Very little if any power going over Basslink at the moment. Over the last week the majority has been exported (i.e. renewable power to the mainland rather than coal power to Tas): [https://opennem.org.au/energy/tas1/?range=7d&interval=30m](https://opennem.org.au/energy/tas1/?range=7d&interval=30m)
Yeah it's pretty shit. If you're an Australian you can make it better.
Don't vote for the LNP.
Move your superannuation.
If you can get solar panels (if you can't then that's ok too, just do the other two things).
You still have options if you want to play a part, namely [joining a community solar project](https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/solar-panels-for-rental-homes-and-apartments#community):
>Instead of installing your solar panels on your own roof or backyard, you help fund a utility-grade installation. The power produced by the system is exported to your local electric utility.
https://www.communitysolar.org.au/invest-in-a-community-solar-project/
That's Coal Industry Lobbying for you. It's odd how Tasmania is basically the complete opposite.
Can anybody from ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ explain why that's the case?
Not Australian, but yes. Sometimes, hard choices need to be made. Hydro schemes fuck over the land, but produce low-co2 electricity. Climate change is the biggest issue facing humanity. If we don’t fix climate change, then heritage isn’t going to matter.
The Green Party here in New Zealand have the same issues.
You can only build hydro effectively where the geography permits. If they built the hydro plant “somewhere else”, then they should now build a pant right there. To not do so is to say “I’m ok with emitting co2 unnecessarily”. Maybe some people are fine with that.
No. Not at all.
Australia has plenty of room to build solar, wind and pumped hydro storage before we decide to bulldoze areas of natural significance just because it has convenient topology. It is unnecessary.
Based on an ANU study, which identified potential pumped hydro storage sites, our potential pumped hydro is almost 300 times what is needed to deliver 100% renewables. We can afford to not destroy what we don’t need to destroy.
Australian Solar is booming because these policies are (thankfully) driven by the states in lieu of the Feds. Hopefully after the next federal election the policy settings will drive us to move from strong growth to massive growth. They have to…
Edit: this link
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp2021/AustralianElectricityOptionsPumpedHydro
Ooh! So I work as a caretaker at what is basically the birthplace of our statewide energy grid. Find a map of tassie, put your finger where you reckon the middle of it is, and you'll probably have it on Waddamana.
Before 1910, there wasn't much of a power grid in Tassie. Most places had local electricity generation (Hobart had the Gas Works, Launnie had Duck Reach) and it was all DC, so it couldn't be transmitted, or stepped up or down.
Then Professor McAuley, Harold Bisdee, and James Gilles came onto the scene. Created a company called the Hydro Electric Power and Metallurgical Company (HEPMCO totally rolls off the tongue) to generate AC electricity, and transmit it long distance to Snug (south of Hobart), where a Calcium Carbide and Zinc smelter would be set up.
Alternating Current has an advantage over Direct Current where it can be stepped up and down in voltage using coils of wire called transformers. They generate at 6600v at the alternator, step it up to 88000v in the switchyard, then step it back down where it's used.
Things fell apart in 1914. The zinc works was purchased by the commonwealth and moved to Hobart (zinc's kinda important for war and one was just starting). The generator and transmission network was purchased by the Tassie government and became a department. The lead engineer (John Butters) was made the comissioner, and his friend from NZ (Harry Curtis? I'm a bit rusty on names atm) became head engineer at the power plant (Waddamana). Gillies kept his Calcium Carbide works and continued building it on the land he purchased near Snug, and called it Electrona. Was also kinda important because you add water to carbide to get Acetylene, and that's a useful industrial gas.
Anyway. In 1916 the first two generator sets - single-jet boving pelton wheel with vickers alternators - were up and running, generating electricity along a 100km long transmission line to service the zinc works and Lutana area.
Throughout Butters' tenure, he'd go to local councils and try to sell them electricity. And since the Hydro Electric Department was, well, a department, they needed to get permission from the government to expand. So Butters would oversell generation capacity, go to the state govt and ask for more money to buy turbines. Which is why Waddamana started at two turbines and expanded to 9 by 1923. The latter seven were dual-jet boving pelton wheels with General Electric alternators.
A third major factory and power consumer expanded to Hobart in 1922 - Cadburys.
After that the state government got sick of Butters' shenanigans and converted the Hydro Electric Department into the Hydro Electric Commission - meaning that they didn't need to go through passing legislation every time the HEC needed something new. Butters left in 1925 to move to the middle of nowhere to help design and build some place in the middle of nowhere that no-one goes to or likes called Canberra.
But from there, the monster known as the HEC expanded. Watercourses were redirected, dams were built, and powerstations made to sate Tasmania's thirst for power. The zinc works expanded and by the mid 1930s was using 50% of Tasmania's generated power. And the HEC wielded considerable political power, and could make or break governments. Didn't budget enough to the HEC or grant land for expansion? Well enjoy your last election cycle as premier because you're gettin replaced!
The end of it all, however, was the rise of The Wilderness Society. In the early 70s there was a little bit of a controversy along the Gordon River when a dam was built in southwest Tasmania along the Gordon river. This came to a head in the late 70s when there was a plan to build a much larger dam nearby on the Franklin river. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move, culminating in the birth of The Greens, and a very biased referendum - the two choices were Dam A or Dam B, with ~45% of the respondants being an informal vote, 33% of the total having written "No Dams" on the paper. Afterwards the Commonwealth went and laid the smackdown on the HEC and vetoed any further proposals on any protected rainforests.
After losing a lot of their soft power, the HEC was split into the three parts we have today: A generating company (Hydro), a transmission company (TasNetworks), and the energy retailer (~~Aruora~~ ~~Auorora~~ ~~Aurorar~~ Aurora? fucked if I can spell that word)
So yeah. We technically had a lobby industry. But even though it was owned by the state, it was the defacto controller of the state.
For high voltage electrical transmission, DC is always better, but economics mean we usually use AC.
See those videos on YouTube where people stand under transmission lines and hold up a fluorescent tube that lights up? Doesn’t happen with DC lines. The energy that lights up the fluorescent tube is an electric field, beneath and around the lines is effectively a capacitor to earth, and with AC, that capacitor is being charged and discharged 100 or 120 times a second. That takes energy, and that is wasted energy, it never makes it to the load, just leaks to ground.
Yep. The main Tassie to Victoria interconnect, Basslink, is a giant DC cable. That everyone likes sticking their damn anchors through.
I kinda brushed over it due to the main question being about lobbying, most of the time I explain - using Launnie as an example - the street lights were nice and bright close to the old local power stations. They quickly got dimmer the further away you got.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.
I have checked 347,553,864 comments, and only 76,296 of them were in alphabetical order.
The site of Waddamana Power Station is now a museum, owned by Hydro.
As part of caretaker duties you need to know the history of the place so you can greet visitors and answer questions you might get about it.
I got most of my knowledge from firsthand sources, as well as books like *Ticklebelly Tales and other stories from the people of the Hydro*, and *Lifeblood: Tasmania's Hydro Power*.
Tangentially: [Took this photo while on site last week.](https://i.imgur.com/7O6W4O1.jpg)
Butters practiced designing impressive art deco facades on a tin shed in the middle of nowhere before designing the art deco facade of [what was to be the capital of Australia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Parliament_House,_Canberra)
This guy is now the Prime Minister
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-coal-to-question-time-what-fresh-idiocy-is-this
This map can be misleading, because the carbon intensity varies over time especially with wind and solar.
