not to mention, poorer countries are developing and will eventually start deploying refrigeration and air conditioning on similar scales as developed countries.
Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time.
This excludes large wind farms that add to base load if you average over the world. There is always wind somewhere around you.
Realistically if we reach 5Twh storage we are able to be >90% renewable.
Having 5Twh of storage is of course not an easy feat if estimates are correct we will have 6.5TWh battery production in 2030. If we amount for 10% of that used in grid storage we would need a decade for a 90%+ renewable grid.
There is no faster method. It is realistic.
> 12 hours of night time is not 30TWh The world is currently at 26TWh A DAY
From your link:
> The global electricity consumption in 2022 was 24,398 terawatt-hour (TWh)
24,398. / 365 is 66.8 TWh of electricity used per day. And again, that's current electricity consumption. Before industrial processes are electrified. Before poor countries adopt air conditioning at the same rates as rich ones. Before transport is fully switched to EVs.
> Let's say it is 30Twh a day in 2030 - you can calculate 50% less energy usage during night making it 20 TWh during daytime and 10Twh during night time
That's not how th consumption curve works. Even in the summer, the ratio of daytime to nighttime energy use isn't so high. And in the winter it's inverted, with nighttime energy use exceeding daytime use.
why should I? I have no idea how fast adaption rate are, we can calculate what it would cost for the current grid to be feasible and work based off of that.
Ah yeah the magical 107 Twh hydrogen capacity. How far off is that? That's a pipe dream.
This is a plan for anything past 2050. I'm talking right now.
Here are high-ball numbers for going off the grid; 2000 sf house in California:
- 30 panels ~ 10kw: $20K
- batteries ~ 10kwh: $8K.
- permits + labor: $20K (California...)
- 100+kwh EV with v2h bidirectional charging: $50K
- comparable ICE car (offset): -$40K
- heat pump water heater $1.5K
- heat pump furnace: $15K
- induction range: $2K
That adds to: $76.5K. Typical PG&E bills are $500-1000 per month. Budget $200 / month for gas. (Again, California prices.). That’s 63-110 months till break even, which is less than the expected lifetime of the panels + battery.
For another $10-20K, you can add propane backup, but I assume extended storms are rare enough to just charge the car and drive the electrons home a few times a year. A fireplace is about $5k installed.
Not going full off-grid is cheaper. So is scaling up to beyond one house.
LLMs should not be used as a reliable source of numbers for research like that. You keep saying how obvious this is and trivial to research. Maybe just post a quality research link instead in that case?
I am suggesting it as a way to do a back of the envelope calculation that can be thoroughly checked manually. It's very easy to check the numbers yourself.
## Upfront Capital Cost
- *Nuclear*: Very high (£4,000-6,000/kW), with 10+ year construction time
- *Natural Gas (CCGT)*: Low to moderate (£500-1,000/kW), with 2-3 year construction time
- *Wind + Battery*: Moderate for turbines (£1,000-1,500/kW) plus substantial battery costs
- *Solar + Battery*: Moderate for panels (£800-1,200/kW) plus large battery costs, especially for winter
## Plant Lifespan
- *Nuclear*: Typically 60 years, with possible extensions; 2+ builds over 100 years
- *Natural Gas*: 25-30 years; requires 3-4 rebuilds over 100 years
- *Wind + Battery*: 25 years for turbines, 10-15 years for batteries; multiple replacements needed
- *Solar + Battery*: 25-30 years for panels (with declining output), 10-15 years for batteries
## Fuel & Operating Costs
- *Nuclear*: Low fuel cost, high operating cost (staffing, maintenance, safety)
- *Natural Gas*: Major cost is fuel (price volatility), plus potential carbon costs
- *Wind + Battery*: No fuel cost, moderate turbine O&M, plus battery replacement costs
- *Solar + Battery*: No fuel cost, low panel O&M, plus battery replacement costs
## Levelized Cost (No subsidies)
- *Nuclear*: £90-120/MWh
- *Natural Gas*: £50-60/MWh (without carbon cost), £100+/MWh with high carbon prices
- *Wind + Battery*: Base wind £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £100-150/MWh with storage for 90% CF
- *Solar + Battery*: Base solar £40-50/MWh, potentially exceeding £150-200/MWh with storage
## Reliability / Capacity Factor
- *Nuclear*: ~90% capacity factor, suited for baseload
- *Natural Gas*: 80-90% if run as baseload, highly flexible
- *Wind + Battery*: 35-50% raw CF for wind alone, requires battery + overbuild for 90% CF
- *Solar + Battery*: 10-15% raw CF in UK, requires massive overbuild and storage for 90% CF
It's not as simple as just installing more wind turbines. The grid needs improvement and we need things like regional pricing. See https://wastedwind.energy for example.
