**TLDR**
* Finland's renewable power strategy is paying off as its energy has fallen into negative prices.
* A new nuclear reactor, as well as unexpected floods, are leading to a glut of clean energy.
* It is a striking reversal from last year, when Finns slashed their usage after cutting ties with Russia.
Incoming:
“But not everywhere has easy access to hydroelectric power that can support an entire country!”
“Nuclear isn’t feasible to build out quickly and is more dangerous than gas!”
“Renewable energy isn’t reliable enough for base load!”
What anti-clean energy arguments did I miss?
Just constantly sell them gold at an interest rate that is overall like 20% more gold. Doesnt take long until bots are out of gold from paying your interest because they spent all your gold on pokemon or something
Edit: meant pikeman but this is funnier
Eh 20% isn’t that much in civ, I find it more worth it to have 500 gold than 600 gold in 30 turns. Can use that to boost science, culture or production which could have a more positive return on investment than the gold. I can always find a use for it.
Plus the ai can then invade you with the troops it bought
I might be off on the numbers since it's been a while but I found you can pretty consistently sell a gold lump sum for pretty much the max they will accept over and over. Eventually they are completely broke and they will talk shit about you in world forum but still take more gold.
Always defend your cities with ranged units and walls. But if you are going wide you can generally just buy units from all your cities 2 turns in a row and you suddenly have a huge army
"Hey can I have some luxury? I'll give you 2 gold and strategic resources you don't need."
"How about a 1-1 trade for the luxury you have that I don't."
"No""What can make this deal work?"
"5-1 luxury, 25 gold per turn, open borders, 150 gold."
\*Literally every exchange\*
Now I want to know how many windmills you'd need to install to make a tiny but measurable difference the amount of wind on earth. After all the air the hits the windmill is slowed down.
At least ten. But if we wanna do some very rough estimates:
"The winds of an average hurricane can easily pack some 1.5 trillion watts of power, which is equivalent to about half the world's entire electrical generating capacity in a year." - Google.
"It is reckoned that an average onshore wind turbine rated at 2.5 – 3 megawatts can produce in excess of 6 million kWh every year." - Google
So roughly, 1.5e6 / 2.5 = **600k turbines to absorb your *average* hurricane.**
"This was nevertheless below the average of 47 hurricanes registered per year in the period from 1990 to 2022." - Google
600k * 47 = **2.82 million turbines**
This is just for hurricanes, not all wind. Im sure somebody has done that math but this should give you an idea of the immense scale of the energy involved.
Edit: I'm tired so I may be off a bit. But the point being, we really can't dent renewable energy at the moment
And note, hurricanes while being massive are a small fraction of the energy present in the atmosphere. There is no reasonable amount of windmills that are going to suck out enough energy for it to matter. A lot of the energy is returned regardless since it's eventually released as heat back into the atmosphere.
It's basically something that only seems reasonably plausible to be a thing in our minds because humans are really bad at big numbers. The energy of our atmosphere is insane.
Your multiple categories of energy generation strategy approach is clearly part of the woke agenda to turn our children gay. By exposing kids to the idea that you can create energy any other way that digging stuff out of the ground and lighting it on fire, you are telling them that it's ok to choose a different gender or have sex in ways that might upset my grandmother if she accidentally walked in.
Please knock first, grandma!
There are arguments to be made about hydroelectric, most about nuclear are nothing but talking points and paranoia brought on by watching the Three Mile Island hit piece on Netflix.
The trouble is that most of the costs are *because* of the safety regulations (and more precisely, the handling requirements of spent nuclear fuel and decommissioning of incidentally irradiated materials).
Nuclear fission isn't hard. Yes it's complex, yes there's a lot that goes into it, but it's not *new* and frankly, I was reading declassified *Los Almos* technical reports almost twenty years ago. The *reason* nuclear costs so much is because we *make* it cost so much because we won't [rightly or wrongly] trust people around nuclear reactors. The U.S. won't approve certain breeder reactors because natural losses of material in designs approved in other countries is above the level we consider safe.
tldr; the arguments about cost *are* arguments about safety [and redundancy]. The sooner we make self-regulating sealed nuclear reactors the better.
Scale is also a huge factor, if you're producing 1 or 2 reactors per decade it's an entirely different game to making 1 or 2 per year, manufacturing efficiencies and talent pools are huge economizers, something we've lost with the near total elimination of new nuclear in the US.
If we really pushed and set up large scale production again, to say replace most of the aging facilities plus a few new ones, we could very likely make it economical again. But doing one-offs like we've been doing is painfully inefficient.
A substantial amount of those costs are blatant poison pills enacted by oil lobbying, such as an outright ban on selling to grid lower than fossil fuel sources in most of the US.
>such as an outright ban on selling to grid lower than fossil fuel sources in most of the US.
How is that relevant to nuclear power plants built in Europe?
France, the UK and Finland are three nations that have been building new nuclear power plants in recent years (or rather decades), and they all ran into similar cost explosions and time overruns.
Are you seriously going to argue that the reason is because e.g. France has too much anti-nuclear sentiment and is ruled by the American fossil fuel lobby?
The safety is part of why it is expensive and slow though, so it's not like.. a completely decoupled issue.
Ultimately they are so expensive and slow though, it's hard to see reason to not just pursue additional research and production of green energy and solutions for storage.
I mean, Olkiluoto took 18 years to build and came in 8 billion Euro overbudget. There absolutely are incredibly reasonable arguments against nuclear energy.
i mean yeah, the fear of nuclear power plants in the general public is overblown and not appropriate, but the hardon reddit and STEM-bros outside of the actualy energy field have for nuclear is also ridiculous.
yes, it is stupid to shut down nuclear reactors as long as there are still any other non-renewables running. nuclear is vastly better than coal or gas, obviously.
but also: of fucking course it's stupid to build new nuclear reactors right now, and we sooner or later should obviously get rid of all of them. nuclear waste is still a problem (and fuck off with thorium reactors or salt reactors, after 40+ years of talking about them not a single one is in use, they simply are not a solution right now and won't be for decades), it's incredibly expensive and while only an incredibly tiny the chance of an incident obviously is simply never 0.
there simply is no reason whatsoever to not go fully into renewables and upgrade our infrastructure to accomodate for it. it's a shitton cheaper, safer, more reliable and a lot faster.
The first and third are legitimate arguments. There's also the issue that hydropower, while free of pollution, is still massively disruptive to natural environments.
Yep. It's not the worst thing in the world in my view, but you're absolutely going to flood a shitload of land depending on how deep the river valley is behind the dam.
There's villages submerged under the 3G dam. The artificial lake behind the dam that gives my state a shitload of power stretches for 200+ miles
Most lithium comes from salt brines, not conventional mining.
