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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2024

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  • Don’t forget hydro, look at Norway, it’s pretty far away from the equator but has almost 100% renewables. Island as well. There are suboptimal locations, but in the end there is no country which can’t use renewables for all electricity needs.

    Supplying the current global electricity consumption with solar PV would imply covering 0.3% of the land area of the world (source)

    All rooftops should be enough but parking lots and agrarsolar would be also solutions. So even if we only use solar (which we don’t ) it should be possible.

    Renewables create a base load, the problem are demand peaks following overcast days. And there npps don’t help.

    so would nuclear if we actually did it and improved regulatory inefficiencies

    Maybe, but not fast enough. We need the power immediately and battery are already in the steep part of their growth phase. We can’t spend several decades learning how to do it right. Then we could also just wait for fusion.

    land use isn’t an issue in rural places, but it absolutely is in more densely populated places near cities and datacenter hubs. The world is not homogenous.

    Then we use power lines like we do already. Most power plants right now are also not in cities, so I don’t understand the argument. Would you also want to build the npps in/near cities?



  • Where do renewables not work? I’d say they work at even more places, because you don’t need such a developed infrastructure to set it up. Everyone can wire up a small solar farm after a few hours of YouTube, i wouldn’t trust myself with reactor maintenance.

    Nuclear also needs storage for peaks. You don’t want to have to build enough nuclear for peak production which then gets shut down all the time, driving up your LCOE. You want your expensive plant to run all the time. Also you need storage if you have an unplanned maintenance, because then you lose a relevant percentage of production with little to no warning.

    And storage is getting cheaper and better every year. The bigger issue would be a grid that can shovel power from one end of a continent to the other in case of adverse weather.

    We need less space for solar to power the world than we use for golf courses right now, so I’d say landuse is a non issue. Because you can use roofs and such even less.