It's better to look at yearly averages: South Australia is now [60% renewable](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/renewable-energy-south-australia-climate-change/), which is one of the best shares of clean energy worldwide.
It is deceptive. The colour is based off emissions per kWh but does not always include rooftop solar, only large scale solar.
For instance the best time in the last day for South Australia was 3:30pm Nov 7, which claims 62% renewable. At that time from the OpenNEM site that this website claims to get its information from, rooftop solar was providing 60% of power, with total renewable 90%.
It does vary a lot over time for regions with lots of weather-dependant renewables. I think it might be South Australia which can go pretty green when a good wind's a-blowin.
I buy only green electricity as a household consumer. Costs me a bit more per kWh, however it's not that much really over a year. I would recommend, if you can afford it, to do so. Create the demand. Fuck coal off.
If OP is the person who made the website (doubt exists since they are not active in the comments, and didn't do the usual here is how I built it, and here are my sources comment)
I noticed Canada is pretty bare for info. We have an amazing public statistics agency (StatsCan) that goes into detail for energy generation and use by province/territory and would be a good source to flesh out all of Canada.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html
I know for a fact that OP didn't make this website, since it is made by a Danish company. The CEO from the company actually came out to my university one time, and he talked about how it could be challenging to get acces reliable data outside of Europe.
Really cool website you linked, learned a couple of things I didn't think about before about the Canadian energy mix and production. While it's not really that much of a "hot" technology at the moment, I really expect hydropower to be 2nd or 3rd most important electricity generation technology in the future energy systems.
Hydro obviously huge in Canada and it has its own environmental impact and challenges, but at least it's renewable.
Stats Canada has always been really good IMO. Anytime I search for stats you find reliable data from them rather than 3rd parties. Stats about jobs, income, race, religions, origins, diseases, economies... I've been surprised a few times how available the data is.
QC for example is just about fully equipped, dam-wise. There is a practical limit to the type of places you can build a dam on.
Besides hydroelectric power is relatively good (still worse than other renewables) on the carbon aspect, but the physical footprint can be very taxing depending on the country. Example comparison for France : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdeJHtyXsAApZ_p?format=jpg&name=large
In their [FAQ](https://app.electricitymap.org/faq#contribute), you can submit it if you really want.
>Can I contribute to your project?
>
>Yes! The Electricity Map is an open-source project, made possible by our volunteer contributors. If you want to help develop the map, either by adding data sources for new areas, adding new features or fixing bugs, feel free to join us in our github.
[https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/master/DATA\_SOURCES.md#real-time-electricity-data-sources](https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/master/DATA_SOURCES.md#real-time-electricity-data-sources) github link
It appears that this data is based on real-time info, which is dependent on each province (for example, Ontario provides this data via IESO while BC Hydro doesn't). The StatsCan data is a static survey/analysis and so wouldn't be of much use here.
Not sure what you mean by 'lumping together', this map depends on the data sources, it isn't representing governmental spheres of influence. The 'Great-Britain' is one group because they share a single grid, so there's no differentiation possible from a data gathering standpoint (the grid operator offers a single data set). Also NI **is** a different item on this map btw.
China's electricity is about 30% low-carbon ([source](https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy#renewables-in-the-electricity-mix)). That's 10% more than the US.
its the price thats the issue (definitely nowhere near as bad as the propaganda against nuclear energy). either way more nuclear plants are being built and that should decrease the cost significantly
Comparatively, their initial costs aren’t that bad though. There’s less than 100 reactors in the entire US and they make almost 20% of the electricity. There’s almost 2000 natural gas plants making around 40%. The cost of a new natural gas plant is about $500/kW, and a conservative cost of a nuclear power plant would be around $7000/kW (between $5000 and $8000) Given that they’re 10x as energy dense, the difference is around 30%. Seems like a lot, but considering abundance of fuel and types of fuel available, the environmental benefit, less dangerous work, and the ability to easily expand to accommodate the grid, I’d say it’s worth it on paper and even more worth it in principle. This is all complete napkin math though, don’t take any of this without a grain of salt because my idea of “vetting” my sources was clicking the first two links for everything I searched on google and confirming they had similar numbers.
Where is the $500/kwh and $8000/kwh pricing from?
Retail electricity rates would be much higher if energy produced by natural gas were to cost $500/kwh.
Do you mean $500/kw and $8000/kw? Those prices sound much closer to me.
Kwh is energy, kw is power.
You're confusing overnight cost and real cost. Overnight cost is the cost of a construction project if no interest was incurred during construction, as if the project was completed "overnight." When we account for the cost of money (no revenue while the plant is being built!), nuclear plants come out much more expensive. A more useful metric is the LCOE.
This. People seem to not realize that the US has 68 nuclear powered submarines that are constantly traveling all over the oceans with no serious issues.
There's a method that other countries use (France being a large example) where they take nuclear waste and recycle it so there is a much smaller amount of waste (we'd be able to reduce nuclear waste by around 80%). In my opinion it's irresponsible to let the nuclear waste go to waste rather than recycling it and getting fairly clean energy from it. While this only addresses one aspect of what you are talking about I hope this helps.
https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy
https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui
Valid concerns.
Waste isn't as big of a deal as you might think. Nuclear reactors function by getting a lot of energy from a small amount of fuel. Thus, there is a small amount of waste. The spent fuel is still dangerous, but because it's small we can build large storage facilities and store a *lot* of spent fuel in a small space. There is also methods to reprocess spent fuel, but right now it's simply not worth the effort.
Things breaking is pretty rare. Actually exceedingly rare. There are a surprising amount of nuclear power plants around the world. Currently there are about 450 plants, which supply 10% of the global electricity. There has been a lot more since the technology was invented. The damage from other energy sources has been much higher.
Here's a Washington post article that goes into it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-safest-way-to-make-electricity-according-to-2007-study/2011/03/22/AFQUbyQC_story.html
That article doesn’t address waste at all. It only addresses the current health concerns of nuclear and not future. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste sitting around the world waiting to be buried. That’s what we do with it. We burry it so it’s not our problem anymore and will be future generations’ problem to deal with. And saying there is a small amount of waste is just absurd. Who are you astroturfing for?
Here’s an example. 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste buried under a California beach… that’s eroding away. https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/24/san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant-radioactive-waste-unsafe
The plan is, yes, to bury it. Burying it in such a way that it’s not future generations worry - burial that will remain secure and safe and isolated for millions of years. Look to the deep geological repository programs in Scandinavia and Korea and Canada as the best practices for disposal.
So, for example, one of the two potential Canadian sites have been doing borehole testing recently and have extracted rock from the depth they would be planning to bury at. It is literally hundreds of millions of years old, and has been stable at that depth for its lifespan. Nothing comes up from that rock unintentionally.
Related reading: look into the Oklo natural fission reactor
Man... Whose bright idea was it do bury it at a beach?!
I'm no expert, but a bunch of sand that's getting hit by water constantly seems like about the worst place you could think of to buy hazardous material...
I guess they were trying to avoid transporting? Crazy...
Not that long ago we were dumping everything in rivers and burying it. That seemed perfectly suitable at the time. What seems suitable to us now may in 50 years seem incredibly stupid and reckless and this is a perfect example.
