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It is cheaper to operate and that has been it’s selling point for the last years.
In case you’re ever wondering, this is an example of your tax dollars at work. Thirty years ago solar and wind generation had to be heavily subsidized with government grants to make them viable in the energy market. Now the technology of both has advanced to the point that it’s undercutting all of the other forms of electricity generation, without subsidization.
Government subsidies work. They’re effective for getting new technologies off the ground.
Good thing we still subsidize petroleum
Good for the oil companies and legislators they own, anyway
Don’t forget the retirees that rely on the stock prices dividend payouts in their 401ks.
Those IRAs and 401ks that are the only alternative after states and corps plundered all the pension systems to buy those politicians.
They are great. As long as they don’t end up like corn.
Or oil and coal, propping up bad energy sources while the clean ones have to often fend for themselves and compete against the subsidies.
Or oil and corn and meat and dairy.
The four elements of power.
Solar PV tortillas taste awful and hurt my teeth.
So now the coal and oil power plants require government subsidies.
Now whether or not any of that has been effective I couldn’t tell you, especially considering those communities aren’t historically fond of democratic administrations.
It is now. But only after we invested in it.
This is a great example of investing in tech even when it’s not practical in the present day. It can pay off later down the line.
Well that and the US fracked a shit ton of natural gas which became the goto fuel to burn.
Natural gas isn’t emissions free. We’re talking about wind, hydro, nuclear, and solar.
A good chunk of that is nuclear which is not cheaper to operate.
This is economics now, not politics. US can go full crazy Trump, but the grid will just keep getting greener as greener is cheapest. He can rant and rave about global warming being a conspiracy or anything else, but it’s unstoppable now.
The infuriating thing to me is, renewable energy is often extremely independent. It means no reliance on foreign oil. That SHOULD be the most American thing, especially for those in the GOP who claim to be anti-government.
Goes to remind you their main product is hypocrisy.
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No, the grid won’t get greener if Trump is elected because he WILL go full dictator. And he will revert everything that is being done currently.
He’ll struggle to make states to buy more expensive energy. If he managed, he’d put the state at a global disadvantage. Even then, he’d have to outlaw solar to stop people installing it at home.
That’s what tanking the EPA is for. Without any oversight of externalities, dirty energy becomes cheaper.
Environmental Protection Agency?
Sorry, I don’t follow.
Yes the Environmental Protection Agency. The Heritage foundation is taking applications and they vet by looking at whether their social media accounts supports Trump: https://www.project2025.org/
Last time Trump did their best to push responsible people out of government jobs, but that was just a test run. This time around it would be a speed run.
Edit: per Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory
Like a lot Trump stuff, that is a whole bag of crazy! Yet another reason to hope he doesn’t get in.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. The order establishing the EPA was ratified by committee hearings in the House and Senate. The agency is led by its administrator, who is appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. The current administrator is Michael S. Regan. The EPA is not a Cabinet department, but the administrator is normally given cabinet rank. The EPA has its headquarters in Washington, D.C., regional offices for each of the agency's ten regions, and 27 laboratories.The agency conducts environmental assessment, research, and education. It has the responsibility of maintaining and enforcing national standards under a variety of environmental laws, in consultation with state, tribal, and local governments. EPA enforcement powers include fines, sanctions, and other measures. It delegates some permitting, monitoring, and enforcement responsibility to U.S. states and the federally recognized tribes. The agency also works with industries and all levels of government in a wide variety of voluntary pollution prevention programs and energy conservation efforts. The agency's budgeted employee level in 2023 is 16,204.1 full-time equivalent (FTE). More than half of EPA's employees are engineers, scientists, and environmental protection specialists; other employees include legal, public affairs, financial, and information technologists.
Still plenty that can be done to stop it. Preventing transmission lines, giving even bigger subsidies to fossil fuels, putting large tarrifs on imported solar panels and wind turbines. Just look at California the power monopoly is in with Gavin Newsom and they created rules that protect their profits above all else and now solar installs is at 20% what it was before.