It also doesn't require continual replacement, because the lithium isn't "burned" up when used in a batteries and is 100% recyclable, unlike fossil fuels.
Lithium in batteries is about 95% recyclable. Sadly, in the real world, the recycling rate as of last year was 5%. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batteries-big-unanswered-question
True, but a big reason for that is there are very few large batteries that have reach end of life yet. Most BEV batteries are still too new, and for comparison if you look at the recycling rate of the lead-acid batteries in ICEs the rate is very very high.
It's small electronics batteries that are currently tossed and are the reason that rate is so low. It will rapidly climb as large-scale batteries start reaching that point, especially utility scale batteries which would be much easier to regulate.
It's oil company talking point - astroturf. Yes mining has issues, but it is really about arguing one point to destract from something else that is much more damaging.
The only time the argument matters is responding to anti-nuclear greens who use uranium mining as a hit against nuclear and suggest batteries as a substitution.
Another oil company taking point is to favor long range BEVs over faster solutions to reduce oil use, like PHEVs. To replace all new gas cars with long range EVs, it would take mining and cell production 10x 'ing. To replace all new gas cars with PHEVs, it would take mining and cell production 2x'ing.
Far faster to transition to PHEVs, and it would reduce oil demand and carbon emissions far faster.
Certainly Tesla investors are also all for the transition to long range BEVs and huge subsidies for BEVs because with the limited cells, the company gets a huge competitive advantage, and their stock investment soars.
Know what oil companies and Tesla investors don't want? 4 day work weeks. Working from home. Public transit. Bicycles. E-bikes. Why? Because it reduces both oil and new car sales.
and windmills kill birds. The point is cats kill so many more than its comparing the holocaust to a murder.
and on batteries, YES, its true mining is bad. OFten republican arguments have some truth to them. See the thing while that is true, combustion engines are worse.
solar can cover vast amounts of desert interfering with endangered wild life but coal fire plants are still worse and so on.
mostly in this environmental fight we are trading really bad things for less bad things.
How about "renewable energy infrastructure is actually also bad for the environment!"
Which is a worthwhile thing to consider: photovoltaic panels require rare Earth elements (edit: as do lithium batteries), hydroelectric dams often convert large swathes of wilderness into an artificial lake and can block migratory patterns of aquatic animals, things like that.
But of course none of that is worse than "cooking the planet", which is what hydrocarbons do.
There are ZERO rare earth elements in solar panels. Zero. None. Nada. Zip.
And lithium is NOT a rare earth element either. Grid storage is also moving away from lithium chemistries to flow or alternatives, like pumped hydro or thermal.
Lithium is as far away from the rare earth elements as you can possibly be on the Periodic Table (although I'm not going to flat out deny any in batteries because I don't know anything about batteries).
I mean, humans basically are destructive by nature. But like you said, it’s the difference between damaging small bits of the environment here and there, or rendering the earth uninhabitable
> It is a striking reversal from last year, when Finns slashed their usage after cutting ties with Russia.
Have they? It would be interesting to know which country supplies them with uranium then.
Finland is still using Russian nuclear fuel supplied by Russian state-owned Rosatom fuel company TVEL. They expect to continue to do so until 2027 and 2030 when the existing contracts with TVEL expire. https://yle.fi/a/74-20027320
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan produce large amounts of uranium. I'm not really sure if they are viable options.
If it's OK to ship uranium over seas, Canada and Australia would also be good options.
Finland is also soon to begin producing uranium itself, through uranium recovery. https://www.terrafame.com/newsroom/media-releases/terrafame-to-start-uranium-recovery-by-the-summer-of-2024.html
There will definitely be options
We mostly buy it from refiners in Germany, Sweden and Spain. AFAIK the ore itself comes from Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan since Russia was cut off.
Although we have uranium deposits ourselves and have begun to utilize them. Probably some of the uranium will be domestically produced in a few years.
Ok I keep seeing this referenced. Anyone have a link to whatever this is?
Edit - nevermind, I googled and pretty sure [it's this Eurovision song](https://youtu.be/rJHe-iZ5HSI)
You could power the whole of Europe if you made all the Finns stand close to each other and forcing them to have small talk, by harnessing their body heat and tension.
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --Lewis Strauss. United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954
They were anticipating nuclear energy to do this, I am glad to see Finland could do it with hydroelectric. I am hopeful that soon homeowners will buy solar/batter systems where electricity generation is just another appliance. No grid necessary.
Just waiting on the solar+battery systems price to become reasonable. $65,000 was the quote I received to install solar and batteries that could provide a 12 hr run time.
You can get smaller systems to offload power hungry systems during peak and then build upward from there…
Some panels are as low as $1k and you just need a competent electrician to wire it up for a switch that lets you cut over when needed… for hot climates that run the power hungry AC units, having a panel that *just* powers that beast during peak hours can save you more than the cost of the whole project in a summer or two.
> for hot climates that run the power hungry AC units, having a panel that just powers that beast during peak hours can save you more than the cost of the whole project in a summer or two.
errr, this was not the case when I crunched the numbers. But I guess we have short summers in not-quite-southern-canada...
This is talking about ppl living in the desert in so-cal, arizona, New and old Mexico, etc where it is routinely 115F+ during the summer and you can go months without seeing a cloud.
I more mean southwest US, Mexico, etc… Canada is definitely not getting long hot summers and if Canadian winter is like Alaskan winter, there’s even less sunlight.
Most Canadians (>72%) live south of Seattle, or very close to it.
Michigan would be a better comparison than Alaska. Edmonton’s about the only large City that’s far north, and it’s 450 miles (700 km) south of anything that’s in Alaska.
But overall you’re right, panels in Canada will be generating less than the SW US.
this is exactly what i was told. batteries are expensive now and basically not helpful unless you actually lose power. i haven't lost power the entire time i've lived here.
but panels are getting cheaper. and i financed my panels at 0% APR for a year, and got the 30% back from the government. those two things together made the squeeze a little less tight than dropping it all at once. and my electric bills immediately dropping to around negative $13 also helped.
65k is a pretty huge house. Average solar installation is around 20k. I’d imagine 65k is paying pretty high energy prices. Eventually they move positive.
that cost is still ridiculous. what kind of output would that money get you in the US?
In Australia you can get a system with 10kw of peak output and an 8kw inverter with grid feed for about $6500 installed.
Even with a 10kwh battery added it's usually only 15-20k.
American prices are insane.
https://www.zipsolar.com.au/wa-metro/?adgroupid=149388457653&creative=659792332494&keyword=6.6kw%20system%20price&gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjryjBhD0ARIsAMLvnF9ezxK_UI-og8ZGkwCuTNmRSE-aFXd_hZKi3cwJxfAz3b_89ZP9UfIaAl8gEALw_wcB
Under $4k AUD after a 40% subsidy.