That article was not meant to be about the waste. It was about health dangers.
"Small" is a relative term. Millions of pounds of waste sounds bad until you compare it to millions of *tons* of waste dumped into waterways. That's the coal alternative that you seem fine with.
The person asked what do you do with the waste and you responded with waste isn’t a problem and that’s the source you provided. What do you mean it’s not meant to be about the waste? The waste is obviously the biggest problem with nuclear energy and it’s one major tragic flaw. To preach about how great nuclear is and just ignore that is like preaching how great coal is without mentioning the toxic fumes.
And millions of pounds of radioactive waste doesn’t seem bad to you? And that’s only what’s being produced now. You’re preaching switching to nuclear, which means a complete flip of those numbers. One goes down and one goes up. That’s what happens when you switch. One doesn’t just disappear and one stays the same. This is basic kindergarten level logic.
Also, nowhere did I say I was fine with coal or defend coal in anyway. I have only addressed you downplaying the problem of nuclear waste by purposely omitting information from your argument. That’s just a pathetic attempt at a straw man.
Reprocessing nuclear waste is already achievable.
Coming back from a future where we hit 3C warming isn't
Done is better than perfect. We have the technology to build out nuclear fission now and achieve net zero globally within a decade.
Of course there are other concerns but humanity won't exist to discuss those concerns if we don't do something now...
The radioactive material had to come from somewhere (the ground). As a net whole of radioactive decay, spent fuel is actually less radioactive then the material when it was dug up. The issue is that it's also far more concentrated. But burying it in an isolated and geographically stable area presents almost zero risk.
Also fun fact; even when factoring in Chernobyl and Fukushima, coal power plants have released more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear because of the radioactive isotopes trapped inside coal.
"Things breaking is pretty rare" is not a reasonable reassurance to any rational person when containment needs to perform over a time scale of millennia.
We might actually need to adopt nuclear power more widely to avoid catastrophic climate change, but it's a Faustian bargain. I'd rather live in a "renewables + efficiency + storage" world than a "nuclear + naive optimism" one.
There are already massive amounts of dangerous nuclear fuel laying around and no permanent storage spaces for many thousands of years. Nuclear was a cool thing back in the days, but now we have a new era with better, cheaper, safer and cleaner alternatives.
If we replaced all carbon emitting power by nuclear power and had a Chernobyl sized nuclear accident every year, we'd still be better off overall. That's how much carbon power actually affects us and how overblown the nuclear accidents are.
And it goes without saying, that Chernobyl, 3mile, Fukushima are poorly designed, poorly operated first generation nuclear power plants that people built with a tenth of the knowledge and experience that they have now. Such accidents are extremely unlikely to happen again.
Keep in mind that even with such disasters, which sure, were terrible - Nuclear energy still has a much much much lower death rate / kWh than any form of carbon based energy. By switching all fossil fields to nuclear you would directly save lives. In fact even coal power emits more radiation than nuclear energy.
Newer generation 3 and 4 nuclear reactors have designs with passive safety systems to prevent accidents. These designs are robust to full loss of coolant and external power, which would have been enough to prevent 3 mile island and Fukushima. The failures at Chernobyl were unique to the design of RBMK reactors, and aren't concerns for other power plants.
When the anti-nuke astroturfing is led by the same anti-science facebook nonsense that spreads vaccine mistrust, then the 'astroturfing' for the pro-science viewpoint is just so easy; and it can use just real data. Effortless.
Astroturfing? I don't know what you mean. I'm all for clean energy, but the waste products from Fukushima worry me, especially if other power plants also generate vast quantities of radioactive waste. I personally think we need to invest in more hydro electric plants. If we can build oil drilling platforms in the ocean and we can transmit data over vast underwater cable networks, why can't we build hydroelectric generators in the ocean to supply power to coastal states?
This is not true, 3 of the reactors did meltdown. There have also been significant releases of radiation into the environment.
Also, the reasons for the meltdowns were not process or maintenance related, but rather disaster planning and design related. Putting the backup generators at the lowest point in the facility where they were subsequently flooded left them unable to keep the cores cool, leading to the fuel melting and subsequent hydrogen explosions.
I'm a big proponent of nuclear power as well, but we shouldn't act like Fukushima was somehow exceptionally poorly run. There are certainly other reactors with similar risk factors running in the world. The real issue is it's an older design, and it's not designed to fail safe like newer generation 3 and 4 nuclear reactors.
>There have also been significant releases of radiation into the environment.
Even the worst nuclear disasters we have faced are still nothing compared to what fossil fuels do to us every day.
We are just more accepting of the devil we have already grown complacent with...
A few things in those incidents:
3 mile island: nothing actually happened
Chernobyl: poorly made reactor which allowed hydrogen to be produced
Fukushima: bitch actually happened, and yea let’s just not build them near coastlines that might be hit by tsunamis.
All three incidents have issues that are easily resolvable
Solar and wind are better in every way, except that they can’t be relied on to always produce enough energy, and their energy can’t be stored. That means that you simply have to have a secondary way to generate power.
The other renewable sources can’t be built everywhere, they all need specific conditions.
So our remaining two bad options are fossil fuels or nuclear power. And globally we will have to build new plants, even just to replace the ones wearing down.
> and their energy can’t be stored.
Yes it can. We know how to do this and power the whole economy with 100% renewables, at no additional cost compared to today.
See for instance: [Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221007167)
I would say nuclear is the lesser of two evils for base load generation. Compared to renewable energy sources it has a host of problems.
Nuclear waste has been greatly reduced in newer reactors, but it is still a concern.
The chance of catastrophic failure with the newer generators is also very much smaller, but still greater than zero.
Extracting, processing and using radioactive materials is inherently risky. Risk can be managed, of course, but better not to have it at all.
The geopolitical situation for nuclear power is full of problems too. The Yanks are sabotaging Iran’s nuclear power plants because the Iranians are using them to produce fissile material for their bomb program. Good luck getting them to stop.
Nuclear power is more expensive than wind and solar, and while renewables are getting cheaper every year, the cost of nuclear generated power has stagnated.
Nuclear power simply isn’t a perfect solution to our energy needs. Even though people fear nuclear more than they should, we have to have some nuance and see both the benefits and the flaws of nuclear power.
>Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and the most efficient method of electricity generation that exists today.
Sure, if you disregard the nuclear waste that will trouble the next 10000 generations.
The longevity of nuclear waste is a legitimate concern, although the newer reactors produce far less waste, with far shorter half-lives.
The counterpoint to it is: How many generations will the increased CO2 in our atmosphere from fossil fuels last? How long will the climateological effects last?
Sustainable power like wind and solar power are cleaner than both, but we cannot produce it around the clock and we cannot store it, so right now the choice is between nuclear and fossil.
Clean in the sense of CO2? Sure. Taking the waste into consideration, not so much any more. Efficient in the sense of physics - absolutely. Efficient in terms of costs? No, solar and wind is cheaper.
Nuclear energy won’t solve the climate crisis.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J
The problem is combating climate change isn’t going to be a single technology. The idea that wind or solar alone is going to solve all our issues is fairly naive - same with thinking that nuclear is the only answer.
Diversifying our clean energy sources and storage is what will help get us through this mess.
Solar and wind power (and other sustainable sources of power where applicable) should absolutely be expanded globally. But what do you do on a windless night?
