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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • What a load of hogwash.

    I understand the railing against rent seeking. It’s my land too, so why am I paying for it, and all. I mean, I disagree with the notion, but I understand it.

    This is entirely different. Cloud services haven’t been built for nothing - they are massive investment projects and like anything else we build that many use, capital allows us to distribute the cost. Yes there’s a profit motive and one could argue against it or not, but these services didn’t exist as natural resources that the cloud-lords dominated by force and then rented back to us. They built new lands and asked if anybody want to come live there.




  • Hey, likewise, thanks for a sensible debate.

    I definitely think 0 nuclear is possible, just a lot expensive than “mostly renewable with some nuclear.”

    I’ve commented extensively on this before here on Lemmy, let me copy pasta here:

    Here’s a couple of good papers and articles on the topic:

    A systematic review of the costs and impacts of integrating variable renewables into power grids - a large meta-study from Nature Energy showing that the externalised additional cost of integrating 1 MW of renewable production hits £40/MWh between 75% to 85% renewable penetration. Beyond that no studies have been done, but already at this level, renewable would be more expensive than nuclear (at auctioned build-prices today).

    Real-World Challenges with a Rapid Transition to 100% Renewable Power Systems - finds that even if you set the Value of Lost Load to £40,000/MWh in a 100% renewable grid, you’ll still get power outages after 2030. It’s not equivalent to externalised cost of renewable integration, but is a heavy indicator that without forcing massive fines on renewable providers, the reserve capacity won’t be provided (it’ll be cheaper for them to just pay the fine). The study finds that a fine of £4 million (!) per required-but-not-fulfilled MWh is needed to encourage providers build the reserve capacity (through distribution, storage etc.).

    How much can nuclear power reduce climate mitigation cost? - shows that nuclear will lower the cost of getting to zero carbon electricity product by 40%+, compared to refusing to use nuclear energy production.

    Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems - shows some of the challenges of the assumptions that people make in thinking renewables will get us all the way there.

    Projected Costs of Generating Electricity - shows that, all costs considered, nuclear remains an extremely cheap way to create energy, even up against renewables.

    Local Complementarity of Wind and Solar Energy Resources over Europe: An Assessment Study from a Meteorological Perspective - shows that at least in Europe, wind and sun don’t anti-correlate (in other words, we’re not going to get energy from the sun on non-windy days and energy from the wind on cloudy days. Also shows there are many periods (days long) in Europe where we have don’t get neither sun nor wind. So storage will have to last us days across Europe.

    Many of these articles refer to many other articles you may find interesting.

    Overall, my point is that it does us (collective “us”, not just “you and me”) no good to argue that “it’ll be alright if we just commit to renewables”. One has to argue against these peer reviewed studies, done by experts in the field, many collecting and meta-reviewing many other studies, to argue that “renewables will be enough”.

    And these are not “cooky studies” in “cooky journals”. Nature, Cell, Joule are some of the most respected journals, with the highest impact ratings and the authors & their reviewers have studied these topics for years.

    I’m all for more renewables! But it won’t be enough!


  • That is honestly an urban myth that nuclear isn’t steerable. It’s not steerable in the second, but it is extremely steerable in the hour or the day, which is more than plenty given that renewables output change by the hour or day, rather than the second.

    Yes it’s not frequency management - for that we have pumped storage and batteries. But it sure as shit is steerable enough for matching up with renewables. The wind doesn’t goes from Beaufort 6 to Beaufort 1 within a second.


  • You do realise solar and wind gets pricier and pricier to integrate as the level of steerable capacity decreases?

    What you are looking at here is “cost to install ‘rated capacity * load factor’”. A big part of the reason renewables are still cheaper is that we have a lot of backup steerable capacity, mainly in the form of gas plants in the west and coal plants everywhere else.

    Renewables dump electricity onto the grid and then say “here, buy this!”. And the only reason the grid can respond and say “sure” is that it can tell the steerable gas and coal plants “turn off for a bit, these other plants are dumping a crap tonne of capacity onto the grid”.

    Given the insane challenge in building enough storage and/or enough transmission capacity, you are going to need some steerable capacity beyond 70-80% renewable to continue to have cheap integration of intermittent renewables. Do you want that to be based on fossil fuel?

    If we wanted to treat renewable capacity in the same way as we have treated other generators, we should say “I want steerable capacity between 0-1200 MW” from this field of wind turbines!”. That would force the currently externalised cost of guaranteeing generation onto the builders of renewables.

    Right now, a lot of the real cost is hidden elsewhere in the grid - so it’s no wonder it looks so cheap.

    Please don’t misread my comment as being against renewables, which we need a lot more of. I’m against crappy accounting.






  • Ha ha me too and I wrote it.

    I’m very aware that there’s nothing to stop a bad actor from ignoring whatever is on the blockchain. But imagine removing all the web3/cryptobro bullshit that makes us all sick and instead just look at it as a record of who’s done what to which file. It could also be a centralised DB but it seems no one should have that power. A smart contract (aka ethereum) that says “anything derived from this sends some transactional fee up toward the originator”.

    I mean I’m aware it won’t work.

    I’m just saying that I can’t come up with anything better and so I also believe the battle is lost.