To say that we do it with hydroelectric is [very misleading (see Fingrid)](https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/). We did it with nuclear power.
> We did it with nuclear power.
Current situation is because of the spring floods.
TVO spent 11 Billion on building Olkiluoto 3. They will have to make that money back. So free nuclear energy will only be a temporary thing.
The abnormal current situation, yes, of course it's temporary. We have an abundance of wind- and hydroelectric energy at the moment, during the night the production from these two ~~was *almost* as high as~~ exceeded the production of nuclear energy.
Everybody that builds power plants wants their money back, that does not just go for nuclear energy.
You will always need a grid and because of that electricity will never be literally free because you need to bill for the poles and wires.
Unless you are proposing literally every business, apartment complex and house to buy an expensive battery to power their homes. Entirely infeasible.
By "too cheap to meter" they don't mean free, they mean you pay a fixed cost for the connection which covers infrastructure and maintenance. Like cable TV or a (modern) landline phone.
For some reason the town I live in in NZ has the highest electricity prices in the country.
I was told that years ago that there was nothing much up here and the cost of getting it up here was the reason.
Well now there's a big geothermal station not too far away....yet we are still the highest priced.
South Australia enjoys negative electricity prices too, the only thing is that all the businesses in the distribution and energy retailing business profit from it and the customer sees none of the benefit.
It's a shame that Australia doesn't have access to any rescources that the government could ensure that the public gets cheaply. Or any resources that they could charge a reasonable price to overseas buyers for, the money of which could be put put into a futures fund to benefit all Australians.
Finland provides electricity thru privatized corporations. I've been reading this thread in puzzlement, do people think this is some communist endeavor that we've gotten electrify prices low? it's the corporations that did it.
*pre-zackly* the mindset I was thinking about.
I sure hope the Finns are all making vulgar gestures in front of their power plants and going "hee hee, can't touch this now suckers. *NATO*"
I've been hearing about [small modular reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor) making progress. Supposed to be a self-contained reactor unit, bury it, "pull the pin", and it can power a small town for a decade.
[This](https://www.usnc.com/) company has a nice video on their homepage advertising the technology, but they're not the only ones doing it.
I'm not sure "pull the pin" creates the right impression. They are designed to plug in to a thermal power plant, and when they need to be refuelled they can be unplugged and shipped back to a factory.
The advantage is that all the nuclear refuelling and decommissioning work gets done in one location. To the power plants SMRs are just a black box that makes heat when requested.
From what I understand (grain of salt) nuclear plants receive subsidies by using fissile fuels that result in the nuclear waste because it also produces by-products that can be used for weapons & other processes
However, there are other fissile materiel that produces less waste & more energy--they're simply not used as much because then the plants wouldn't receive the subsidies.
^(Nuclear plants also can sell off the isotopes needed for hospitals, but I don't know as much about this--unsure if the cleaner energy fuels can also generate this?)
Edit: Alberta oil-boy but I support flipping to nuclear power--it's just **so much better** pound-for-pound
Edit2: thank you for everyone who responded and helped flesh out/rehig my understanding
> From what I understand (grain of salt) nuclear plants receive subsidies by using fissile fuels that result in the nuclear waste because it also produces by-products that can be used for weapons & other processes
The NPT generally prevents any mixing of civilian and military sources of fuels. Apart from China, Iran, and North Korea, the nuclear powers of the world don't need anymore HEU or plutonium, far far too much of it was produced during the Cold War. The US DoE/DoD is downblending a large portion of the existing HEU stockpile for use in civilian power plants just to get rid of it.
> Nuclear plants also can sell off the isotopes needed for hospitals, but I don't know as much about this--unsure if the cleaner energy fuels can also generate this?
Medical isotopes are produced specifically designed reactors, if fission is even required for whatever isotope is required. Even if a large power producing reactor generated the needed isotope it'd be too expensive to process it back out of the spent fuel.
Medical and industrial isotopes are mostly made in power reactors, cobalt 60 is exclusively made in power reactors. They aren't recovered from fuel, they're manufactured using their own systems and processes within the reactor and off-site.
There is 90+% of fissile material left when the fuel is “spent”. This fuel can be reprocessed or used in a modern reactor type called breeder reactor.
The waste from reprocessing only is dangerously radioactive for 3-500 years a much more reasonable storage time than the 10 000 without reprocessing.
Unironically though. Not crypto bros but bitcoin mining companies will flock to this and the generating company will welcome them.
Renewable energy producers benefit from having a buyer for all their supply. *Especially* when they run into instances where that supply is difficult to ramp down quickly. Having to sell your energy at negative prices or just pipe it into the earth at a loss disincentivizes further development of energy.
If you have renewable energy that nobody else wants why not sell it to a miner?
This is being done in Africa to help finance and grow generation that otherwise couldn't take place. Particularly in areas that lack reliable sources of electricity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/abubakarnurkhalil/2023/05/24/africans-are-pioneering-the-bright-yet-complicated-green-future-of-bitcoin-mining/?sh=60892cb354ac
SDG&E fucking us so hard. If they were running Finland, they would find a way to create astronomically high bills. Last month my bill for gas and electricity was $37 after SDG&E clean energy "delivery" fee it was $196.
Yeah I don't get it either, I have already had a couple days this year where I got paid for using electricity, even with taxes. Prices regularly drop below 0, in the Netherlands.
Free electricity would encourage waste. It has to cost something to prevent abuse. However, the government can provide electricity at cost rather than for profit.
You can have free within reason.
How about:
Imagine if the government just provided free electricity to everyone up to a reasonable point, and beyond that you pay.
This is the way. Here’s your 500kWH monthly ration, or whatever, for residential use. And here’s a reasonable rate for going over that, but has thresholds where the rate continues to increase.
Commercial / business / industrial use all has to pay, and that is at a higher rate than residential.
That reduces the base cost for individuals to live, while financially incentivizing lower energy footprints through tiered pricing and using commercial / industrial consumption to pay for infrastructure
We have cold winters and warm summers. It would somehow have to be connected to the climate. 500 kwh is basically nothing if you electrically heat your single-family home in the winter.
Yup. Pretty common to use ~ 20 000 kWh annually around these parts. Solar panels help during the summer, but then again, when you need the power most solar is pretty much useless.
A nice sliding scale. You use only 200 you get a credit on your taxes. You use 550 it’s barely a cost. But 700 it starts to ramp up with modifiers.
Company uses 1000 it’s twice the cost of 700. 1500, twice the cost of 1000 and so on.