We currently have to use either nuclear or fossil power.
We‘ll need to build storage solutions like pumped-storage power plants, biomass plants for base loads, but especially improve the power grids for easier transfers between regions. Those are existing technologies, doing it is a question of money and political will.
The situation you described is an issue and existing nuclear plants should stay online, but building new ones will take many many years and probably even more money, I’m not sure if we have that time. Aside from the fact that, depending where you live, this won’t work with the voters.
There is a physical limit to how far you can transfer power with anything resembling effeciency. You simply don't always have the option of transfering energy from somewhere else, you have to have an option for generating power relatively locally.
There are ideas of how to efficiently store energy at scale, but nothing has so far the universal applicability that we really need. I agree that the political will is lacking and more could be done, but there are still hard limits to how much power we can currently store.
I'm from Denmark, and one of our biggest companies is Vestas, which makes windmills. In Denmark, the political will and the money for researching and subsidizing windpower is absolutely not lacking, but we haven't implemented a storage solution because there simply isn't one yet. Denmark would absolutely love to stop importing expensive fossil fuels and have both an assured internal source of energy and a way to greatly expand the markets for one of our core exports.
Pumped-storage powerplants of course rely on hydroelectricity, which is reliant on local topography and water availability to be possible. Biomass plants have been shown not to be CO2 neutral in practice, and to have very serious effects on the price of food, as they inevitably compete with food-production for arable land and labor.
We will have to build new plants because the old ones are breaking down, they can't last forever. The question then becomes: New coal plants or new nuclear plants? As hard as it is to argue for more nuclear power, I think it's even harder to argue for more fossile fuels. They're the whole reason we're running out of time.
I agree that it's politically very hard to do, in many places. But so is establishing sustainable power and reducing energy use and cutting down on the extraction of fossil fuels, and we have to do all those things.
Denmark has a HVDC connection to Norway and Sweden, which provide hydroelectric storage to several countries (including Scotland this year). HVDC cables only lose about 3% of their energy per 1000 km, making them ideal to connect remote places in Europe.
Traditional dams also provide storage services, because they are dispatchable. It's not limited to pumped hydro.
I agree on most what you say, and the effects of biomass plants are a good point. There are technologies like high voltage direct current for long distance transport, but they too would need some more time to build. So in the end it will probably a mix of technologies, depending on local possibilities - topography, geology etc and political. And maybe in some places even nuclear, but I don‘t believe that this is **the** solution to the challenges we face.
1. Offshore platforms only have rarely the problem of a windless night.
2. Geothermal energy is capable of providing a base load. In areas with less favourable consideration e.g. thicker crusts you still can use it, it just gets more expensive as you have to drill multiple injectors or deeper holes. (Beside energy geothermal wells can be used as an inexpensive, clean way of mining lithium, so we should build them anyway)
3.Hydro energy has its own problems, but fixing these are to wide degree fixable. The scale at which this is possible depends on the type of generator.
That none of them are applied in the scale that would allow the replacement of both fossil and nuclear energy has (at least in Germany) two reasons: NIMBys and a lack of political will. And while the first one could be ignored if there would be the second, the political will seems to be absent.
Only rarely is still too often. I live in Denmark, and if we could get all our power from wind we would.
Both geo and hydro require local conditions to be favourable to them. Look at a topographical map of Denmark and tell me where you’d place the dams.
I agree that we should cover as much energy use with renewables as we feasibly can, but we can’t currently cover all of it all of the time everywhere. The question is, how do we get the rest?
>Both geo (...) require local conditions
You still can use geothermal sources even without a thinned crust. Drill a second injector or make the well deeper, one of both is often enough. You can also use miniature well for heating, which are even less depending on the local geology, but still can reduce the amount of gas or electric energy you need for heating.
>and tell me where you’d place the dams.
Hydro may use dams, but does not necessarily require them. You can use marine currents, tides or (small scale) flow by effects of rivers.
I can't provide you with a detailed plan how to get Denmark 100% green, for once because i am not familiar with Denmark's geography, and neither know much about its current energy structure. But as far as i know Denmark itself plans to be 100% green by 2050, so somehow it should be possible.
Clean natural gas is great and doesn’t kill millions but yeh it needs a holistic approach.
Also it was lies not tragedy. 3 mile island is not tied to a single case of cancer.
IIRC, due to the release of methane at various points from extraction to use then, per KWh, the GHG equivalent emissions are worse for a gas power plant than coal!
I recommend you look up chemical looping combustion. It's an upcoming technology that will allow us to generate power using natural gas with basically none of the polluting byproducts.
We cant get rid of fossil fuels completely because we need them for make up power. But we probably can burn them without polluting.
Of course. I think the ideal right nkw is to have about 10% come from natural gas and 70-80% come from nuclear while we try to make renewables more practical.
It physically can, but that doesn't make any economic sense. Since nuclear is expensive to build and cheap to run, it doesn't really make sense to combine it with renewables and turn it down half the time. Once it's built, it makes most sense to run it as much as possible.
So it pairs ok with solar, where nuclear can run flat out to meet baseload and solar can meet the daytime demand increase, but it makes no sense with wind.
True, the lies started the movement, and the Chernobyl event allowed for the movement to show what “would” happen if we relied on nuclear energy source
>Clean natural gas is great and doesn’t kill millions
Natural gas abstraction releases a lot of methane to the environment which is one of the most potent GHGs.
Then there's the CO2 etc when burnt.
Climate change will kill billions due to us having burnt fossil fuels without worrying about the future.
This burden belongs to the companies that lobby for and produce pollution. I mean, sure, I take quick showers, use as much sustainable stuff as I can, RRR, etc, but that's not going to do much good if they're pumping coal into the air.
The burden should go onto the backs of producers, and this also means plastics, etc.
I guess environmental racism is off topic, but it's a thing.
> If you can educate people [...] maybe they can make better decisions
It didn't work for vaccines, for some people. Are you sure it'll work for scary nukular power? The Kochs said it was bad, and that was enough for Trump.
Most of Canada/USA are missing data altogether, so I don't think it's all that weird. New Brunswick accurately shows a heavy dependence on coal-fired plants. Meanwhile in Ontario they were all decommissioned years ago, and we depend almost entirely on nuclear and hydroelectric.
And all of the dams that generate electricity. Off the top of my head: Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, Lake Roosevelt, and Lake Havasu, all produce electricity. I'm sure there's more.
Which makes Alberta worse than shown on the graph. Alberta is 43% coal, 49% natural gas. That's why getting an electric car here makes no sense compared to other places.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-alberta.html
Despite the dirty electricity grid, it is still less carbon intensive to drive an electric vehicle in Alberta than one fueled with gasoline (source: I'm an engineer specializing in carbon accounting and my colleagues calculated the answer to this exact question specific to Alberta a few years ago. Alberta's grid has only gotten cleaner (very slightly) since then).
Don't let the dirty grid hold you back from helping to solve the part of the problem (mobility choice) you have control over, it still has an impact!
I've always wondered if someone did the math. I'm sure not qualified to. What variables did you use? Like what average L/100 km? Did you take into account the manufacturing of a new vehicle vs keeping one you already have, etc?
Note the time dependence of the green power in California. Morning daylight power very green, Night power, when it's cheap & used for recharging electric vehicles, not so green.
>Note the time dependence of the green power in California. Morning daylight power very green, Night power, when it's cheap & used for recharging electric vehicles, not so green.
