| ▲ | kokey 3 hours ago |
| Every time, over the years, that there has been some kind of headline saying renewables have overtaken fossil fuels, when you look at it a bit more closely there is always a big 'but'. For example, it was compared to coal (not taking into account electricity from gas), or it was for one day, or it was a percentage of new installations, or it excludes winter, includes nuclear etc. This time, however, it looks like it's actually true and that's just for wind and solar. This is incredible, and done through slowly compounding gains that didn't cause massive economic hardships along the way. |
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| ▲ | owenversteeg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe. For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou... Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc. You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%. |
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| ▲ | eigenspace 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It can be rather misleading to to talk about renewable energy generation versus total energy usage. Most uses of fossil fuels are very inefficient. For instance, when you step on the accelerator in your car, only around 30% of the energy in the fuel you use actually is being used to propel you forward. The majority of the energy is wasted as heat. In a power plant that's more like 70% being captured and going towards the goal (electricity generation). Another large quantity of energy-usage is heating, and electrical heat-pumps can be around 3-5x more energy efficient at heating an enclosed space than combustion or resistive heating. So while things like heating an transportation use a very large amount of energy, conquering them with renewables actually won't require that Europe installs 10x or whatever more wind and solar, since electrification also brings significant new efficiencies. ______ If you want to compare renewables against the amount of fossil fuels being burnt, then it'd be a lot more representative if you calculate the amount of wind energy impacting a wind turbine blade, or the amount of energy in solar radiation incident on a solar panel. That's an easy way to inflate the renewable numbers by ~5x or whatever | | |
| ▲ | owenversteeg an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I mostly agree. Certainly transportation is an obvious one. But of course there are still some losses; when you include all the losses in the system and cold weather you can easily get ~80% for EVs vs. ~30% for ICE cars. Heat pumps can be very efficient, but 5x more efficient than combustion/resistive heating (which is near 100%...) is not common in practice. 3x, sure, plenty of installations that get that or better in mild climates. That said, those are two pretty large items. If we reached 90% electrification on both it would be a pretty big win: Road transport represents ~26% of global energy use and all heating/cooling (industry, building, agriculture) represents ~50%. | |
| ▲ | grumbelbart 16 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Exactly. It is in general (much) more efficient to burn natural gas in a power plant and use the electricity for heatpumps compared to simply burning gas at home for heating. | |
| ▲ | adrianN an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most power plants are less than 50% efficient. | | |
| ▲ | eigenspace an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, 70% is more or less a best-case scenario (unless you count systems for recovering and distributing waste heat, then it goes higher) |
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| ▲ | jl6 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The “but” this time is that we are talking about electricity demand, not total energy demand. Electrification of heating is the next big milestone. It’s still a great trend. |
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| ▲ | pranavj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is an important observation. For years these headlines came with asterisks - one sunny/windy day, excludes gas, new capacity only, etc. This being actual annual generation for wind+solar combined vs all fossil fuels is genuinely significant. The compounding nature of it is key too - solar capacity is now large enough that even modest percentage growth adds enormous absolute capacity each year. |
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| ▲ | RationPhantoms 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In my opinion, the "but" is still the "hellbrise" considerations brought up in the Decouple podcast. Renewable energy is fantastic but, at grid scale, has to be coupled with sufficient storage: https://www.decouple.media/p/hellbrise |
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| ▲ | adrianN an hour ago | parent [-] | | You can get pretty far with negligible storage. There is a cost tradeoff between storage, peaker plants (those could burn hydrogen, not just natgas) and grid size. 70% renewable with no storage is rather easy. | | |
| ▲ | RationPhantoms 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Not sure if you read the podcast but the whole point is that over-reliance on renewables without a sufficient means to handle oversupply can cause grid instability specific to the Spain/Portugal grid outage. |
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| ▲ | youngtaff 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you take a look at the All Time view on https://grid.iamkate.com you'll see wind overtook gas a few years ago in the UK |
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| ▲ | fred_is_fred 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How much did Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine and nat gas price and supply changes accelerate things? |
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| ▲ | ZeroGravitas 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Sadly we got a warning in 2014 with Crimea being seized and fossil apologists like Bjorn Lomborg argued against rolling out wind and solar faster in response. Because he's so "reasonable" and "pragmatic", he didn't say we shouldn't phase out Russian gas, he just said solar and wind don't work and so we should invent some totally new type of energy for this purpose. It's only with a few years hindsight that he's obviously a shill. You had to be paying close attention at the time to notice. And sadly that kind of engineered delay is widespread. | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Ember Energy: European electricity prices and costs - https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an... (updated daily) | |
| ▲ | cies 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
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