RT @gretathunberg
Germany is opening a new coal power plant this summer. It’s run by Finnish state-owned Fortum.
Swedish state-owned Vattenfall is already operating new coal plants in Germany.
Everyone involved claims to be “climate leaders” but this is the opposite of leadership.
This is failure. https://twitter.com/fridayforfuture/status/1262314065843695617
@gretathunberg This is because Germany dismantled its nuclear power plan.
I'm sorry, but this is just reality hitting home. If you are anti-nuclear, you're pro-coal.
cc @kravietz
@drq
That's a false binary.
Germany also dismantled its solar power plan, and significantly dampened the wind power development. If it had not, one coal plant would be easy-peasy to replace. And that's not even taking into account all the gas plants which exist but are rarely used.
Building coal plants today is in direct contradiction to any plans to protect the climate.
@Mr_Teatime Solar is never going to replace nuclear. Nor is wind. Thy are not as reliable, not as controllable, and nowhere even near its energy density.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gg9_zTlg4M
See this? This is the insides of the Electric Arc Furnace. This is the technology that lets us melt steel without using coal or gas. It is used to recycle scrap metal into useful material. Waste into new things. Every given moment the temperature inside this giant arc welder must exceed 1800 degrees centigrade when in operation.
I can see households be powered by solar or wind, probably. I want to power mine with solar and wind myself when I get a suitable one someday. I can't see solar or wind powering heavy industries like this anytime soon, save for maybe a Dyson sphere. And the stuff people use must come from somewhere, it has to be made by someone, and powered by something. I'd rather it be powered by electricity, than by coal or gas.
And we already have a way to do it.
To be honest, I don't know. But we're getting into more details here than necessary.
Any coal plant built today signals intention to dig up and burn coal for the next x decades, therefore it's not compatible with sensible climate policy. Nuclear power has its own issues, and I don't think any amount of nuclear energy is going to save us, either. Because no single measure is enough, and because it creates other problems for which we have no solution.
@gretathunberg @kravietz @drq
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
You're absolutely right here. We should be adding more wind and solar, as much as possible, but since 100% is not possible, for baseline we should use nuclear which is zero emissions, rather than gas and coal.
Decarbonization is the priority now. In 30 years we might have nuclear fusion which is zero emissions and does not produce any waste, or some other completely new technology.
@loonycyborg @gretathunberg @Mr_Teatime @drq
I thin I saw some ideas to build solar panels on Earth stationary orbit and then send the power down using lasers or something :)
Yeah, that sounded pretty cool, but the economics are shaky, especially since you'd need to shoot the panels into space, on a rocket, and they degrade over time ... so the energy return may not be large
Two-step plan, basically.
0) Completely decarbonize electric power production (and produce more power to account for step 1)
1) Move EVERYTHING to electric power
@drq
0.b) Reduce energy requirements for everything to a level where you can produce the required energy sustainably
1b) ...or other sustainably-sourced forms of energy. Like cycling instead of driving a car. MUCH less energy needed, and no extra electricity, just maybe an extra sandwich sometimes :)
1: Nuclear power plants are not a very good match for intermittent sources because it can't vary its output very fast.
2: a large enough grid would require very little storage because there always wind (and tides, and water, and sun, and ...) somewhere.
3: the consumption side of things does not have to stay the same, either. How much energy could be used opportunistically, and why can't we effing decrease energy consumption already?
@kravietz @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
I recently talked to an academic who works on cars. They managed to reduce the mass of a particular SUV by 400kg. When the next model came out, the manufacturer had applied all those measures, then added more servos, extras and whatnots and oncreased engine size until total mass was unchanged -- that's what's happening everywhere. Efficiency increase results in bigger, larger things with equal or bigger consumption, not same output, less consumption.
@kravietz @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
If car manufacturers had used efficiency gains in engines and structures since the late 1990s to make more efficient cars, 3l/100km would be considered fairly high fuel consumption for a car these days.
And now electric cars are marketed by saying they accelerate faster. That's completely backwards. We need "all you need", not "all you can".
> We need "all you need", not "all you can".
That is going to be a problem. See, not everybody likes it when someone else straight-up decides what they need.
I wasn't implying that I knew what someone needs, or that it was decided for anyone by anyone else.
I AM complaining that industry and many consumers feel some strange obligation to consume as much as possible. Drive the biggest, fastest car, for example. To the point where since 1999 (which is how far I traced it), the huge improvements in engine efficiency have gone to making cars bigger and faster, and I can't buy a car which bucks that trend.
@drq @kravietz @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
I don't _need_ a car any faster or bigger than a 2003 VW Polo. 17 years later, the most economic car of thar size uses no less fuel than its predecessor, but it's significantly faster and heavier
So I _cannot_ even get something suitable because someone else has decided for me what I must _want_.
And this is a trend which gets me angry. It's technically possible, there's people who' d like it, but it's too humble, and you're not supposed to be humble
@Mr_Teatime @drq @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
No, this is a misrepresentation. I don't know how much fuel VW Polo 2003 used (I was driving a Gaz-69 from 1964 back then) but today you *can* certainly buy cars that use as little as 3-4 l/100km or even a fully electric one. Tesla is bloody expensive but for town driving there's Nissan Leaf and quite a lot of others. I did consider it but then I go to mountains often and... I couldn't, so I ended up with hybrid Toyota Auris (4-5 l/100km).
@kravietz
Teslas cars are wasting energy.