I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).
People forget that the natural landscape of Britain is forest. The enclosed fields people think are natural countryside are in fact an entirely human creation.
The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain. Are moors not natural landscapes because they were formed hundreds or thousands of years ago? Is it natural when animals do something but not when humans do it? Or is it natural when hunter gatherers do something but not when agriculturalists do it? Or is it natural when non-industrial people do it, but not when industrialists do it? And why does your chosen definition matter? Is the natural landscape better than human-modified landscapes? Is a change always fine if the starting point was created by humans?
If you replaced the ancient figures carved into the chalk in England with wind farms would that be fine because they arent natural features?
> The "natural landscape" is a pretty meaningless concept in Britain
It's quite simple: there is none. Moors are created by farming and logging. All woodland has either been planted and managed by humans, or self-seeded on land cleared by humans. Aside from a handful of tiny patches (which are questionable) there is no primeval forest in Britain.
It's unclear what point you're making with reference to the blanket ban on onshore wind. I wouldn't like to see turbines on Cerne Abbas or Dartmoor. Nobody wants that, as far as I'm aware?
I would like to see more of them on the generic grass/wheat/rape fields that cover much of England. That was prevented by the blanket ban.
Yes. The gently rolling fields of grass, sheep, rape and wheat are considered a national symbol of our natural environment in need of protection from dastardly human creations such as wind turbines. This is the 'green and pleasant land' that William Blake wrote about.
Lighthouses have only become aesthetic because of their rarity rendering them as quaint or nostalgic. Modern versions and their impacts would be largely protested.
I suspect the real reason behind objections to technology being visible is basically "It makes me feel old by highlighting that I came from a time before X and now everyone will just become accustomed to X!".
Where do you think coal and oil comes from? It's ok as long as other people's environment is destroyed for non-renewable energy but not your environment for renewable energy?
Lol, they used to mine coal under that very mountain (until it was outsourced). It's not like we have some insular life. The region is economically depressed. People would rather have jobs while destroying the environment than not have jobs while destroying the environment and recreational value simultaneously.
Also people who need jobs. And that's just the case you personally know of. Maybe people should retrain instead of pining for jobs of the past. And we should support them in the transition as much as possible .
> only generates reasonable numbers of jobs during initial construction
We're gonna need a lot of initial construction though.
Have they ever used that technique in the UK? I don't think the UK has mountains suitable for mountaintop removal - they are famous for their underground operations.
I've always filed mountaintop removal mining as one of those "weird things Americans do" approaches. Probably associated with unusual geology or something.
I think the UK had the none-mountainous version of strip mining - open pit mines. I think there aren't any in operation currently, and I'm unsure if they were for coal or just other commodities.
Maybe it's a geographical/cultural difference, but there are so, so many mountains in the western US. it's a good part of why the game Oregan Trail was made. Before carving roads around and through mountains it was a truly treacherous journey.
US also jury has so much land to begin with. We can certainly afford to retrofit a few mountains without fundamentally disrupting the ecosystem. We're very bad at moderation, sadly.
Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year
This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.
I would hardly call it "utterly irrelevant" that in a discussion about "killing birds is bad" someone mentions that it is not usually considered bad to kill birds for food.
Killing wild birds accidentally is completely different from raising and bucthering birds for food, from virtually any point of view I can imagine. People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig, and might still consider sport hunting wild boars to be barbaric.
Life is still life, pain(not only death) caused needlessly whether windmills or in factory farms is still cruel. Birds are intelligent, curious, emotional, they are social animals and get depressed.
Other attributes the bird may have (wild/bred) or species (rare/common) has no bearing on the pain and kind of death they suffer. The importance of those attributes is lens we see from, it does not change their suffering.
> People who have no problem with eating meat will still not find it OK to kill a pet pig
It doesn't make it acceptable to view life raised for food[2] as a lesser (therefore ok to be tortured) than other life because they are pets, merely because it is common practice.
How is it different than valuing human life was valued differently in age of slavery or even today if you say correlate level of aid, support, news coverage or empathy to simple numbers on human conflict impact[1].
[2] The argument here is not becoming vegetarian, it is about not torturing needlessly what we need to eat. The human equivalent is akin to not following Geneva conventions in a war not abolish war altogether, while ideal everyone agrees is not practical today.