You mean 120% of what it was? 20% of what it was means way cheaper, and I’m sure you mean more expensive.
Sure but it’s self defeating, making things more expensive. Putting that whole state/country at a disadvantage against those who use cheap clean power instead of fighting it.
I think they were referring to installations, not cost.
I think you’re unfamiliar with California’s new policy it doesn’t change the cost to install but how much you pay and make for electricity. Basically now you sell electricity to the grid for 3-5 cents and buy it for like 10-15 but then they tack on like 20 cents in transmission fees. So it has made solar not cost effective anymore in most residential cases. So the total number of yearly installs has decreased to 20% compared to last year. But my point was a radical government can do plenty of stuff to sabotage progress in order to keep themselves and friends in power.
Don’t sell to the grid if you can avoid it. Charge a house battery, charge a EV, run all your stuff for the day. Always better to use than sell back to the grid anyway.
But my larger point was that by harming green energy, you harm energy costs and harm the economy. It becomes less competitive to economies who ride reality instead of fight it.
And yes, I don’t know California policies. Hand up, I’m a Brit who just champions green energy transitions. I watch https://grid.iamkate.com with glee.
but the grid will just keep getting greener as greener is cheapest.
Really? As somebody that works in the power space, how exactly do you figure that? Nuke aside, which people constantly complain about, the NRC doesn’t like to renew licenses, doesn’t want to grant new ones, that leaves wind and solar, both are money pits, waste more than they generate, and have a horrible environmental impact both from lost land, spent panels that can’t be recycled or thrown out as they’re toxic as hell, wind farms need never ending maintenance and again, cost more to run than they give back.
Until modular nuke become the norm and coal plants are retro’d, standard nuke plants are the absolute best bet. There’s no consiracy to keep older coal plants alive, sorry, that’s political stupidity. Every power company on the planet would dump them if they could. They’re a nightmare to operate and keep going.
Easier to recycle solar pannels and wind turbines than burnt coal or gas…
Solar and wind are now the cheapest power. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/ Both can be mixed with other land use. Both are still undergoing material use evolution.
Fission is always going to be an issue because humans aren’t grown up enough to handle the waste. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
Let alone running them safely. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accidents_by_country So I’m pretty uncomfortable with standardized nuclear modules (sub reactors) being distributed far and wide.
Maybe fusion will be different, but it always seams decades away.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Worldwide, many nuclear accidents and serious incidents have occurred before and since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Two thirds of these mishaps occurred in the US. The French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has concluded that technical innovation cannot eliminate the risk of human errors in nuclear plant operation.
How exactly do solar and wind waste more money than they generate? There is hardly anything that requires less maintenance. I put panels on my roof and just forget about them for 20 years. No space wasted, no maintenance.
Compare that to a nuclear power plant. How long does it take to build one? France is building new ones for I don’t know, 5 or ten years? And once it’s built, how much land does a NPP require? How much staffing and maintenance? They have massive cooling requirements so they always need to be built close to water. Did you know that France had to power down about half their NPPs in the summer because the rivers didn’t carry enough water? You say that solar is toxic as hell, then what is nuclear? What exactly is the plan with waste? Bury it somewhere really really deep and keep fingers crossed for thousands of years that it doesn’t contaminate ground water? And what’s with all the irradiated parts of the plant itself? How can you recycle them?
Any way you cut it, nuclear is a grandiose, but extremely risky and costly technology.
How exactly do solar and wind waste more money than they generate? There is hardly anything that requires less maintenance. I put panels on my roof and just forget about them for 20 years. No space wasted, no maintenance.
LOL, you didn’t just compare an ignorable amount of low grade consumer panels to a solar site did you? How many millions did you spend to clear land? How much did you spend on hundreds of employees, trucks, fuel, constant oh shit moments over the course of 1-2yrs to build the thing? How many millions in environmental consulting and never ending harassment from the municipality that you’re building it in? How about all the legal fees from the lawsuits from the environmentalists that are conveniently the same ones that claim they want green power?