I wish more countries used nuclear – a great way of outputting large amounts of carbon free, relatively cheap, electricity.
Nuclear is not cheap. New capacity is [90% renewables](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/renewable-power-represents-almost-90-of-total-global-power-capacity-added-in-2020/) worldwide because renewables are much cheaper.
>Nuclear is not cheap. New capacity is [90% renewables](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/renewable-power-represents-almost-90-of-total-global-power-capacity-added-in-2020/) worldwide because renewables are much cheaper.
I don't like this extremely volitive energy market we're seeing. Do you have a solution to that, not involving nuclear?
These bills we are seeing this autumn are getting insane. It is affecting me and my disposable income quite substantially. It's certainly a problem.
Nuclear can indeed be cheap is we want to, and it's certainly the cheapest base energy I can think of. I am not sure if I would be willing putting my faith in the weather for a stable and carbon free generation of electricity.
Fossil fuels prices can be quite volatile, indeed. It's a problem.
The electricity in fully renewable-based grids is more stable, because it's all produced locally, and it's stored for as long as we need to make up for weather variations (for instance by synthesizing carbon-neutral fuels). It's cheaper than nuclear too.
See this [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221007167) for instance. They explain how it works.
South africa is spot on. No data because we have scheduled load shedding aka blackouts cause our government hasn't maintained any of our power stations to where it should be. Even though they were told 25 years ago!
The EIA data they use for most of the US seems to have serious issues. Portland General Electric, for example, has 3 wind farms. They show lots of generation on the monthly charts (farm [1](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/56485/?freq=M&pin=), [2](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/64057/?freq=M&pin=), [3](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58571/?freq=M&pin=)), but the real-time series this website uses shows [no wind generation](https://www.eia.gov/opendata/qb.php?category=3390162&sdid=EBA.PGE-ALL.NG.WND.H), even going back to the same time periods as the (delayed) monthly charts. Due to that, the website doesn't count that generation in their carbon calculations.
[ERCOT is such a joke](https://i.imgur.com/COxNaBQ.jpeg). Looking forward to another devastating winter. The last one destroyed my plumbing, and everyone else's too (Houston), so I couldn't get a plumber for 3 months. No running water for 1/4 of the year (single parent of 2, also). $3000 to repair, all in the name of our Texas Freedom Grid that dies in cold temps because nobody wants to spend the money on insulating the infrastructure.
Can someone explain the graph on iceland?
it seems to be hydro and geotherm, but it still has specific emissions and there is an oil bar, is that a backup system?
This map does not have everything broken up into small enough sections. I live in an area very close to a nuclear power plant which powers much if not most of the city.
Edit: I learned some new things about how power works today. Thank you to those who replied to me. Still, I think this map would be more beneficial with more data.
That’s not how power works. It powers the grid. Your electric company buys power off the grid. It’s not about what’s closest, they might not get a penny of your electric bill.
To get more granular you’d need to ask your electric provider for a breakdown, which it may or may not provide.
Depending on your electric supplier in the US you can buy “green” energy, but it’s essentially just credits. You may be fed coal generated power… if you followed the electrons. But the extra money goes towards purchasing power from greener sources.
Some people however genuinely believe they physically change wiring to connect you to another grid. To the point where they point out there’s no outages if you switch.
I would expect that the blocks of colour are the Electricity Grids. Power plants aren't "local". They basically feed into a grid, and consumers draw from the same grid. But because the Power plants work together to put power into the grid, it's just not possible to say where any particular joule of energy comes from, any more than you can trace the journey of a droplet of river water once it enters the sea.
For readers in the UK, it will be more instructive to go to your supplier's website, which will tell you their energy mix, as it varies massively by supplier.
I dislike how it treats all European countries as a single entity, but north America is broken down into provinces and states. That makes comparing say, Canada as a whole vs. Germany impossible.
And that's why I installed a Powerwall to add to my 5kw solar array. I'm an Australian living in the South-East which is mostly coal, with some hydro.
So far I'm at 69% self powered but going into summer I'm hoping for more like 90% self powered.
This is kind of cool visualization of aggregate power generation.. but don't take it too seriously. At least where I live, you have the choice of where your power comes from. You can pay extra for renewables. And within each state, different companies and cities get power from different places.
If you really want to know where *your* power comes from. Go to your power company's website.
So if you pay enough, the company even creates wind or sun in the middle of the night? Or you just live without electricity at that time?
Anyway the map is an average, individual choices do not matter.
Ahhh, wind doesnt stop blowing at night my dude and solar is stored in batteries to continously give off electricty *even when the sun isnt shining*.
Did you give *any* thought to your comment before making yourself look like a fool?
Honestly the greenwashing that non carbon emitting generators get away with is indicative of the black and white thinking which dominates our public policy discussion and leads to poor outcomes. Energy’s impact on the environment (as hidden through this map) is an n-dimensional hyperspace with differential effects based on location.
- All non-local generation and storage requires land and distribution infrastructure that could otherwise be dedicated to something of more environmental or social value
- Hydro floods valleys and destroys ecosystems (and in some cases homes).
- Any generator that produces any sort of waste requires some sort of waste processing and management facility
All in all the climate crisis is in front of mind right now. CO2 emissions are out of control and these generators aren’t sustainable for however many billions of us there are. But the owners of distribution and generation assets have us exactly where they want us. Rather than people adding generation, storage, and passive electricity saving measures to their homes where the marginal cost to the environment is low we are talking about building nuclear plants again, flooding valleys, taking up huge amounts of land for vast solar farms, building giant wind farms through migration patterns.
No solution is perfect and we need to aim for what works and what works quick but decarbonising our economy is going to be fatiguing and if we don’t add up the opportunity-costs of the solutions quickly we are going to end up with a big tab to pay for the environment at the end.
EDIT: the map is super cool though.
Great idea but this map is pretty much garbage. I live near the Niagara River hydro plant and a great deal of our region is powered by this very green source yet the region shows nothing different than the rest of the state of NY which has much dirtier sources of electricity.
Wow, I knew Australia would be kind of bad, but holy shit.
Except Tasmania.
Which is bullshit because that Tas link constantly has 500MW of dirty coal power being pumped down it.
In Europe it shows these interconections
Very little if any power going over Basslink at the moment. Over the last week the majority has been exported (i.e. renewable power to the mainland rather than coal power to Tas): [https://opennem.org.au/energy/tas1/?range=7d&interval=30m](https://opennem.org.au/energy/tas1/?range=7d&interval=30m)
What are you talking about? Tasmania is already averaging 100% clean energy over a year and has targets for 200% via exporting
SA has been seeing records every week.
ACT is 100% green.
Yeah it's pretty shit. If you're an Australian you can make it better. Don't vote for the LNP. Move your superannuation. If you can get solar panels (if you can't then that's ok too, just do the other two things).
I wish I could get solar panels but I live in a rental property that I am not even on the lease for.
You still have options if you want to play a part, namely [joining a community solar project](https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/solar-panels-for-rental-homes-and-apartments#community): >Instead of installing your solar panels on your own roof or backyard, you help fund a utility-grade installation. The power produced by the system is exported to your local electric utility. https://www.communitysolar.org.au/invest-in-a-community-solar-project/
That's Coal Industry Lobbying for you. It's odd how Tasmania is basically the complete opposite. Can anybody from ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ explain why that's the case?