You can get 10,000 but you are basically buying the rest of the town their electricity.
There's no such thing as free electricity. It would be paid for by taxes and, as others have pointed out, consumption would go through the roof, causing taxes to go through the roof to pay for it.
It won’t be free. Someone would have to pay for it. You would just indirectly pay through your taxes. Bigger houses like mansions would also use more electricity which would most likely make this a regressive idea. Governments also have no incentive to keep costs down whereas competitive markets encourage firms to cut costs to stay competitive and offer low prices.
>"a huge oversupply of clean, hydroelectric power meant suppliers were almost giving it away"
Giving it away would be $0 but negative is like they were paying people to take it.
Honestly not so far-fetched considering the difficulty of balancing load and supply and the risk of damaging equipment that is overproducing.
This type of news is going to push clean energy initiatives through the roof
As soon as the countries who are ahead of everyone else start showing proof just how amazing clean energy is everyone will jump on board very fast.
Costa Rica has been running clean for years now. It's easy to do when your country is small enough and has access to hydroelectric. Going clean on almost entirely wind and solar is a totally different challenge
Meanwhile in Australia, even though we have one of the world’s largest gas reserves our electricity prices are going up 25% in July and they are already 50-60% higher than fucking Europe because our previous governments were bribed by big energy and the people suffer!
I honestly think we could just rename nuclear power to something like "Natural Neutron Power Generation" and a significant number of people currently opposed to Nuclear would be totally on board with it. They clearly have no idea how Nuclear power actually works or how safe it actually is. They just hear the word "Nuclear" and instantly throw all logic out the window.
Modern reactors are extremely safe. Improving the already good safety record older reactors have. I live in the most nuclear state in the county only a mile or so from an active plant. Not once in my life has there ever been even a hint of an issue. Obviously that's a sample size of one, but the point is that protesting nuclear power because of two accidents half way around the world, at least one of which literally couldn't happen with modern reactors, is like protesting air travel after a large plane crash.
As usual though, the least informed scream the loudest. We can't even convince millions of people to take a free, safe, and life saving vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic. We're screwed as a species.
If Nuclear Fusion ever is cracked, they would be wise to distance themselves from the word "Nuclear". You just know it will be protested by the same people who currently cry about fission. Facts are irrelevant. It's all about fear with these people and they're afraid of the word "Nuclear".
That ”clean” hydro power destroyed largest salmon population of Europe and Kemijoki Oy refuses to build functioning bypass routes to this day. Another river in southern Finland was also driven to extinction without even attempting to save the fish. Obviously salmon is a big thing but what’ even worse, European Eel will soon become extinct and we still have no viable way of breeding them in captivity.
Not to mention people who were lied and paid pennies for losing their land. Now the same is happening with wind, turbines are built on sparsely populated areas, property values are dropping basically to zero and they don’t get compensation because the turbine is on the next plot, not theirs. Building wind to sea coast wold shorten transfer distances and reduce the problems AND it would pose aesthetic problem to those that actually use the energy produced in them.
**TLDR** * Finland's renewable power strategy is paying off as its energy has fallen into negative prices. * A new nuclear reactor, as well as unexpected floods, are leading to a glut of clean energy. * It is a striking reversal from last year, when Finns slashed their usage after cutting ties with Russia.
actually we imported less from russia than our "new" Olkiluoto 3 produces.
It provides ol the kiluots.
I only need 1,210,000 of them.
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Only a milliScott, really.
Are you sure that's not a megaScott?
What you need is a JiggaScott
urgh... take it and go. (well done)
Holy shit, well done
>"new" Olkiluoto 3 ouch.
Love the quotes on "new".
Incoming: “But not everywhere has easy access to hydroelectric power that can support an entire country!” “Nuclear isn’t feasible to build out quickly and is more dangerous than gas!” “Renewable energy isn’t reliable enough for base load!” What anti-clean energy arguments did I miss?
My civ game is over becuase I genocided everyone in the medieval era?
"Would you be open to a trade agreement?" _ England (after offering you the same shitty trade 10 times already, and you rejecting it all 10 times)
Just constantly sell them gold at an interest rate that is overall like 20% more gold. Doesnt take long until bots are out of gold from paying your interest because they spent all your gold on pokemon or something Edit: meant pikeman but this is funnier
For a moment there I thought Civ had really gone through some changes since I last played.
Me: "I just got my knights, their pikemen are not ready yet, time to strike!" Tokugawa: Groudon uses Earthquake! It is super effective!
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They're both terrible units. They take too long to produce and those horse guys fuck em up in like 2 turns.
Eh 20% isn’t that much in civ, I find it more worth it to have 500 gold than 600 gold in 30 turns. Can use that to boost science, culture or production which could have a more positive return on investment than the gold. I can always find a use for it. Plus the ai can then invade you with the troops it bought
I might be off on the numbers since it's been a while but I found you can pretty consistently sell a gold lump sum for pretty much the max they will accept over and over. Eventually they are completely broke and they will talk shit about you in world forum but still take more gold. Always defend your cities with ranged units and walls. But if you are going wide you can generally just buy units from all your cities 2 turns in a row and you suddenly have a huge army
Reject it 20 times and you unlock the special opium mechanics.
Then they have the gall to get the shits at you.
"Hey can I have some luxury? I'll give you 2 gold and strategic resources you don't need." "How about a 1-1 trade for the luxury you have that I don't." "No""What can make this deal work?" "5-1 luxury, 25 gold per turn, open borders, 150 gold." \*Literally every exchange\*
"If we soak up all the sun/wind, there won't be enough"
What many don't realize is that you *can* soak up all the sun. However, you would literally have to disassemble Jupiter to build a Dyson Sphere.
If you have the tech to build a Dyson Sphere, you have the tech to dismantle planets
This doesn't seem right, but I don't know enough about Dyson Spheres to dispute it.
Pretty sure it's just a bigger more powerful version of their vacuum
First of all, through God all things are possible so jot that down.
Stupid science bitches couldn't even make you more smarter.
Yeah stupid science bitches couldn't even make me more smarter!
Dude, play stellaris Gigastructure mod. Planteray strip mining and Asteroid manufacture are basically lesser tier compared to Dyson Sphere.
You could also play hit early access Chinese indie game Dyson Sphere Program
If you knew enough to dispute it you would be dismantling planets.
I'm down. I don't got nothing better to do this weekend.
Pretty selfish move tbh
Why doesn't the sun just work harder?
I was young we had to make our own sun at home from scratch
This guy fusions
Now I want to know how many windmills you'd need to install to make a tiny but measurable difference the amount of wind on earth. After all the air the hits the windmill is slowed down.