Also, you don’t get to claim you get to forget about anything until that 20yrs has passed and your system hasn’t shit it’s pants, I got a handful of buddies that work for solar contractors and they fuck up all the time. You know how many bad batches of panel there are out there that don’t even come close to living their lifespan? Depending on the “Deal” you got, that’s not always covered either, espeically when the companies that put them in make the majority of the money from taking the tax credits from it.
Did you know that France had to power down about half their NPPs in the summer because the rivers didn’t carry enough water?
Yes, I did. You realize there’s a difference between powering down, and downpowering right? Plants downpower all the time for a host of reasons, part of the deal with nuclear.
What exactly is the plan with waste? Bury it somewhere really really deep and keep fingers crossed for thousands of years that it doesn’t contaminate ground water?
No, and that’s never been the plan. The industry is always working on better ways to deal with the waste, in Nuclear’s case, even building pools although a pain in the ass, is safe, including literally falling into the thing.
And what’s with all the irradiated parts of the plant itself? How can you recycle them?
They’re decontaminated and removed. Happens all the time during outage season and during repair. What can’t be totally decontaminated is transported to where it can be.
What is toxic in solar panels? While I’d love it if they would actually recycle the silver, copper, and 99.99% pure silicon, most of the time it ends up the same place the fiberglass turbines do: ground into industrial sand for concrete. Also the aluminum is already recycled anyway. There are several recyclers for solar panels popping up as the scale of solar increases to better take advantage of the materials, but they are already fully recycled Also coal plants are shutting down and being edged out by natural gas anyway. I don’t know what sources you are using, but they are either out of date or wrong.
What is toxic in solar panels?
Mainly lead and cadmium, and they can be recycled, that’s not the problem, the problem is the cost of doing it vs sticking them in a landfill. Nobody wants to spend 5x to recycle something that’s dead to them and can’t generate income anymore, vs dumping it.
Quick everyone, downvote to oblivion because this guy actually is educated in the subject
That guy sounds more like that pilot I know bitching how noise and pollution regulations make their job now difficult or even take their wings. It’s not because they’re in the biz they’re not biased.
Meanwhile where I live, solar panels and wind turbines are happily recycled.
That sounds pretty different actually. On one hand you have someone talking about being inconvenienced.
On the other hand you have someone in the industry talking about practicality. Biased or not, people that work in their respective areas generally know the most about that same area, as opposed to random people online.
From where I’m sitting is still a random person online. I mean, I worked in a power plant for some time. It doesn’t make me an expert for the whole sector.
I actually work in the industry and am definitely educated in the subject and I can say with 100% certainty that guy is not in the industry and is full of shit.
No. No it’s not. EOTW in a decade tops. If it ain’t hell incarnate then it’ll be a virus, bio-, tech-, software, etc., maybe that comet, whatever. Unless you FOSS everything NOW…Goodbye…forever.
Can I get that in English?
They can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what they’re saying is there are numerous reasons that the world can and will be over in the next decade. The only solution to this, as they see it, is to make everything free and open source. If we don’t, we’ll all be doomed.
The planet will live. We won’t.
No. I only speak in psychedelic and psychic drugs. Inhale some cognitive dimensioner perception accelerator already. Your last chance before…
That’s a very cool article, I didn’t know the US was actually making the change so quickly.
Weirdest part of the article is the included pie chart from the US Energy Information Agency showing the usage of different types of energy, but the entire pie is orange, like every slice of different energy is orange.
They need one art guy, just one.
I didn’t mind the pie chart, the slices are labeled clearly, no need to use coloring like you have to read a legend.
Kind of you
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Why? Nuclear power is the most complex and expensive option of any clean energy source from what I know.
Nuclear power is good for its consistent output that is independent of outside factors like wind, clouds, or drought. Plus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn’t particularly expensive.