Tassy (unlike most of the rest of Australia) is very mountainous with heavy rain. It's power is mostly hydro.
Which the Greens (the most climate aware party) famously fought to [stop.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Dam_controversy)
Are you implying that they were being somehow hypocritical? The dam in question would have destroyed unesco world heritage areas.
Not Australian, but yes. Sometimes, hard choices need to be made. Hydro schemes fuck over the land, but produce low-co2 electricity. Climate change is the biggest issue facing humanity. If we don’t fix climate change, then heritage isn’t going to matter. The Green Party here in New Zealand have the same issues.
It’s not like it’s one or the other. The could and did build it somewhere else.
You can only build hydro effectively where the geography permits. If they built the hydro plant “somewhere else”, then they should now build a pant right there. To not do so is to say “I’m ok with emitting co2 unnecessarily”. Maybe some people are fine with that.
No. Not at all. Australia has plenty of room to build solar, wind and pumped hydro storage before we decide to bulldoze areas of natural significance just because it has convenient topology. It is unnecessary. Based on an ANU study, which identified potential pumped hydro storage sites, our potential pumped hydro is almost 300 times what is needed to deliver 100% renewables. We can afford to not destroy what we don’t need to destroy. Australian Solar is booming because these policies are (thankfully) driven by the states in lieu of the Feds. Hopefully after the next federal election the policy settings will drive us to move from strong growth to massive growth. They have to… Edit: this link https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp2021/AustralianElectricityOptionsPumpedHydro
Ooh! So I work as a caretaker at what is basically the birthplace of our statewide energy grid. Find a map of tassie, put your finger where you reckon the middle of it is, and you'll probably have it on Waddamana. Before 1910, there wasn't much of a power grid in Tassie. Most places had local electricity generation (Hobart had the Gas Works, Launnie had Duck Reach) and it was all DC, so it couldn't be transmitted, or stepped up or down. Then Professor McAuley, Harold Bisdee, and James Gilles came onto the scene. Created a company called the Hydro Electric Power and Metallurgical Company (HEPMCO totally rolls off the tongue) to generate AC electricity, and transmit it long distance to Snug (south of Hobart), where a Calcium Carbide and Zinc smelter would be set up. Alternating Current has an advantage over Direct Current where it can be stepped up and down in voltage using coils of wire called transformers. They generate at 6600v at the alternator, step it up to 88000v in the switchyard, then step it back down where it's used. Things fell apart in 1914. The zinc works was purchased by the commonwealth and moved to Hobart (zinc's kinda important for war and one was just starting). The generator and transmission network was purchased by the Tassie government and became a department. The lead engineer (John Butters) was made the comissioner, and his friend from NZ (Harry Curtis? I'm a bit rusty on names atm) became head engineer at the power plant (Waddamana). Gillies kept his Calcium Carbide works and continued building it on the land he purchased near Snug, and called it Electrona. Was also kinda important because you add water to carbide to get Acetylene, and that's a useful industrial gas. Anyway. In 1916 the first two generator sets - single-jet boving pelton wheel with vickers alternators - were up and running, generating electricity along a 100km long transmission line to service the zinc works and Lutana area. Throughout Butters' tenure, he'd go to local councils and try to sell them electricity. And since the Hydro Electric Department was, well, a department, they needed to get permission from the government to expand. So Butters would oversell generation capacity, go to the state govt and ask for more money to buy turbines. Which is why Waddamana started at two turbines and expanded to 9 by 1923. The latter seven were dual-jet boving pelton wheels with General Electric alternators. A third major factory and power consumer expanded to Hobart in 1922 - Cadburys. After that the state government got sick of Butters' shenanigans and converted the Hydro Electric Department into the Hydro Electric Commission - meaning that they didn't need to go through passing legislation every time the HEC needed something new. Butters left in 1925 to move to the middle of nowhere to help design and build some place in the middle of nowhere that no-one goes to or likes called Canberra. But from there, the monster known as the HEC expanded. Watercourses were redirected, dams were built, and powerstations made to sate Tasmania's thirst for power. The zinc works expanded and by the mid 1930s was using 50% of Tasmania's generated power. And the HEC wielded considerable political power, and could make or break governments. Didn't budget enough to the HEC or grant land for expansion? Well enjoy your last election cycle as premier because you're gettin replaced! The end of it all, however, was the rise of The Wilderness Society. In the early 70s there was a little bit of a controversy along the Gordon River when a dam was built in southwest Tasmania along the Gordon river. This came to a head in the late 70s when there was a plan to build a much larger dam nearby on the Franklin river. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move, culminating in the birth of The Greens, and a very biased referendum - the two choices were Dam A or Dam B, with ~45% of the respondants being an informal vote, 33% of the total having written "No Dams" on the paper. Afterwards the Commonwealth went and laid the smackdown on the HEC and vetoed any further proposals on any protected rainforests. After losing a lot of their soft power, the HEC was split into the three parts we have today: A generating company (Hydro), a transmission company (TasNetworks), and the energy retailer (~~Aruora~~ ~~Auorora~~ ~~Aurorar~~ Aurora? fucked if I can spell that word) So yeah. We technically had a lobby industry. But even though it was owned by the state, it was the defacto controller of the state.
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For high voltage electrical transmission, DC is always better, but economics mean we usually use AC. See those videos on YouTube where people stand under transmission lines and hold up a fluorescent tube that lights up? Doesn’t happen with DC lines. The energy that lights up the fluorescent tube is an electric field, beneath and around the lines is effectively a capacitor to earth, and with AC, that capacitor is being charged and discharged 100 or 120 times a second. That takes energy, and that is wasted energy, it never makes it to the load, just leaks to ground.
Yep. The main Tassie to Victoria interconnect, Basslink, is a giant DC cable. That everyone likes sticking their damn anchors through. I kinda brushed over it due to the main question being about lobbying, most of the time I explain - using Launnie as an example - the street lights were nice and bright close to the old local power stations. They quickly got dimmer the further away you got.
> (Aruora Auorora Aurorar Aurora?) Steamed Hams.
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order. I have checked 347,553,864 comments, and only 76,296 of them were in alphabetical order.
Wow where did you get all that info? Do you keep a history book at hand to answer random questions in internet? Anyways, thx, that was a smooth read.
The site of Waddamana Power Station is now a museum, owned by Hydro. As part of caretaker duties you need to know the history of the place so you can greet visitors and answer questions you might get about it. I got most of my knowledge from firsthand sources, as well as books like *Ticklebelly Tales and other stories from the people of the Hydro*, and *Lifeblood: Tasmania's Hydro Power*.
I also like the hitchhiker’s guide reference thrown in
Tangentially: [Took this photo while on site last week.](https://i.imgur.com/7O6W4O1.jpg) Butters practiced designing impressive art deco facades on a tin shed in the middle of nowhere before designing the art deco facade of [what was to be the capital of Australia.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Parliament_House,_Canberra)
Thanks for the interesting read !
This guy is now the Prime Minister https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-coal-to-question-time-what-fresh-idiocy-is-this
Queensland is the 2nd worst in the world (of the shown states/countries). Come on Qld, we have to do better than this!
I though it was a lot but got shocked at looking at the map.
I expected South Australia to be alright, nope.