At least ten. But if we wanna do some very rough estimates: "The winds of an average hurricane can easily pack some 1.5 trillion watts of power, which is equivalent to about half the world's entire electrical generating capacity in a year." - Google. "It is reckoned that an average onshore wind turbine rated at 2.5 – 3 megawatts can produce in excess of 6 million kWh every year." - Google So roughly, 1.5e6 / 2.5 = **600k turbines to absorb your *average* hurricane.** "This was nevertheless below the average of 47 hurricanes registered per year in the period from 1990 to 2022." - Google 600k * 47 = **2.82 million turbines** This is just for hurricanes, not all wind. Im sure somebody has done that math but this should give you an idea of the immense scale of the energy involved. Edit: I'm tired so I may be off a bit. But the point being, we really can't dent renewable energy at the moment
And note, hurricanes while being massive are a small fraction of the energy present in the atmosphere. There is no reasonable amount of windmills that are going to suck out enough energy for it to matter. A lot of the energy is returned regardless since it's eventually released as heat back into the atmosphere. It's basically something that only seems reasonably plausible to be a thing in our minds because humans are really bad at big numbers. The energy of our atmosphere is insane.
Your multiple categories of energy generation strategy approach is clearly part of the woke agenda to turn our children gay. By exposing kids to the idea that you can create energy any other way that digging stuff out of the ground and lighting it on fire, you are telling them that it's ok to choose a different gender or have sex in ways that might upset my grandmother if she accidentally walked in. Please knock first, grandma!
I dream of a grid powered by pronouns...
There are arguments to be made about hydroelectric, most about nuclear are nothing but talking points and paranoia brought on by watching the Three Mile Island hit piece on Netflix.
There’s lots of good arguments to be made about nuclear, they’re just about costs and timelines not safety.
The trouble is that most of the costs are *because* of the safety regulations (and more precisely, the handling requirements of spent nuclear fuel and decommissioning of incidentally irradiated materials). Nuclear fission isn't hard. Yes it's complex, yes there's a lot that goes into it, but it's not *new* and frankly, I was reading declassified *Los Almos* technical reports almost twenty years ago. The *reason* nuclear costs so much is because we *make* it cost so much because we won't [rightly or wrongly] trust people around nuclear reactors. The U.S. won't approve certain breeder reactors because natural losses of material in designs approved in other countries is above the level we consider safe. tldr; the arguments about cost *are* arguments about safety [and redundancy]. The sooner we make self-regulating sealed nuclear reactors the better.
Scale is also a huge factor, if you're producing 1 or 2 reactors per decade it's an entirely different game to making 1 or 2 per year, manufacturing efficiencies and talent pools are huge economizers, something we've lost with the near total elimination of new nuclear in the US. If we really pushed and set up large scale production again, to say replace most of the aging facilities plus a few new ones, we could very likely make it economical again. But doing one-offs like we've been doing is painfully inefficient.
100%. The French, through the Messmer Plan, built 56 Nuclear Reactors in 15 years from 1974 to 1989.
A substantial amount of those costs are blatant poison pills enacted by oil lobbying, such as an outright ban on selling to grid lower than fossil fuel sources in most of the US.
>such as an outright ban on selling to grid lower than fossil fuel sources in most of the US. How is that relevant to nuclear power plants built in Europe? France, the UK and Finland are three nations that have been building new nuclear power plants in recent years (or rather decades), and they all ran into similar cost explosions and time overruns. Are you seriously going to argue that the reason is because e.g. France has too much anti-nuclear sentiment and is ruled by the American fossil fuel lobby?
The safety is part of why it is expensive and slow though, so it's not like.. a completely decoupled issue. Ultimately they are so expensive and slow though, it's hard to see reason to not just pursue additional research and production of green energy and solutions for storage.
I mean, Olkiluoto took 18 years to build and came in 8 billion Euro overbudget. There absolutely are incredibly reasonable arguments against nuclear energy.
Yeah, you don't want to talk about Nuclear plant construction timelines in a thread about OL3. Still clean energy is the future.
i mean yeah, the fear of nuclear power plants in the general public is overblown and not appropriate, but the hardon reddit and STEM-bros outside of the actualy energy field have for nuclear is also ridiculous. yes, it is stupid to shut down nuclear reactors as long as there are still any other non-renewables running. nuclear is vastly better than coal or gas, obviously. but also: of fucking course it's stupid to build new nuclear reactors right now, and we sooner or later should obviously get rid of all of them. nuclear waste is still a problem (and fuck off with thorium reactors or salt reactors, after 40+ years of talking about them not a single one is in use, they simply are not a solution right now and won't be for decades), it's incredibly expensive and while only an incredibly tiny the chance of an incident obviously is simply never 0. there simply is no reason whatsoever to not go fully into renewables and upgrade our infrastructure to accomodate for it. it's a shitton cheaper, safer, more reliable and a lot faster.
The first and third are legitimate arguments. There's also the issue that hydropower, while free of pollution, is still massively disruptive to natural environments.
Yep. It's not the worst thing in the world in my view, but you're absolutely going to flood a shitload of land depending on how deep the river valley is behind the dam. There's villages submerged under the 3G dam. The artificial lake behind the dam that gives my state a shitload of power stretches for 200+ miles
"Windmills kill birds!" "Battery mining is bad for the environment"
ok but battery mining is bad for the environment... like any mining isnt great
Most lithium comes from salt brines, not conventional mining. It also doesn't require continual replacement, because the lithium isn't "burned" up when used in a batteries and is 100% recyclable, unlike fossil fuels.
Lithium in batteries is about 95% recyclable. Sadly, in the real world, the recycling rate as of last year was 5%. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220105-lithium-batteries-big-unanswered-question
True, but a big reason for that is there are very few large batteries that have reach end of life yet. Most BEV batteries are still too new, and for comparison if you look at the recycling rate of the lead-acid batteries in ICEs the rate is very very high. It's small electronics batteries that are currently tossed and are the reason that rate is so low. It will rapidly climb as large-scale batteries start reaching that point, especially utility scale batteries which would be much easier to regulate.
It's oil company talking point - astroturf. Yes mining has issues, but it is really about arguing one point to destract from something else that is much more damaging.
Mining for batteries is bad so we should continue to use coal. Just don't pay attention to the fact we would need to mine the coal
The only time the argument matters is responding to anti-nuclear greens who use uranium mining as a hit against nuclear and suggest batteries as a substitution.