Have a look at Spritmonitor.de, and compare how much electricity Teslas use, compared to, e.g. Hyundai Ioniq.
I had an Opel Corsa(75HP) in 2004 and a Clio in 2013. Same weight but 90HP smallest engine. Used a bit less fuel, but the rated consumption was much harder to achieve, On the Corsa, I beat the rating. The average driver would probably use a similar mount on both.
@kravietz @drq @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
...actually that's beside the point. The Clio engine, scaled down to 75HP, built into the Corsa would have used significantly less fuel. Again, not a thing "the market" cares about -- but I do.
@Mr_Teatime @drq @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
> but it's too humble, and you're not supposed to be humble
This is 100% marketing because "they're not selling cars, they're selling visions" 😂 No, really, this is how this bullshit works. It's not a cause or somebody controlling your mind, it's that the whole "my car/house/boat/phone is bigger" dick contest is still very important to many people and I suppose always will be.
*You* however don't have to participate, just buy what you need.
@Mr_Teatime @drq @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
> Drive the biggest, fastest car, for example
I wouldn't generalize. In the US, in less perceptive and more rich parts of the society, maybe.
In EU fuel efficiency is an important factor because fuel is bloody expensive. Adequate size is also important, because parking space is limited.
This part is all about creating the right fiscal drivers for people. If fuel is too cheap then hell yeah, why even bother?
Just compare:
VW Polo (or any otjer small carnyou care about) from 2000 until today. Size, weigjt, power, fuel consumption of tje most efficient version.
...it's not really getting better, just faster and bigger.
In 1999, the Lupo 3L got by on 3l/100km and 50HP, in 2018, the Peugeot 208 BlueHDI did the same (though it was probably impossible to achieve those 3l, since it had 100HP), and now ... it's "impossible" again!
@Mr_Teatime @drq @loonycyborg @gretathunberg
I have not driven any of these so can't compare, but the emission standards were significantly raised since then (we're now at EURO6), so things like particulate matter or CO2 emissions *did* improve. You also have a whole range of small town cars today like Fiat 500, Smart using up to 4 l/100km
@kravietz
Compare fuel economy ratings for any car from one version to the next where they kept using the same engine, you can nicely see that consumption increases with every generation, unless a new engine compensates for the difference.
If appropriately scaled-down versions of today's engines were in 2000's cars, 3l/100km would be nothing special. And don't even get me started in SUVs.
How come they can't vary output fast? Isn't it just a matter of moving the control rod?
@loonycyborg RodS. There are hundreds of them.
And yes, part of argument for NPPs is that they are controllable, you can steer them in the matter of minutes if not seconds.
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
> Nuclear power (...) can't vary its output very fast
Modern nuclear plant - 20 minutes
Modern gas plant - 10 minutes
Is that not fast enough?
> a large enough grid would
We don't have large enough grid, just as we don't have large enough storage, power-to-gas, hydrogen - or clean nuclear fusion for that matter. We may have them in 30 years, but that's pretty much when we should have *already* decarbonized the energy sector.
IPCC 2019:
"We don't have a large enough grid" ... who said we did? We had almost no wind power 20 years ago, and now we do!
You want to build fission plants -- oh, but we don't have those plants either.
We need to build one, is what I'm trying to say here.
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
We don't know yet how to build any of these on industrial scale. We have a number of research tokamaks (also Russian word BTW) running plasma like ST-40 in UK (check on YouTube) and ITER is going "first plasma" in 2025 but this is still part of research. We're now a decade away from first production fusion reactor. Pretty much the same for power-to-gas and hydrogen.
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
By the way, we had enooormously long discussion exactly on the topic of smart grid with @loweel just 2 days ago here. I need to bookmark these things, as it took me like 10 mins to find it 🤦♂️
https://boseburo.ddns.net/objects/c0fc3cfa-7584-45b1-aee4-dfeb73733418
Have you got a source for the 20 minute figure about nuclear plants? And is that from 0 to full power?
To me, smart grids done right would mean that opportunistic consumption (charging your car, washing machiney dishwasher, some industrial processes -- possibly H2 production and E2L processes), could adapt to availability, thus reduce the need to store energy (not about suppliers knowing when I turn the light on ...).
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq @loweel
These are called "load following nuclear power plant" and this is an exact technical description for an older one (40 min) but the principle is the same
@kravietz
Gah, I think I misread your comment.
Nuclear fission might (might!) be a very helpful piece of the puzzle. If it works, and works safely, and there's no catch of the kind that anyone with a sense for good stories would expect if life was a book, or a movie.
my conclusion: we should totally try to work that out, but we should not rely on it, at least yet.
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
> Nuclear fission
FUsion! FIssion is what we do now :)
> we should totally try to work that out but we should not rely on it, at least yet
Exactly! And now it's the moment you should realize that the very same argument that is pulled to dismiss fusion also applies to power-to-gas, smart grid, hydrogen and other prospective technologies on which theoretical 100% renewable depends.
@Mr_Teatime @loonycyborg @gretathunberg @drq
What Greenpeace said 10 years ago was "oh let's first close all nuclear and then just jump on wind and solar, and in 10 years we'll have storage and stuff". We don't.
What they're saying now is "oh, let's close the remaining nuclear and, you know, temporarily, build more gas plants as we wait for storage and stuff".
Unfortunately, this is opposite of decarbonization.
Also, it depends on particular territory. Different geographic areas will get different relative utility out of wind/solar/geothermal. Maybe even go to moon because solar will work a lot better there :P