That consistent output isn’t as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they’re available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I’m turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren’t being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There’s some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
This is the trap. The fossil fuel industry has co-opted wind and PV solar by way of filling in the gaps and transitioning to net zero emissions. Of course, the gaps will always be there and the transition will never complete and “net zero” seems to just leave the door open on fossil fuels forever.
Nuclear power, on the other hand, has the reliability that @FireTower@lemmy.world mentioned and it closes any of the gaps from wind and solar right up. You don’t have to quickly cut the power on a reactor if it’s sunny or windy, just divert it to hydrogen and ammonia production. Even if the efficient high temperature electrolysis tech isn’t ready yet, it doesn’t really matter since it’s emissions free. Furthermore, nuclear power produces good heat/steam to support cogeneration and various industrial processes.
Nonsense. Conservatives have brought up nuclear for decades as a way to play “gotcha” with anti-nuclear progressives. Maggie Thatcher, for example, embraced the science of climate change early on as a way to push nuclear. It was never serious, though. Always a political game that resulted in no new nuclear being built while coal and oil continued to ramp up.
I think Thatcher just wanted to privatize, deregulate, and liberalize as much as she could, all fundamentally bad moves from the perspectives of both labor and greenhouse emissions concerns.
I totally agree with this. A lot of places have cheap electricity in off-peak hours, as a workaround to this limitation (steady output).
I think that this obsession about intermittent power comes partially from the idea that any new sources of power must be drop-in replacements for the systems that we’ve had for so many decades. However those systems run the way they do as an accident of technology, not because of a careful analysis and design to match optimal usage patterns.
im assuming by “winding down” you mean production of power? Not shutting down the plants, nuclear plants operate the most efficiently at high capacity factor, when they aren’t producing power the fuel is still decaying, thus you should be producing power for AS LONG as possible. This is why if you ever look at capacity factor >80% is really common, i’ve even seen >100% a couple of times, as well as the term “baseload plant” being used almost always in reference to nuclear.
That wouldn’t make sense for an existing nuclear plant, the nuclear plant should stay running in place of solar/wind. As you would be burning money actively otherwise, or you could just shut it down permanently, thats the other option.
Yes, running them at a lower level, and yes, that would be my point. You can run them down when renewable sources pick up, but that’s inefficient. Solar/wind don’t mix well with nuclear; you’re leaving something on the table if you try.
That’s not a particularly complex way of looking at it. the nuclear plant is a base load plant, meaning you can pretty much just subtract its output from the predicted consumption, and then you can simply have less renewable energy, load peaking is midday anyway, which is when solar is productive. (or have less energy storage, since the nuclear plant will combat that), you would have a more consistent and regular power production at that point, and waste less money. (since you aren’t burning money on running a nuclear plant at a reduced/no output, you would technically be burning solar energy (you cant burn wind energy, you just stop the turbine, and it wont produce power) but that’s cheaper anyway, and besides beyond install costs, very low continual maintenance)
Though if you were going to shutdown the nuclear plant at its EOL then you would need to increase production of renewables, which is easy enough. Saying that “nuclear and solar/wind don’t mix” is just kind of weird. Realistically the only better mix would be solar/wind and gas since gas can manage peak loads super trivially, which is of course not very green. So arguably nuclear would be your ideal match unless you went explicitly solar/wind.
Also, having nuclear in a 100% low carbon grid is great to stabilize the grid.
A French study showed that having around 13% of nuclear in the grid reduce the solar and battery capacity needed by a factor of two compared to no nuclear.
Don’t leave out the deconstruction of old nuclear plants after their operational time and the storage of radioactive waste. It’s very laborious and expensive.
Hydro is also quite independent but it’s heavily dependent on geography. That’s how Canada is able to be much ahead in renewable energy.
Nuclear power is bad for its consistent output because demand is not constant. You could of course run some energy hungry chemical reaction when there is more power than demand, make hydrogen to use for synthetic fuels for example or build a battery to store the excess power for when the demand is high. But is is of course much cheaper with renewables.
