Not sure we really are arguing much. More like violent agreement.

This, IMHO contrasts with the earlier comment

I'd say you are switching and that the nuclear turn off should have been delayed so that the reliance on natural gas during the changeover was lessened compared to what it currently is. I'd also say that this is the time for saying "there is a war on", overriding some farmers concerns and then settling on full compensation once Russia is completely and soundly defeated. The Norwegian and American gas which Germany is using now could be beneficially delivered to the new Hungarian government instead, allowing them to switch off their reliance on gas.

In the end, though, it's a glass 60% full vs 40% empty story. Without German determination and taking responsibility Russia would have had much more money than they already have. The people who blew up Nord Stream should be treated as European heroes, however. Merkel's record should be disowned, and Schröder considered for treatment as a traitor.

Careful. You can't communicate information with it, but it could be useful for securing communication. If it was done right and both sides know that they are going to simultaneously measure a series of entangled states then they both get a shared data stream that they know nobody else has access to and can use for encrypting other data that has been transferred at normal light speed or below.

In real life, however, when systems based on this were examined it turned out that they mostly weren't done right and you would be better off using conventional encryption, probably some quantum resistant form. You definitely want any such system to have been audited by competent conventional security people.

Assuming you are right that there were no higher appeals, which I don't intend to verify, then agreed. Thanks.

A) that matches with what I said almost exactly
B) lowest power is still typically at least 40% of highest power and, towards the end of the fuel cycle (when U235 is low in fuel rods), lowest power can be 90% of maiximum
C) given that typical daily peak in most countries can be multiple times minimum (e.g. peak household usage is often more than 8 times minimum in the uk) and that there will be three real peaks and troughs a day, that flexibility is just not enough
D) as I said, French plants can't flex at all when they get close to the end of their fuel cycle, probably for something like 30% of the time they are running, in other words.

What this means is that running nuclear power has to assume that the rest of the grid has massive storage capacity and resilience. That doesn't means that the additional flexibility of nuclear is not useful. It just means that the main use is to match output with the level of demand that storage can produce.

I believe that a) Germany gets about 25% of it's electricity still from natural gas and b) North and South interconnectivity often means that Gas is generating in the North when the South has a surplus.

You should have
* at least doubled North South internal inter-connectivity
* connected to Scottish and Norwegian wind and pumped storage in ways that bypass Sweden (though going through Denmark is probably fine)
* build more PV, wind and storage than you did (even though what you did so far is great)

Yes, well, you have politicians who refuse to fix your grid interconnections. The South of Germany is pretty well connected to Morocco and Southern Europe and could get plenty of PV electricity from there in the winter. There is a lack of a North-South grid connection which would allow you to access that. The North of Germany is close to Denmark, which not only has a good supply of Wind, but could also be easily connected to Scotland which has a massive supply of winter wind. Furthermore, North Germany is also close to Norway which could provide you with lots of energy if you were willing to change the rules to make things more worthwhile for Sweden.

Fix those interconnections properly and you will absolutely be able to use renewable energy all year. Not reliably from your own home PV, I'll happily admit.

Fair comment I guess. I suppose it's slightly differently perceived in the UK because it's been part of the same reforms that make it easier to switch (virtual) supplier whilst using the same connection.

These kind of problems are far smaller than the changes to the grid that can happen through other seemingly random events like some particular TV show coming on; some particular group having a festival and wanting to cook more; an announcement of a special offer that makes many people drive their electric car to a shop.

There just are fluctuations in both demand and supply of the grid. On the scale of an individual solar panel, the fluctuations from a cloud can be huge. As much as 80% of power output. On the scale of a neighborhood, on the other hand, that becomes much less of a problem - individual panels come on and off but the overall generation remains almost the same and overall change is much slower. Scale up to a country and you just aren't worried. On the European grid this is scaled over the entire continent, with, for example, wind power gathered both in Scotland and Morocco and many places in between so that when the North Sea is calm, that's the time when Morocco will be generate more and also the opposite.

This article, from 2018 was exactly what I was ribbing you about with my 1990s joke. 2018 is honestly closer to the 1990s than today. Consider that, at the time, there were no renewable systems delivering synthetic inertia and that no grid scale batteries were installed at all. Synthetic inertia is now standard on all new commercial wind turbines and grid batteries are everywhere, often in the GWh scale.

In the 1990s we didn't have that technology. Solar and wind generated electricity is now so much cheaper than fossil fuel power, let alone the most expensive type of power, nuclear, that the only economic way to generate power for the future is to use them, even when that power needs multi-day storage. To even approach a reasonable economic level, nuclear plants must run continually at their full output, something that not only requires even more storage, but also means that you need a huge amount of controllable (rapidly and flexibly dispatchable, with many changes per day) renewable energy to compensate for the lack of flexibility. This means that even the standard "levelized" prices, often well over €100 per MWh, are in fact massively understated.