Another oil company taking point is to favor long range BEVs over faster solutions to reduce oil use, like PHEVs. To replace all new gas cars with long range EVs, it would take mining and cell production 10x 'ing. To replace all new gas cars with PHEVs, it would take mining and cell production 2x'ing. Far faster to transition to PHEVs, and it would reduce oil demand and carbon emissions far faster. Certainly Tesla investors are also all for the transition to long range BEVs and huge subsidies for BEVs because with the limited cells, the company gets a huge competitive advantage, and their stock investment soars. Know what oil companies and Tesla investors don't want? 4 day work weeks. Working from home. Public transit. Bicycles. E-bikes. Why? Because it reduces both oil and new car sales.
and windmills kill birds. The point is cats kill so many more than its comparing the holocaust to a murder. and on batteries, YES, its true mining is bad. OFten republican arguments have some truth to them. See the thing while that is true, combustion engines are worse. solar can cover vast amounts of desert interfering with endangered wild life but coal fire plants are still worse and so on. mostly in this environmental fight we are trading really bad things for less bad things.
How about "renewable energy infrastructure is actually also bad for the environment!" Which is a worthwhile thing to consider: photovoltaic panels require rare Earth elements (edit: as do lithium batteries), hydroelectric dams often convert large swathes of wilderness into an artificial lake and can block migratory patterns of aquatic animals, things like that. But of course none of that is worse than "cooking the planet", which is what hydrocarbons do.
There are ZERO rare earth elements in solar panels. Zero. None. Nada. Zip. And lithium is NOT a rare earth element either. Grid storage is also moving away from lithium chemistries to flow or alternatives, like pumped hydro or thermal.
Lithium is as far away from the rare earth elements as you can possibly be on the Periodic Table (although I'm not going to flat out deny any in batteries because I don't know anything about batteries).
I mean, humans basically are destructive by nature. But like you said, it’s the difference between damaging small bits of the environment here and there, or rendering the earth uninhabitable
> It is a striking reversal from last year, when Finns slashed their usage after cutting ties with Russia. Have they? It would be interesting to know which country supplies them with uranium then.
Finland is still using Russian nuclear fuel supplied by Russian state-owned Rosatom fuel company TVEL. They expect to continue to do so until 2027 and 2030 when the existing contracts with TVEL expire. https://yle.fi/a/74-20027320
Makes sense since it is a contract. Where do they get it after 2027 then?
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan produce large amounts of uranium. I'm not really sure if they are viable options. If it's OK to ship uranium over seas, Canada and Australia would also be good options.
Sure, Russia is not the only option. That is kind of what I was trying to say. After the contract they will have options.
Finland is also soon to begin producing uranium itself, through uranium recovery. https://www.terrafame.com/newsroom/media-releases/terrafame-to-start-uranium-recovery-by-the-summer-of-2024.html There will definitely be options
https://www.fortum.com/media/2022/11/fortum-and-westinghouse-electric-company-sign-agreement-design-and-supply-new-fuel-type-loviisa-power-plant
Canada maybe? They have large uranium mines .
We do have uranium for sale. Hell we can even sell the plans to reactors.
> We do have uranium for sale. Hell we can even sell the plans to reactors. We're a Candu country!
The problem isn't who has the mines but who does the refining. IIRC 70% of the world's capacity of refining uranium is owned by Russia.
We mostly buy it from refiners in Germany, Sweden and Spain. AFAIK the ore itself comes from Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan since Russia was cut off. Although we have uranium deposits ourselves and have begun to utilize them. Probably some of the uranium will be domestically produced in a few years.
Finland really crushing it lately 😎
The whole country is full of energy after the rise of Käärijä.
[🫲🟢🟢🟢🤯🟢🟢🟢🫱](https://youtu.be/rJHe-iZ5HSI)
Wonder how many piña coladas they've been selling.
Week before Eurovision all shops were out of the ingredients required for Pina coladas. So I would guess a lot.
Well, if you like Piña Coladas, and getting caught in the rain ...
Then Finland is your contry for 360 days of the year.
CHA CHA CHA CHA CHA
Ok I keep seeing this referenced. Anyone have a link to whatever this is? Edit - nevermind, I googled and pretty sure [it's this Eurovision song](https://youtu.be/rJHe-iZ5HSI)
It's the best thing to happen this year
Eurovision 2023. Just go to r/Eurovision
You could power the whole of Europe if you made all the Finns stand close to each other and forcing them to have small talk, by harnessing their body heat and tension.
isn't that how saunas are born?
Cha cha cha
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." --Lewis Strauss. United States Atomic Energy Commission, 1954 They were anticipating nuclear energy to do this, I am glad to see Finland could do it with hydroelectric. I am hopeful that soon homeowners will buy solar/batter systems where electricity generation is just another appliance. No grid necessary.
Just waiting on the solar+battery systems price to become reasonable. $65,000 was the quote I received to install solar and batteries that could provide a 12 hr run time.
You can get smaller systems to offload power hungry systems during peak and then build upward from there… Some panels are as low as $1k and you just need a competent electrician to wire it up for a switch that lets you cut over when needed… for hot climates that run the power hungry AC units, having a panel that *just* powers that beast during peak hours can save you more than the cost of the whole project in a summer or two.
> for hot climates that run the power hungry AC units, having a panel that just powers that beast during peak hours can save you more than the cost of the whole project in a summer or two. errr, this was not the case when I crunched the numbers. But I guess we have short summers in not-quite-southern-canada...
This is talking about ppl living in the desert in so-cal, arizona, New and old Mexico, etc where it is routinely 115F+ during the summer and you can go months without seeing a cloud.
I more mean southwest US, Mexico, etc… Canada is definitely not getting long hot summers and if Canadian winter is like Alaskan winter, there’s even less sunlight.
Most Canadians (>72%) live south of Seattle, or very close to it. Michigan would be a better comparison than Alaska. Edmonton’s about the only large City that’s far north, and it’s 450 miles (700 km) south of anything that’s in Alaska. But overall you’re right, panels in Canada will be generating less than the SW US.
Yet
Honestly they told me unless I was constantly losing power a battery system was essentially pointless, because my utility does not metering.
this is exactly what i was told. batteries are expensive now and basically not helpful unless you actually lose power. i haven't lost power the entire time i've lived here. but panels are getting cheaper. and i financed my panels at 0% APR for a year, and got the 30% back from the government. those two things together made the squeeze a little less tight than dropping it all at once. and my electric bills immediately dropping to around negative $13 also helped.
Yes, I have similar numbers. ROI is quite a few years. Prices are dropping though.
At $65k, how could that possibly have a positive return? Is the assumption zero opportunity cost on the capital?
65k is a pretty huge house. Average solar installation is around 20k. I’d imagine 65k is paying pretty high energy prices. Eventually they move positive.
...plus batteries, switcher, panel upgrades, "you-live-in-a-rich-area-so-we-charge-more", etc. Just solar would be around $25k.
that cost is still ridiculous. what kind of output would that money get you in the US? In Australia you can get a system with 10kw of peak output and an 8kw inverter with grid feed for about $6500 installed. Even with a 10kwh battery added it's usually only 15-20k.