"completely different" and "utterly irrelevant" are not the same thing. They also aren't completely different. They have things in common (killing and harming birds).
You're trying to turn "I don't care about that" into "it's logically incorrect to care about that" which is not a game you can win.
The real issue seems to be that they might kill protected birds more often than buildings or cats, which seem to kill smaller common species (usually of lesser concern).
That number is a heavy under-estimate and deliberately lowered for public consumption. But, you might want to sit down - The real slaughter is well in the millions annually.
I doubt that wind turbines are the only power source that kills birds. Marginal bird deaths per unit of power production is the interesting statistic. This MIT post [1] links to a 2009 study [2] which provides that comparison:
4.98 birds/GWh in the fossil fuel estimate comes from unrealized climate change expectations. They also only looked at two coal power plants for the remainder of the study.
The nuclear source bird death estimates are extrapolated from one bad weather incident over two nights from a single plant on the Florida coast.
This is not a serious or rigorous study. Is there anything more recent?
I live in an area where there are a lot of wind mills along a nearby range of hills. There is also another taller hill which allows you to look down on the wind mills. In all the times I've driven up there and stopped to look out at the vista there were no birds at the base of the windmills. None. On any of them.
They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.
> "by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have."
(but we can; the UK has 30 million homes; if 500,000 of them put up wild bird feeders, that would lead to more wild birds. Again the context of the comment was the shock value of $bignum not a comment on specific species or habitats or desired outcomes).
It isn't completely irrelevant; they didn't mention wild birds, or any wider context - the way they commented was as a shock number, the intent of that is "wind turbines kill $bignum, stop wind turbines". The relevance of the much bigger shock number is to put it in context - human activity slaughters a lot of animals.
Okay, something else which affects wild birds: "Bird corpses were counted - and, where possible, identified - at 166 locations throughout Britain during the summer of 1985. The survey covered all roads except motorways. It is the most recent such study, and the most comprehensive. The results were depressing. A minimum of 30 million birds are killed on Britain's roads every year. Depending on the assumptions made in the statistical analysis, the death rate could be even higher: 70 million a year is not impossible."[1] And that's as well as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, badgers, foxes, deer, and so on killed by cars which wind turbines don't affect.
So the wildlife in the UK would be much better off if we built more viable alternatives to driving and road trucking than if we scrapped wind turbines. We can also note that people are working on wind turbines that don't kill birds, e.g. [2]. It's not a fixed fact that all wind turbine designs do the same damage.
In the context of a world where fossil fuel propaganda really does exist[3] and Trump's recent executive order on unleashing energy generation where he tells government departments to look for all kinds of energy sources on their land - geothermal, hydroelectric, oil, gas, anything - except wind or solar - exists, and in the wider climate change context where there isn't a magically perfect answer - and where the UK is uniquely well suited in Europe to wind power - it can't just be left that "sensational $bignum means stop wind turbines" with nothing else mentioned.
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54 - Climate Town video on how the gas industry sets up groups of 'concerned citizens' which pay social media influencers to post about how great cooking with gas is, and agitate politically while obscuring the source of their funding, among other things.
While indeed irrelevant for the original point. I would encourage you to educate[1] yourself on the life these birds have before you make claims we're doing them a favour by bringing them into existence.
I made no such claim, I was only mentioning that in relation to the fact that population size of domestic birds is not impacted at all by the massive killing, while population size for wild birds might be dramatically impacted by a much smaller number of deaths.
I find the horrors of industrial animal farming horrendous, while not having a moral problem with the idea of raising an animal in decent conditions for slaughter.
It's usually the types of birds that are affected that upset people. Many ideal locations for windmills (in particular mountainous regions, dunno about offshore) happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
Likewise, there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement, especially among whales.
It'd be nice to know that we're not replacing one disaster with another, though I'm out of date on my personal research as to whether any of these concerns still warrant further investigation.
> Many ideal locations for windmills...happen to also be ideal places for threatened or endangered large raptors.
The person I replied to was making a quantity-of-birds argument. Not an endangered species argument.
> there's the (unproven) connection with noise generated by offshore wind farms disturbing wildlife migration and movement
Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts? I don't see much of a movement to ban those. It's almost like people decide the things they want to have for themselves (undisturbed views), then make up whatever noble-sounding reasons (whales, birds) will preserve those things.
> Bringing up bird welfare to oppose wind turbines is bullshit. If people cared about birds or wildlife we wouldn't be in this mess at all.
Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general, not a limited critique of quantity harmed. I do think the distinction remains important, hence why I made my post.
> Do they make a lot more noise than giant cruise ships? Luxury yachts?
Given that the ships are itinerant and their turbines are much smaller, I do believe the type of noise pollution they generate is qualitatively less harmful. I imagine the scale is something along the lines of:
Windmills take the top spot for being a constant barrage over a large area.
Sonar gets the second for the extreme volume some ships (esp. military) are capable of producing, though there are far fewer of them.
Marine vehicles come last. There's a greater danger of animals being hit by fast moving boats (for example, manatees) than discombobulation from engine and turbine noise.
> Your comment seems to be a blanket opposition to bird welfare in general
I don't know how you got that. I just think a lot of fake bird lovers come out of the woodwork to oppose wind turbines because of $MADE_UP_REASON. Real wildlife lovers recognize that clean energy is good for wildlife.
I have trouble believing you are being honest. Piling under wind turbines?! I have yet to see a dead bird under a wind turbine myself (but I acknowledge they do kill some). Published estimated averages are 4 to 18 birds per turbine per year [1]. Compare that to buildings (where we also don't pile up either) which kill man estimated 1 billion birds a year [2]
Yes, explicitly piling up under wind turbines. This was in the Western Ghats in India and my mother was sickened - (she used to be a regular trekker before Covid). I didn't initially believe her either. Btw, they were so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator". They change ecology drastically within a couple of years.
“Our central discovery is that wind turbines can act as top predators, by reducing the density and activity of birds, their prey are now released from the typical level of predation. This release causes a range of changes in lizards,” explained Dr Maria Thaker of Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
> so effective as bird killers that wind-turbines were even acknowledged officially as "top predator"
This is using "top" in the sense of "apex", because turbines have no natural predators. The paper says you could imagine them as something at the top of the trophic web. The paper explores the impact on their prey populations.
That's opposed to "top" in the sense of "kills more than other predators" or whatever. I mention it because number-of-kills is what the rest of the discussion seems to be about.
You haven’t, which is why you have no citation just a ridiculous, unproven anecdote. There are literally hundreds of turbines in my area, there are not and have never been “birds piling up under them.”
Your own link further down estimates 4-18 per year. 1 bird per month would be gone before you had a chance to collect it, much less have a chance to “pile up”.
I am honestly surprised - you should see dead birds at-least a couple of times a week. Not annually or monthly, but weekly esp for a full wind-farm like what you are stating.
Which part of the world do you live in ? It is possible that the ___location of the farm was chosen wisely. Are you also sure someone is not clearing the corpses ? There are laws mandating the collection of corpses in many western nations. My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.
The entire US? I’ve been to Hawaii and hiked under turbines, no dead birds. I’ve been hunting in the midwest in fields, no dead birds.
I’ve been hiking in Europe, no dead birds.
Again, where is your citation? If birds are “piling up” they’re should be countless articles on it. Hell BP alone would GLADLY fund studies showing all these birds deaths to justify selling more oil.
> My personal anecdotal opinion is that data is more honest in the non-Western nations since nobody cares about bird-deaths all that much and so the deaths are not sanitized.
Real number is well above that. Everyone involved in bird conservation agrees this number is a fraction only reported for public consumption - real number is well into the millions. You can ask organizations like ABC birds.
Ugghh. I meant everyone in bird conservation. The ABC article explains why the official numbers are a heavy underestimate. But this was in 2021 - it has gotten worse since then. This is not unique to the US - my personal experience of this was in India.
And the recommendation from those people is: choose the sites more carefully. Not stop or slow down, just:
> Climate change is a critical threat to birds. Recognizing this fact, ABC supports renewable energy, including wind energy, and the transition away from fossil fuels. However, not every wind project is proposed in a suitable ___location.
> Did you read a Donald Trump tweet? Because no reputable source has ever said wind turbines are a major risk to birds.
I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?) And your second statement is laughably false as even elementary research would tell you.
Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
> I don't care about Donald Trump. (How did this even become about him ?)
You said you “read” about turbines killing birds (shockingly with no citation). There is literally nobody else claiming such stupidity.
> Do note that there are ~100 million cats and only ~70k wind turbines, if you use US as a reference. Cats are clearly not the top-predators of birds anymore.
Do note, a tiny fraction of the 100m cats are outdoor cats. And yes, they are absolutely one of the top predators of birds and have been for decades.
I cannot believe this article talks about planning constraints and energy prices and doesn't mention that.