Hydro is best as a giant battery bank, and pairs quite well with nuclear.
That’s a good thing. It means lots of hours of well paying engineering and construction work.
modern gen 4 plants are MUCH simpler, foregoing PWR loop entirely in favor of liquid metal/salt type reactors, with various different design choices that are all much simpler, and cheaper to build/maintain.
If we see actual development in that field it’s not hard to imagine them playing with the fossil fuels, possibly renewables as well given the base load productivity, and relative lack of waste.
Also needs less coal.
And after that less natural gas, but getting rid of coal should be the higher priority as it is the greater polluting fuel.
Fair. I wonder if the chart includes the coal typically needed to make steel.
unless that coal is somehow also generating power, i doubt it, electricity production including a source that isn’t electricity production is… weird.
Okay I guess it should have been obvious to me.
I, too, want the one that will take longer and cost more than alternatives.
That’s actually better than I thought.
In my city they had everyone switch to renewable energy, they sent Mail out stating that your energy source will automatically change unless you opt out.
LOL how are they going to change the energy source that powers an individual house if they “opt out” ??
Did they run separate power lines to every house that is on a switch between the power sources? It’s not like a network packet that you can route to a destination, it’s going to go down the lines the same way unless the circuit is broken.
Suppose Provider A is 100% renewable and Provider B is 100% fossil. Both providers generate power and feed the same grid (which is managed separately from the various energy providers). The same grid powers all homes. Householders get to choose whether to buy from Provider A or Provider B. If you support renewables then you buy from Provider A; their share goes up and B’s share goes down. And vice versa for B. In addition the government juggles A,B as well as C,D,E,etc to provide the overall service to the country.
Wait really, no joke??
Not in my state, we’re like 10-15% emission free wind and solar), and like 60-70% from coal.
Finally some good news.
There’s a lot if you look for it, recent developments in tidal are incredibly positive and we’re absolutely going to see a rapid uptake in marine electrification as existing technology progresses through the market. Most people never really think about the resources used and pollution caused by small boats but one of the big destructive forces at play is the infrastructure requirements - small boats need big boats to supply their fuel stations.
Transitioning away from this system and instead using costal tidal generators to charge electric ferries and barges could be a total game changer in many areas, especially many of the highly trafficked and polluted tidal basins like in north Brazil, Nigeria, or island clusters like in the Philippines. Also the intercoastal waterways around the US and other leisure spots.
We’re making great progress in many areas and I really think it’s important to acknowledge this and cheer it on least we get so caught in a false sense of doom that we just give up.
Its not good news at all, electricity prices have gone up a lot since this net-zero insanity took over. Morons are clapping their hands like trained seals at their bank accounts being drained by corporations and politicians.
Wanting to breath clean air on a habitable planet isn’t insanity.
The air is plenty clean as it is, has been for decades too… as long as you don’t live in California, where the smug is so thick it’s asphyxiating.
The air is plenty clean as it is
Tell that to the people in East Palestine Ohio. Tell that to the people that live near coal plants.
as long as you don’t live in California
Doesn’t matter where you live if the planet is uninhabitable.
This is due to corporate greed. Solar and wind are the cheapest sources of energy in the history of the world.
All prices have gone up in the same window you describe!
No they haven’t. Mine has been the same for a few decades and it’s fine.
Yes they have, rates used to be 0.12/kwh all day long, recently they rolled out a peak pricing scam and it’s 0.22/kwh from 2-7pm, that is nearly double.
It’s better than nothing. Hopefully we can speed this up in next couple of years.
This makes electric cars less polluting with every passing day as this percentage increases.
60% of US electricity still isn’t emissions-free
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.
Weather can also play a role, as unusually high demand for heating in the winter months could potentially require that older fossil fuel plants be brought online.
This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.
Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment).
But that’s likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs.
The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity.
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