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Arodex 3 hours ago

It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries. You even have the industrial prowess to make it all in the country step by step, whereas nuclear reactors are such humongous engineering projects that building the capacity is very out of reach.

Edit: and with the Mediterranean and rivers warming severely - and the latter even suffering from draught - how are you going to cool down your reactors? Nuclear in Italy is a non-starter.

flextheruler 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Solar, wind, and even hydroelectricity are too dependent upon the environment to make up the entire electricity generation capacity of any major industrial country. With renewables, even with batteries, the actual production is within a range. Couple that with demand also being in a range you get uncomfortable possibilities at play. And while colder water is definitely preferable for cooling, I'd have to imagine that if the bodies of water were actually becoming too hot to cool a nuclear reactor system there'd be bigger problems than energy production.

Kipters 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why not both?

We still need rotating mass to keep the grid stable, which means either building giant flywheels, keep burning gas or bring nuclear into the mix.

One of these can also produce a ton of energy when needed, the other two cant.

We can and should build more renewables, but we can't risk grid stability!

mrob an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's technically possible to replace rotating mass with batteries using a "grid-forming inverter", which is an inverter that converts the battery DC to AC with frequency varying depending on the grid load, simulating how that rotating mass would behave ("synthetic inertia"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource#Grid-f...

This competes with the traditional giant flywheel option ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser ), which has the advantage of being a simple and proven technology, and handling brief overload better, but the disadvantage of having moving parts. It's not clear which option is currently best. Both are in current use.

iknowstuff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We actually don’t need those anymore. Grid forming inverters and batteries will take over that role.

ziotom78 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It is absolutely ridiculous: of all countries, Italy has totally the means to rely only on solar and batteries

Do you have any trustable source for this?

swiftcoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'd say "Supplementary Information for Strategic deployment of solar photovoltaics for achieving self-sufficiency in Europe throughout the energy transition"[1] fits the bill. It lays out various paths to 100% renewables (which in Italy, like in Spain, is heavily solar) by 20250

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61492-9.pdf

Arodex 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just look at any map of solar power potential, solar irradiance, hours of sunshine of Europe.

otikik 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the question is more about the "and batteries" part than about the sunshine part.

ziotom78 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Exactly

dieortin 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Latitude?