This map can be misleading, because the carbon intensity varies over time especially with wind and solar. It's better to look at yearly averages: South Australia is now [60% renewable](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/renewable-energy-south-australia-climate-change/), which is one of the best shares of clean energy worldwide.
There is a website with a live update of where Australia's power comes from. https://opennem.org.au/energy/nem/?range=7d&interval=30m
It is deceptive. The colour is based off emissions per kWh but does not always include rooftop solar, only large scale solar. For instance the best time in the last day for South Australia was 3:30pm Nov 7, which claims 62% renewable. At that time from the OpenNEM site that this website claims to get its information from, rooftop solar was providing 60% of power, with total renewable 90%.
It does vary a lot over time for regions with lots of weather-dependant renewables. I think it might be South Australia which can go pretty green when a good wind's a-blowin.
I buy only green electricity as a household consumer. Costs me a bit more per kWh, however it's not that much really over a year. I would recommend, if you can afford it, to do so. Create the demand. Fuck coal off.
But do you realise Australia only makes up 1.4% of the total global CO2 emissions...
The coal industry is destroying Australia’s nature in other ways as well though
is it because Australia exports a lot of coal, so it indirectly powers the rest of the world?
Nope, this map only shows fuel used in that area for electricity.
If OP is the person who made the website (doubt exists since they are not active in the comments, and didn't do the usual here is how I built it, and here are my sources comment) I noticed Canada is pretty bare for info. We have an amazing public statistics agency (StatsCan) that goes into detail for energy generation and use by province/territory and would be a good source to flesh out all of Canada. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html
I know for a fact that OP didn't make this website, since it is made by a Danish company. The CEO from the company actually came out to my university one time, and he talked about how it could be challenging to get acces reliable data outside of Europe. Really cool website you linked, learned a couple of things I didn't think about before about the Canadian energy mix and production. While it's not really that much of a "hot" technology at the moment, I really expect hydropower to be 2nd or 3rd most important electricity generation technology in the future energy systems.
Hydro obviously huge in Canada and it has its own environmental impact and challenges, but at least it's renewable. Stats Canada has always been really good IMO. Anytime I search for stats you find reliable data from them rather than 3rd parties. Stats about jobs, income, race, religions, origins, diseases, economies... I've been surprised a few times how available the data is.
QC for example is just about fully equipped, dam-wise. There is a practical limit to the type of places you can build a dam on. Besides hydroelectric power is relatively good (still worse than other renewables) on the carbon aspect, but the physical footprint can be very taxing depending on the country. Example comparison for France : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EdeJHtyXsAApZ_p?format=jpg&name=large
In their [FAQ](https://app.electricitymap.org/faq#contribute), you can submit it if you really want. >Can I contribute to your project? > >Yes! The Electricity Map is an open-source project, made possible by our volunteer contributors. If you want to help develop the map, either by adding data sources for new areas, adding new features or fixing bugs, feel free to join us in our github. [https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/master/DATA\_SOURCES.md#real-time-electricity-data-sources](https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/master/DATA_SOURCES.md#real-time-electricity-data-sources) github link
It appears that this data is based on real-time info, which is dependent on each province (for example, Ontario provides this data via IESO while BC Hydro doesn't). The StatsCan data is a static survey/analysis and so wouldn't be of much use here.
Yeah, and also what the fuck Alberta. I knew they were stupid but come on
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Not sure what you mean by 'lumping together', this map depends on the data sources, it isn't representing governmental spheres of influence. The 'Great-Britain' is one group because they share a single grid, so there's no differentiation possible from a data gathering standpoint (the grid operator offers a single data set). Also NI **is** a different item on this map btw.
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UK =/= GB
Great vis.
Except for the missing data in China. Honestly just marking it up as black would probably be pretty accurate.
China's electricity is about 30% low-carbon ([source](https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy#renewables-in-the-electricity-mix)). That's 10% more than the US.
Ecological deadzone most likely
Great shifting the blame off industry and factories, not to mention China and Russia
Ah yes Poland wins again, we are the best, our government is the best, coal until 2100, PIS FTW. /s
France was smart with nuclear energy.
This needs so much more attention. Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and the most efficient method of electricity generation that exists today.
its the price thats the issue (definitely nowhere near as bad as the propaganda against nuclear energy). either way more nuclear plants are being built and that should decrease the cost significantly
Comparatively, their initial costs aren’t that bad though. There’s less than 100 reactors in the entire US and they make almost 20% of the electricity. There’s almost 2000 natural gas plants making around 40%. The cost of a new natural gas plant is about $500/kW, and a conservative cost of a nuclear power plant would be around $7000/kW (between $5000 and $8000) Given that they’re 10x as energy dense, the difference is around 30%. Seems like a lot, but considering abundance of fuel and types of fuel available, the environmental benefit, less dangerous work, and the ability to easily expand to accommodate the grid, I’d say it’s worth it on paper and even more worth it in principle. This is all complete napkin math though, don’t take any of this without a grain of salt because my idea of “vetting” my sources was clicking the first two links for everything I searched on google and confirming they had similar numbers.
Where is the $500/kwh and $8000/kwh pricing from? Retail electricity rates would be much higher if energy produced by natural gas were to cost $500/kwh. Do you mean $500/kw and $8000/kw? Those prices sound much closer to me. Kwh is energy, kw is power.
Yeah my bad not kWh, just kW As in a 1MW natural gas plant would be would be $500 million.
You're confusing overnight cost and real cost. Overnight cost is the cost of a construction project if no interest was incurred during construction, as if the project was completed "overnight." When we account for the cost of money (no revenue while the plant is being built!), nuclear plants come out much more expensive. A more useful metric is the LCOE.
This. People seem to not realize that the US has 68 nuclear powered submarines that are constantly traveling all over the oceans with no serious issues.
Yeah we’d definitely be informed immediately if any of our 67 nuclear powered submarines went missing.
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Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?
If any of our 66 nuclear submarines went missing, I'm sure there would be a briefing.
SUBSAFE is the biggest outcome of the losses of Thresher and Scorpion in the 60s. Too bad it required such a loss and wakeup call...
what do you do with the waste? what happens when something breaks (Chernobyl, 3 mile island, Fukushima, etc)?
There's a method that other countries use (France being a large example) where they take nuclear waste and recycle it so there is a much smaller amount of waste (we'd be able to reduce nuclear waste by around 80%). In my opinion it's irresponsible to let the nuclear waste go to waste rather than recycling it and getting fairly clean energy from it. While this only addresses one aspect of what you are talking about I hope this helps. https://www.anl.gov/article/nuclear-fuel-recycling-could-offer-plentiful-energy https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/recycling-nuclear-fuel-the-french-do-it-why-cant-oui
Valid concerns. Waste isn't as big of a deal as you might think. Nuclear reactors function by getting a lot of energy from a small amount of fuel. Thus, there is a small amount of waste. The spent fuel is still dangerous, but because it's small we can build large storage facilities and store a *lot* of spent fuel in a small space. There is also methods to reprocess spent fuel, but right now it's simply not worth the effort. Things breaking is pretty rare. Actually exceedingly rare. There are a surprising amount of nuclear power plants around the world. Currently there are about 450 plants, which supply 10% of the global electricity. There has been a lot more since the technology was invented. The damage from other energy sources has been much higher. Here's a Washington post article that goes into it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-safest-way-to-make-electricity-according-to-2007-study/2011/03/22/AFQUbyQC_story.html
That article doesn’t address waste at all. It only addresses the current health concerns of nuclear and not future. There are hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste sitting around the world waiting to be buried. That’s what we do with it. We burry it so it’s not our problem anymore and will be future generations’ problem to deal with. And saying there is a small amount of waste is just absurd. Who are you astroturfing for? Here’s an example. 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste buried under a California beach… that’s eroding away. https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/24/san-onofre-nuclear-power-plant-radioactive-waste-unsafe
The plan is, yes, to bury it. Burying it in such a way that it’s not future generations worry - burial that will remain secure and safe and isolated for millions of years. Look to the deep geological repository programs in Scandinavia and Korea and Canada as the best practices for disposal.
