I find it amusing that this story comes up right next to this other one about German power costing less than nothing because of renewables.
Green energy is somehow both way too expensive and dangerously cheap.
That can literally be said by the same individuals in adjacent sentences depending on the narrative they’re spinning at the time.
TLDR daily on YouTube was spreading fud also recently. It’s amusing to see the fossil fuel media reach. It also helps identify who are the shitheads that sell out for pennies.
I dropped all the TLDR channels, they are not clued in enough to be talking in such depth on most topics.
“But if you don’t pay into the grid, there will be no money for maintenance of the grid!!!”
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What, like all these private power companies have been doing a good job of maintaining that grid infrastructure anyway? Don’t make me laugh any harder. They’ve taken all of their profits from the last century, give or take, and largely done the corporate equivalent of blowing it all on hookers and cocaine rather than reinvesting any but the bare minimum back into their own infrastructure.
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If it isn’t profitable to run the grid, that’s great! To use an example, the sewer system in my county is run directly by… the county. It is not a for profit enterprise, because as soon as you pull your head out of your own ass you can realize that trying to make modern basic necessities like power, water, and sewer access private businesses is a moronic idea. One which leads to inevitable catastrophe, because capitalists are going to do what capitalists do. The fact that these idiots are straight-facedly behaving as if we “owe” them profits in perpetuity and expect us to swallow it is almost as bad as the fact that, by and large, the public still does. Nationalize that shit. It’s a matter of national security anyway, at this point.
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This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Fossil fuels are on the way out. The companies in possession of the resources have a vice grip over the entire planet, and they know that their time is limited. You can’t monopolize wind or the sun, and they’re afraid
There wealth is going to end up with a lot of “stranded assets”.
I mean you can and they probably will. Unless something is easy enough to make yourself in your garage there will always be a free market to expand into and then extinguish.
lol
German power prices dropped below zero on the first trading day of the year, an increasingly frequent phenomenon in Europe as renewables expand.
funny, on the same day we get a headline about Germany energy prices dipping into negatives mainly due to renewables… hmmm
seeing ads on youtube saying “SolArr PAneLS rUiN YOurr rOOf!”
Right, that can happen. If an idiot installs the panels. But then, idiots can cause all sorts of problems, like making blanket statements such as the one above!
Yeah, idiots can also spill a couple of million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Whoopsie doodle! I guess that’s just the cost of doing business, amirite? Good thing stuff like that always happens far away…
Eh I’m more concerned about whoever is still pushing nuclear these days.
It’s a worse solution that takes longer and costs more to achieve what renewables and storage already can. It’s mainly wielded to attack renewables, and nothing ever gets done with it beyond that.
Anything that isn’t a fossil fuel is better then a fossil fuel.
Yes and the thing we can roll out today is better than doing nothing while we postulate about doing something in 5-10 years if nothing changes in the political landscape.
Not to mention it’s just downright better.
Tax the fuck out of fossil fuels and build both.
The quickest solution is degrowth, but no one and I mean no one wants to talk about that. My supposedly progressive, boomer friends think I’m mad for suggesting that.
I disagree, I think nuclear is a half decent stop gap. Especially when noting renewables aren’t a universal perfect solution for every location. (IE not everywhere has good sun or wind). Doesn’t mean we should 100% move to nuclear, but the faster we can get rid of coal the better.
Nuclear has its place in the world, and it’s pretty much a given that in order to maintain high availability and energy stability we will not be able to rely solely on one single source. It can’t be all renewables, but it can’t be all nuclear, either. We are going to need a mix of both.
Nuclear can serve e.g. big time industrial, manufacturing, or other mission critical needs with large amounts of power that is reasonably clean and, importantly, very stable.
We just need to keep it from falling totally into the hands of morons who want to waste it all on “AI” datacenters, or whatever the fuck else.
It can and will be multiple renewable sources of generation and storage, with nuclear only having a limited role (especially if SMRs don’t become a thing).
Is it more expensive than storage? My understanding was that nuclear was cheaper long-term, but I honestly don’t know. I think we need both, but I could be convinced that nuclear is obsolete with some real-life numbers.
It’s not, to provide 2 weeks of storage (a reasonable amount to cover a period of no wind in winter) for the UK would cost about 2,000 Billion USD at current Li-ion prices.
Intermittent renewables are great as a component of energy generation but storage costs become prohibitive as you get to large fractions of intermittent power generation.