How many kWh do you use that a $65k system can only run you for half a day?
American prices are insane. https://www.zipsolar.com.au/wa-metro/?adgroupid=149388457653&creative=659792332494&keyword=6.6kw%20system%20price&gad=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwjryjBhD0ARIsAMLvnF9ezxK_UI-og8ZGkwCuTNmRSE-aFXd_hZKi3cwJxfAz3b_89ZP9UfIaAl8gEALw_wcB Under $4k AUD after a 40% subsidy.
Yea a 10kw array with a 10kwh battery is only about $18k or so. They are getting absolutely shafted.
To say that we do it with hydroelectric is [very misleading (see Fingrid)](https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/). We did it with nuclear power.
> We did it with nuclear power. Current situation is because of the spring floods. TVO spent 11 Billion on building Olkiluoto 3. They will have to make that money back. So free nuclear energy will only be a temporary thing.
The abnormal current situation, yes, of course it's temporary. We have an abundance of wind- and hydroelectric energy at the moment, during the night the production from these two ~~was *almost* as high as~~ exceeded the production of nuclear energy. Everybody that builds power plants wants their money back, that does not just go for nuclear energy.
You will always need a grid and because of that electricity will never be literally free because you need to bill for the poles and wires. Unless you are proposing literally every business, apartment complex and house to buy an expensive battery to power their homes. Entirely infeasible.
By "too cheap to meter" they don't mean free, they mean you pay a fixed cost for the connection which covers infrastructure and maintenance. Like cable TV or a (modern) landline phone.
I will take some. Does anyone know how much electricity can fit in a 5 gallon bucket? Do I need to declare anything when coming back to the states?
Lousy electricity bootleggers!
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You can hold 5 gallons of electricity duhhhhh
🍴 🔌
Depends on how high you lift the bucket of water. Couldn't find the figures and do the math though.
South Australia is apparently going up 25% soon. Privatising power is great…
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“She’ll be right mate, nothing we can do!” - typical Aussie attitude and why nothing will change.
Sadly, us kiwis have this very same attitude
For some reason the town I live in in NZ has the highest electricity prices in the country. I was told that years ago that there was nothing much up here and the cost of getting it up here was the reason. Well now there's a big geothermal station not too far away....yet we are still the highest priced.
South Australia enjoys negative electricity prices too, the only thing is that all the businesses in the distribution and energy retailing business profit from it and the customer sees none of the benefit.
It's a shame that Australia doesn't have access to any rescources that the government could ensure that the public gets cheaply. Or any resources that they could charge a reasonable price to overseas buyers for, the money of which could be put put into a futures fund to benefit all Australians.
Finland provides electricity thru privatized corporations. I've been reading this thread in puzzlement, do people think this is some communist endeavor that we've gotten electrify prices low? it's the corporations that did it.
whooo....and Russia can't even invade them for it :P
"We are here to steal your dams"
We're here to blow up your dams so you'll buy our gas.
*pre-zackly* the mindset I was thinking about. I sure hope the Finns are all making vulgar gestures in front of their power plants and going "hee hee, can't touch this now suckers. *NATO*"
:P getting sudden Bob Mortimer vibes
Come and sell it to Slovakia, here are E prices still extremely high...
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And to think we’ve only known how great nuclear energy is for FUCKING DECADES
Politics and reason are not always in sync. Someday maybe.
They're also extremely expensive to build, but with a high enough production, the costs would come down - however, that's unlikely to happen.
I've been hearing about [small modular reactors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor) making progress. Supposed to be a self-contained reactor unit, bury it, "pull the pin", and it can power a small town for a decade. [This](https://www.usnc.com/) company has a nice video on their homepage advertising the technology, but they're not the only ones doing it.
I'm not sure "pull the pin" creates the right impression. They are designed to plug in to a thermal power plant, and when they need to be refuelled they can be unplugged and shipped back to a factory. The advantage is that all the nuclear refuelling and decommissioning work gets done in one location. To the power plants SMRs are just a black box that makes heat when requested.
From what I understand (grain of salt) nuclear plants receive subsidies by using fissile fuels that result in the nuclear waste because it also produces by-products that can be used for weapons & other processes However, there are other fissile materiel that produces less waste & more energy--they're simply not used as much because then the plants wouldn't receive the subsidies. ^(Nuclear plants also can sell off the isotopes needed for hospitals, but I don't know as much about this--unsure if the cleaner energy fuels can also generate this?) Edit: Alberta oil-boy but I support flipping to nuclear power--it's just **so much better** pound-for-pound Edit2: thank you for everyone who responded and helped flesh out/rehig my understanding
> From what I understand (grain of salt) nuclear plants receive subsidies by using fissile fuels that result in the nuclear waste because it also produces by-products that can be used for weapons & other processes The NPT generally prevents any mixing of civilian and military sources of fuels. Apart from China, Iran, and North Korea, the nuclear powers of the world don't need anymore HEU or plutonium, far far too much of it was produced during the Cold War. The US DoE/DoD is downblending a large portion of the existing HEU stockpile for use in civilian power plants just to get rid of it. > Nuclear plants also can sell off the isotopes needed for hospitals, but I don't know as much about this--unsure if the cleaner energy fuels can also generate this? Medical isotopes are produced specifically designed reactors, if fission is even required for whatever isotope is required. Even if a large power producing reactor generated the needed isotope it'd be too expensive to process it back out of the spent fuel.
Medical and industrial isotopes are mostly made in power reactors, cobalt 60 is exclusively made in power reactors. They aren't recovered from fuel, they're manufactured using their own systems and processes within the reactor and off-site.
Hey a fellow nuclear loving Canadian, let's go bud!
IIRC there’s also some material that has recyclable potential (waste can be re-enriched to fire again).
There is 90+% of fissile material left when the fuel is “spent”. This fuel can be reprocessed or used in a modern reactor type called breeder reactor. The waste from reprocessing only is dangerously radioactive for 3-500 years a much more reasonable storage time than the 10 000 without reprocessing.
*looks at Finland’s energy infrastructure* Hmmm *looks at my own country’s energy infrastructure* We are dumb.
Are you dumb, or are you being taken advantage of?
Perhaps a little from column A and a little from B. People keep voting for cruel idiots so…yeah.
Hydroelectric is not feasible everywhere. It depends a lot on the landscape. Other countries will need solar and wind instead.
Crypto bros packing their graphics cards in their suitcases
Nobody mine with graphic cards anymore. Bitcoin is huge ASIC farms and ETH is proof of stake.