Here I do actually fully understand what decarbonization means and agree and support your goal. That means that there is absolutely a need for understanding and that the recent massive cost reductions in renewable energy are exactly what is needed. Nuclear is not useless, but it is hugely more costly (levelized cost, which includes use of storage and capacity factors, around $100, ten or more times as much as solar)

Neither solar, nor wind, nor hydro nor geothermal switch off completely in winter. Your capacity may definitely be reduced but you will still get some generation. What that means firstly is that you should install your solar panels at the level needed to generate most of your winter electricity and secondly that you should have diverse supply available. Increasing the installation theoretically takes costs per MWh from, say, €5 to €10 (that's approximately the levelized solar cost, which already includes this). Diversifying means that in almost all locations, in Winter you will have much more wind and geothermal power in your mix and less solar.

Again, this is the 1990s view. There are a bunch of different deployed technologies at this point. Large scale heat stores which heat inert material like rocks or sand and keep that heat for months. Deep underwater or even simple on surface high pressure air storage facilities that can store energy almost indefinitely. Conversion into hydrogen which is getting more and more economic and can have annual losses at far less than 1% and round trip energy losses of only around 30%. Now there are other alternatives also coming into use. Especially more interesting technologies like sodium batteries and flow batteries look as if they will soon become economical for storing energy for weeks or months. Gravity stores, moving solid weights, can keep energy indefinitely. To some extent, it's a chicken and egg problem. The long term storage will only be installed once there is available cheap renewable energy.

The move to nuclear power itself would never have been possible without the simultaneous addition of technologies such as gas "peaker" plants and pumped hydro storage. Nuclear is extremely expensive, very inflexible and needs to be taken off the grid in huge (many MegaWatts) chunks either for maintenance or in case of unexpected and impossible to avoid failures, such as the jelly fish, but also hot weather, earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks, coolant leaks and many many other causes. If a reactor SCRAM happens, such as happened in the Spanish incident, it can take weeks to bring a reactor back on line, so the requirement for storage or alternatives in the grid is much higher than for well designed renewables.

The key difference, however, is the overall marginal cost of electricity. If the average sale price of electricity will be say €4, typically because it is only storage that has enough demand to use it, it makes absolute sense to run renewables because the only real cost is a small amount of additional maintenance. On the other hand, for nuclear, this would absolutely not make sense. The plant needs a price of, say €60, just to cover fuel costs (more if long termdisposal is fully included). Sure, nuclear plants do run with such temporary prices, but only when they can make it up later. This makes them very unreliable as a source for filling storage.

True but misleading. The settlement itself does not create a precedent, however judgements that happen before the settlement can. In fact, given that it's possible to appeal a preliminary judgment and that could continue to the supreme court, an absolutely binding precedent could, and actually often does, come out of a case which, when remanded back to the lower court, ends in a settlement.

Interesting question. It seems to be widely inclusive

Globally, electricity demand for space cooling – which also includes fans and other cooling technologies such as district cooling – rose by about 50% between 2015 and 2025. Last year, it surpassed 2,900 terawatt-hours, more than the total electricity demand of the entire European Union.

however data centers seem to be a separate category

Hi, welcome to the 21st century. As you move here from the 1990s, you will find that we have lots more of these things called "computers" - you probably have already heard of them in your time, but, judging from your comments you likely didn't use them much - congratulations on finding Slashdot so quickly.

What we do with these computers is a thing called "Weather forecasting" and what that means is that there are now excellent models allowing us to pretty accurately predict solar output more than a day in advance. The great thing about this is that not only are the models accurate, but, because of the widely distributed nature of solar power, any deviations from the model occur slowly over several hours. This contrasts with nuclear power stations which can suddenly trip of the grid with only seconds notice.

Whilst there were those, back in your time of the 1990s, who predicted as you did that Solar would ultimately be "a dead end for meaningful decarbonization", we're happy to tell you that they all turned out to be deeply wrong.

Oh, and your story about "Just 6 Days After Grid Ran on 100% Renewables" ; read the report. At the time of the failure there were at least two nuclear plants with four plants operating on the Spanish grid and their failures were some of the most major power loss events of the whole sorry story.

And surprisingly, this will solve the overcast days problems because the solar power will be distributed enough, high enough capacity and well enough connected that you'll be able to draw enough from it for your normal needs. Which is great.

You mean you can't even rely on them to fuck you over, whilst with the Russians you know that's going to happen?

Beware, however, of the term "dispatchable nuclear power" which is bandied around. This gives the impression that some nuclear plants can match the dispatchability of other much more flexible systems like Wind power. This is deeply misleading firstly because you can mostly only change output a few times a day, secondly because any changes come at high cost to efficiency (though might we worth it even so) and thirdly because the dispatchability varies through the nuclear fuel cycle and by the time the reactor is 60% of the way from one refueling to the next refuelling it will have lost most of its ability to be dispatchable.

It is very striking the way that the policy failings of different European governments; in most country's cases, too much reliance on politically vulnerable fossil fuels, in Frances case too much nuclear; In Germany's case cutting old nuclear too quickly and without a backup plan; have been smoothed over by the European wide Electricity grid. That only nuclear heavy Spain had the big problem is truly an achievement.

Or as a financial reward. There are people willing to buy large amounts of memecoins to ensure that their investments continue to pay off.