They're absolutely dual use, which is why the greens have always been against them.
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.
Plenty of blame lies with the German Greens, but I'd also blame the German economy's stagnation from 1991-2004.
People forget now because of the 2010s, but Germany was the sick man of Europe before the recession because the reunification of West and East Germany was extremely expensive - West Germany was averaging 3-4% GDP growth rates in the 1980s, and reunification led growth rates to collapse to the 1% range. It was in this macroeconomic climate that German firms like Siemens AG were unable to sustain nuclear energy operations and began either shutting down or selling off entire product lines and business units in order to weather the storm.
Heck, much of Germany Inc's growth in the 2010s could be attributed to Germany's openness to export deals and JVs in countries like Russia (eg. Germany becoming one of the largest FDI sources in Russia both before [0] and after [1] the annexation of Crimea), China (eg. VW Group and SAIC since the 1980s [2]), and India (eg. Siemens Energy AG ToTing their entire renewables, gas turbine, battery energy storage system, and Hydrogen Electrolyzer IP to an Indian subsidiary that was then de-merged from Siemens Energy into it's own business that IPOed in India a couple months ago [3]).
Essentially, Germany's nuclear industry collapsed for the same reasons why the German renewables industry collapsed in the 2010s, and why German automotive industry is in such dire straights today - Germany Inc basically sold out and transferred their IP to such a degree in the 1990s to 2010s that entire competitors were spawned within a generation using that know-how. Owning shares or generating revenue on IP licensing deals doesn't matter when you don't own the actual means of production, leaving you open to either nationalization (Germany Inc and Russia), JV partners building competitors to undercut the JV (VW and SAIC), or entire operations being directly regulated with IP access under their purview (Siemens Energy and India).
The union is a nice backstop for issues around the edges that come up with corporate, but the real backstop is the pilots’ licensing. By making them directly responsible for the plane as PIC, it gives them leverage over their employer that few other professions have. AIR-21 gives them significant protection from retaliation and the ASRS is confidential. ALPA helps them navigate that mess if it comes to it, but that’s the real legal backing that pilots have.
Same thing happens with Professional Engineers regardless of whether they are employed or work as independent consultants/firms. They’re legally responsible for the bridges and other infrastructure they sign off on with laws protecting them from employers and clients.
(I fully support the ALPA and other unions, I just don’t think it plays as significant a role in following regulations as you claim)
More efficient, but much more expensive. I'm sick of people handwaving $100 per kWh. That is two orders of magnitude off where it needs to be to do anything more than virtue signal.
Meanwhile multiple grids are now paying renewable to curtail, because guess what, the variability is correlated (it's the exact same damn mathematics we used to fuck up the entire global economy in 2008, which is why I'm so surprised people are handwaving that too, but whatever). If you want to minimise cost without relying on gas to save you on dark still days, you want a cheap use for the surplus, round-trip be damned.
100$/kwh on a battery that does 1000 cycles is 10c/kwh, 5000 cycles ("Claimed" lifepo4 these days), that's 2c per kwh. These aren't that unreasonable, albeit one would need to account for cost of capital and so on increasing these effective numbers.
Batteries are already economical in most grids where they can arbitrage daily prices of 0-10c during the day to 10-30c during the night, with the occasional outlier event contributing dollars per kwh.
They will never load-shift across seasons, agreed, but for daily loadshifting they are already economical, and being 90%+ efficient (and very simple/easy to deploy and scale) is part of why they're popular. It opens up power shifting opportunities that aren't just daytime solar too.
you're undercounting cycles for batteries. batteries are quoted for until 80% capacity is left which makes sense for mobile applications, but for grid storage, a battery that's 80% degraded is still useful. as such, you probably get 15-20k cycles before it's worth recycling
He was talking about batteries there, not Standard Thermal's storage solution. The point of the thermal storage is that it is complementary to batteries, which aren't suitable for seasonal storage and are not being used for seasonal storage.
Kilowatt hour of capacity and kilowatt hour delivered are two very different numbers. Sources rarely distinguish, and you're almost certainly confusing them if you think batteries have to get down to $1.
Correlated errors are a problem in all sorts of places. Most statistics assume everything is independent; super important to verify that before drawing conclusions.
What worries me the most is that if the ACS can't issue new PINs, there's no way to replace them. If a single PIN is shared or compromised, anyone with it can walk in undetected until the whole system is replaced. And if the entire PIN list is exposed, all hell breaks loose.
They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.
Aspiration for 20 GW of power by 2040, or in 15 years time.
In the period 1980-1990, I repeat in a 50% shorter period commencing forty years ago, France installed 34 GW of nuclear.
All I want is for someone advocating renewables over nuclear to give me a single example of a buildout of available-in-winter power exceeding that target with the forty years of investment available.
Or to agree that we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating carbon-free energy.
Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally.
And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.
Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:
It's all part of the problem that has to be solved. You can't pretend that nuclear is better technically and that is the end of the story. As long as governments regulate and as long as people motivate governments to slow-roll more nuclear, nuclear generation will have a serious competitive disadvantage.
That disadvantage will manifest as cost and slow growth, among other objective measures.
I’d be open to making a prediction (on longbets.org) that in the 2025 to 2034 timeframe, more solar, wind, and batteries get deployed globally than any 10 year period of your choice for nuclear. And if you want to limit that to winter time capacity that’s fine by me.
The current buildout of solar/wind/batteries is definitely faster than anything we ever saw with nuclear.
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.
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.
It certainly leads to less sex. Seems a lot of vaguely-defined experts (economists/demographers/??) are very concerned we're not having enough, so more impulse-regulating drugs seem relevant.
Then again, maybe everyone being a 10 would level that out a bit?
> What do you mean by "metals don't actually withstand temperature"? As in the raw metal would melt were it not for the cooling vanes?
They creep. Have you seen, for instance, Blu-tac or glue fail? It doesn't go at once, but slowly, over a period of time. At high temperatures most metals (others on this thread have mentioned single-crystal blades) behave a bit like that.
Although steel is also weaker at temperatures far below its melting point, yes. A simple observation of a blacksmith at work should tell you that. And a think some new jets may be running hotter than Tm for steel now?
> The lower power setting on shutdown does what? Spin it at a low RPM so it doesn't decrease in temp too quickly?
Yup, or more relevantly evenly, although those tend to be related. Given almost all materials expand as they get hotter and contract as they cool, different cooling rates between parts -> different contraction rates -> different relative shape -> Very Bad in precision machinery.
So basically metal gets rubbery when hot, and stopping something all off a sudden could have inertial forces(moving blades, gears etc) wreck the structure?
You have to shut things down step by step, so that rigidity is supplied to the metals as the inertial forces are reduced.
And that's why Georgism exists! You can't offshore a plot of land.
If you've really managed to generate trillions in profit without using any, including indirectly (mining, showrooms, etc), fair enough. If your economic model is quite literally rent seeking, you can fuck off and give all those proceeds to whatever government ensures that land is not overrun by whatever raiders are historically a problem in your area. If you work for a living, you should be able to spend your earnings on a fancy apartment if you wish, and if a landlord wishes to make one instead of just sitting on land, they keep the profits from that too.
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.