kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@kmic

Apparently "why Germany has 5x more emissions than France in spite of boasting 40% RE wasn't gentle enough 😃 Yes, it seems like tribalism. Either you're all with us, or you're against.

@Wetrix TBH I just can't make sense of flat earthers, it's beyond my comprehension as of 2020 😂

The RE case is different: on the first look RE is very intuitive and obvious, and it's *largely* true in small scale. It's only when you start to dig into the engineering details of industrial scale deployments, it comes out that RE certainly makes sense just not everywhere and not alone.

Because if you do ignore basic physical constraints, you will eventually end up believing that "green" is a country that emits 5x more CO2 per kWh while boasting it's 40% share of RE in its energy mix, and at the same time opening new fossil gas power plants. The only way to make sense out of it for you will be to come up with conspiracy theories and blame "them", while the explanation will be simple need to have 24/7 electricity supply...

Just had a very unpleasant encounter with two #renewableenergy advocates who seem to believe that it's literally about advocating rather than having a highly efficient source of energy with low environmental footprint.

If you are concerned about #climatechange never ignore basic physical facts about the environment and technologies you're considering. It's a dead end.

Most importantly do not ignore surface power density and lifecycle CO2 emissions.

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

You can report me anywhere you like. I'm not being offensive, I'm just quoting scientific data that you dislike.

The right solution in this case for you is to mute or block users at your will.

One of the reasons why the energy sector in Europe is increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, while we should be going the opposite way, is precisely because of people like you ignoring science and engineering.

@VictorVenema @davidoclubb

Renewable energy alone is not green, that's very simple fact that is clearly supported by the scientific data.

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

Yes, if you look from investor's perspective. But I was thinking we're after decarbonisation?

Because in this case nuclear power is the only technology that *actually* led to decarbonisation of energy sector. Germany made a lot of hype about their Energiewende and 10 years later they're at 5x CO2 emissions of France or Sweden, both largely nuclear.

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

In Norway it was specifically reindeer migration that caused the protests. In Wales the problem is solved by not having reindeer or anything else larger than small deers.

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

If you factor environmental costs - especially land use and emissions - PV and wind are more expensive than nuclear.

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

What kind of large animals are living in Wales exactly?

@davidoclubb @VictorVenema

If you want cheapest, go for coal, won't you?

Nuclear plants do not load follow because they have the best ROI at 100% capacity *and* there are fossil gas plants where the loss of ROI is smaller. If you get rid of fossil fuels, then you just load follow on nuclear.

@VictorVenema @davidoclubb

> You can use the land between wind mills

You can use it for very small range of activities only like farming, nothing else. This is precisely why new on-shore wind farms are being blocked in Germany, France and even Norway, where they were causing massive migration of animals due to noise.

@VictorVenema @davidoclubb

> you also need storage or some method to bring supply and demand together

You don't. Any nuclear power plant made after 1990 can do load following. You can run grid 100% on nuclear alone. You can't run grid on 100% RE.

@VictorVenema @davidoclubb

"Storage" is just a distraction really. This is precisely why we invented metrics such as surface power density or lifecycle CO2 emissions to account for respectively land use and emissions during the *whole* lifecycle of a technology.

Because, can you imagine, PV and wind mills are also made of steel, concrete and rare earth metals, that need to be mined, and then decommissioned.

Accounting for that, nuclear still has way lower emissions and land usage than RE.

@Gina

Wait, but how is that "society", if there's nobody else on the climbing wall 🤔

@davidoclubb

But then RE also has low capacity factor, so only gives power 30% of the time on average, which means you need energy storage of the capacity of the whole system (doesn't exist), or build... a nuclear or fossil gas plant to provide baseload.

The more I learn about these technologies, the more I feel we've been scammed by the fossil industry once again, as they tricked us to replace low-emission, clean nuclear power with fossil gas using FUD...