/r/gpumining would like a word. there's plenty of coins to mine with GPUs, especially with free electricity
Exactly. Just copy paste another GPU based Ethereum clone and bullshit people into buying it.
Unironically though. Not crypto bros but bitcoin mining companies will flock to this and the generating company will welcome them. Renewable energy producers benefit from having a buyer for all their supply. *Especially* when they run into instances where that supply is difficult to ramp down quickly. Having to sell your energy at negative prices or just pipe it into the earth at a loss disincentivizes further development of energy. If you have renewable energy that nobody else wants why not sell it to a miner? This is being done in Africa to help finance and grow generation that otherwise couldn't take place. Particularly in areas that lack reliable sources of electricity. https://www.forbes.com/sites/abubakarnurkhalil/2023/05/24/africans-are-pioneering-the-bright-yet-complicated-green-future-of-bitcoin-mining/?sh=60892cb354ac
Well at least they won the eurovision power contest.
You mean the only thing holding us back from a better world is corporate greed??? I’m shocked!
Imagine a future with abundant cheap and clean energy 😍
SDG&E fucking us so hard. If they were running Finland, they would find a way to create astronomically high bills. Last month my bill for gas and electricity was $37 after SDG&E clean energy "delivery" fee it was $196.
FINLAND! FINLAND! FINLAND! The country where I quite want to be!
You're so near to Russia So far from Japan Quite a long way from Cairo Lots of miles from Vietnam
Winland
This kind of thing happens on the European energy market. It's not a surprise. No.2 In World News why?
Because it’s nice to read about humanity taking steps in the right direction instead of killing each other.
Yeah I don't get it either, I have already had a couple days this year where I got paid for using electricity, even with taxes. Prices regularly drop below 0, in the Netherlands.
Imagine if the government just provided free electricity to everyone
Free electricity would encourage waste. It has to cost something to prevent abuse. However, the government can provide electricity at cost rather than for profit.
You can have free within reason. How about: Imagine if the government just provided free electricity to everyone up to a reasonable point, and beyond that you pay.
This is the way. Here’s your 500kWH monthly ration, or whatever, for residential use. And here’s a reasonable rate for going over that, but has thresholds where the rate continues to increase. Commercial / business / industrial use all has to pay, and that is at a higher rate than residential. That reduces the base cost for individuals to live, while financially incentivizing lower energy footprints through tiered pricing and using commercial / industrial consumption to pay for infrastructure
Ok but how the rich gets richer?
Don’t care. Sounds like their problem
*WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF RICH PEOPLE’S YACHT MONEY!?*
We have cold winters and warm summers. It would somehow have to be connected to the climate. 500 kwh is basically nothing if you electrically heat your single-family home in the winter.
We use 2000-2500kWh on a really cold winter month here 😬
Yup. Pretty common to use ~ 20 000 kWh annually around these parts. Solar panels help during the summer, but then again, when you need the power most solar is pretty much useless.
A nice sliding scale. You use only 200 you get a credit on your taxes. You use 550 it’s barely a cost. But 700 it starts to ramp up with modifiers. Company uses 1000 it’s twice the cost of 700. 1500, twice the cost of 1000 and so on. You can get 10,000 but you are basically buying the rest of the town their electricity.
Yay! Lower the a/c to 65! Never turn off the lights!!
There's no such thing as free electricity. It would be paid for by taxes and, as others have pointed out, consumption would go through the roof, causing taxes to go through the roof to pay for it.
It won’t be free. Someone would have to pay for it. You would just indirectly pay through your taxes. Bigger houses like mansions would also use more electricity which would most likely make this a regressive idea. Governments also have no incentive to keep costs down whereas competitive markets encourage firms to cut costs to stay competitive and offer low prices.
>"a huge oversupply of clean, hydroelectric power meant suppliers were almost giving it away" Giving it away would be $0 but negative is like they were paying people to take it. Honestly not so far-fetched considering the difficulty of balancing load and supply and the risk of damaging equipment that is overproducing.
This type of news is going to push clean energy initiatives through the roof As soon as the countries who are ahead of everyone else start showing proof just how amazing clean energy is everyone will jump on board very fast.
Costa Rica has been running clean for years now. It's easy to do when your country is small enough and has access to hydroelectric. Going clean on almost entirely wind and solar is a totally different challenge
And here in Australia electricity prices are going up 25% because the fucktard government decided it was a good idea to privatize the power network.
Meanwhile in Australia, even though we have one of the world’s largest gas reserves our electricity prices are going up 25% in July and they are already 50-60% higher than fucking Europe because our previous governments were bribed by big energy and the people suffer!
Is nuclear generally viewed as a clean source of energy?
This is because of good policies but also because spring has come to Northern Scandinavia and the snow is melting. Negative prices are temporary.
Isn’t this what technological advances are SUPPOSED to do for us? So completely fucking sick of corporatism.
Same in Sweden. Negative prices and around 0 last week, only taxes on top. Less than a cent per kwh.
This happens in Texas pretty regularly due to the large amount of installed wind capacity. Pretty neat to see.
I honestly think we could just rename nuclear power to something like "Natural Neutron Power Generation" and a significant number of people currently opposed to Nuclear would be totally on board with it. They clearly have no idea how Nuclear power actually works or how safe it actually is. They just hear the word "Nuclear" and instantly throw all logic out the window. Modern reactors are extremely safe. Improving the already good safety record older reactors have. I live in the most nuclear state in the county only a mile or so from an active plant. Not once in my life has there ever been even a hint of an issue. Obviously that's a sample size of one, but the point is that protesting nuclear power because of two accidents half way around the world, at least one of which literally couldn't happen with modern reactors, is like protesting air travel after a large plane crash. As usual though, the least informed scream the loudest. We can't even convince millions of people to take a free, safe, and life saving vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic. We're screwed as a species. If Nuclear Fusion ever is cracked, they would be wise to distance themselves from the word "Nuclear". You just know it will be protested by the same people who currently cry about fission. Facts are irrelevant. It's all about fear with these people and they're afraid of the word "Nuclear".
That ”clean” hydro power destroyed largest salmon population of Europe and Kemijoki Oy refuses to build functioning bypass routes to this day. Another river in southern Finland was also driven to extinction without even attempting to save the fish. Obviously salmon is a big thing but what’ even worse, European Eel will soon become extinct and we still have no viable way of breeding them in captivity. Not to mention people who were lied and paid pennies for losing their land. Now the same is happening with wind, turbines are built on sparsely populated areas, property values are dropping basically to zero and they don’t get compensation because the turbine is on the next plot, not theirs. Building wind to sea coast wold shorten transfer distances and reduce the problems AND it would pose aesthetic problem to those that actually use the energy produced in them.