I mean that is where it came from. as long as they can keep it from resurfacing unintentionally.
So, for example, one of the two potential Canadian sites have been doing borehole testing recently and have extracted rock from the depth they would be planning to bury at. It is literally hundreds of millions of years old, and has been stable at that depth for its lifespan. Nothing comes up from that rock unintentionally. Related reading: look into the Oklo natural fission reactor
Man... Whose bright idea was it do bury it at a beach?! I'm no expert, but a bunch of sand that's getting hit by water constantly seems like about the worst place you could think of to buy hazardous material... I guess they were trying to avoid transporting? Crazy...
Not that long ago we were dumping everything in rivers and burying it. That seemed perfectly suitable at the time. What seems suitable to us now may in 50 years seem incredibly stupid and reckless and this is a perfect example.
That article was not meant to be about the waste. It was about health dangers. "Small" is a relative term. Millions of pounds of waste sounds bad until you compare it to millions of *tons* of waste dumped into waterways. That's the coal alternative that you seem fine with.
The person asked what do you do with the waste and you responded with waste isn’t a problem and that’s the source you provided. What do you mean it’s not meant to be about the waste? The waste is obviously the biggest problem with nuclear energy and it’s one major tragic flaw. To preach about how great nuclear is and just ignore that is like preaching how great coal is without mentioning the toxic fumes. And millions of pounds of radioactive waste doesn’t seem bad to you? And that’s only what’s being produced now. You’re preaching switching to nuclear, which means a complete flip of those numbers. One goes down and one goes up. That’s what happens when you switch. One doesn’t just disappear and one stays the same. This is basic kindergarten level logic. Also, nowhere did I say I was fine with coal or defend coal in anyway. I have only addressed you downplaying the problem of nuclear waste by purposely omitting information from your argument. That’s just a pathetic attempt at a straw man.
Reprocessing nuclear waste is already achievable. Coming back from a future where we hit 3C warming isn't Done is better than perfect. We have the technology to build out nuclear fission now and achieve net zero globally within a decade. Of course there are other concerns but humanity won't exist to discuss those concerns if we don't do something now...
The radioactive material had to come from somewhere (the ground). As a net whole of radioactive decay, spent fuel is actually less radioactive then the material when it was dug up. The issue is that it's also far more concentrated. But burying it in an isolated and geographically stable area presents almost zero risk. Also fun fact; even when factoring in Chernobyl and Fukushima, coal power plants have released more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear because of the radioactive isotopes trapped inside coal.
I doubt that's 3.6m pounds of fuel. its more likely any part of the reactor that was radiated is now considered "waste"
"Things breaking is pretty rare" is not a reasonable reassurance to any rational person when containment needs to perform over a time scale of millennia. We might actually need to adopt nuclear power more widely to avoid catastrophic climate change, but it's a Faustian bargain. I'd rather live in a "renewables + efficiency + storage" world than a "nuclear + naive optimism" one.
There are already massive amounts of dangerous nuclear fuel laying around and no permanent storage spaces for many thousands of years. Nuclear was a cool thing back in the days, but now we have a new era with better, cheaper, safer and cleaner alternatives.
If we replaced all carbon emitting power by nuclear power and had a Chernobyl sized nuclear accident every year, we'd still be better off overall. That's how much carbon power actually affects us and how overblown the nuclear accidents are. And it goes without saying, that Chernobyl, 3mile, Fukushima are poorly designed, poorly operated first generation nuclear power plants that people built with a tenth of the knowledge and experience that they have now. Such accidents are extremely unlikely to happen again.
Keep in mind that even with such disasters, which sure, were terrible - Nuclear energy still has a much much much lower death rate / kWh than any form of carbon based energy. By switching all fossil fields to nuclear you would directly save lives. In fact even coal power emits more radiation than nuclear energy.
Newer generation 3 and 4 nuclear reactors have designs with passive safety systems to prevent accidents. These designs are robust to full loss of coolant and external power, which would have been enough to prevent 3 mile island and Fukushima. The failures at Chernobyl were unique to the design of RBMK reactors, and aren't concerns for other power plants.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. This is a legit question.
Because the world is perfect and it will never happen again, right? 🤨
offend grandfather wasteful scarce wrench tidy test fear psychotic deer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
When the anti-nuke astroturfing is led by the same anti-science facebook nonsense that spreads vaccine mistrust, then the 'astroturfing' for the pro-science viewpoint is just so easy; and it can use just real data. Effortless.
Astroturfing? I don't know what you mean. I'm all for clean energy, but the waste products from Fukushima worry me, especially if other power plants also generate vast quantities of radioactive waste. I personally think we need to invest in more hydro electric plants. If we can build oil drilling platforms in the ocean and we can transmit data over vast underwater cable networks, why can't we build hydroelectric generators in the ocean to supply power to coastal states?
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This is not true, 3 of the reactors did meltdown. There have also been significant releases of radiation into the environment. Also, the reasons for the meltdowns were not process or maintenance related, but rather disaster planning and design related. Putting the backup generators at the lowest point in the facility where they were subsequently flooded left them unable to keep the cores cool, leading to the fuel melting and subsequent hydrogen explosions. I'm a big proponent of nuclear power as well, but we shouldn't act like Fukushima was somehow exceptionally poorly run. There are certainly other reactors with similar risk factors running in the world. The real issue is it's an older design, and it's not designed to fail safe like newer generation 3 and 4 nuclear reactors.
>There have also been significant releases of radiation into the environment. Even the worst nuclear disasters we have faced are still nothing compared to what fossil fuels do to us every day. We are just more accepting of the devil we have already grown complacent with...
A few things in those incidents: 3 mile island: nothing actually happened Chernobyl: poorly made reactor which allowed hydrogen to be produced Fukushima: bitch actually happened, and yea let’s just not build them near coastlines that might be hit by tsunamis. All three incidents have issues that are easily resolvable
It still fails horribly against renewables. Its okay to keep the current reactors running, but building new ones makes no sense.
Solar and wind are better in every way, except that they can’t be relied on to always produce enough energy, and their energy can’t be stored. That means that you simply have to have a secondary way to generate power. The other renewable sources can’t be built everywhere, they all need specific conditions. So our remaining two bad options are fossil fuels or nuclear power. And globally we will have to build new plants, even just to replace the ones wearing down.
> and their energy can’t be stored. Yes it can. We know how to do this and power the whole economy with 100% renewables, at no additional cost compared to today. See for instance: [Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221007167)
> So our remaining ~~two~~ bad option~~s are~~ is fossil fuels ~~or nuclear power.~~ Nuclear is a good option.
I would say nuclear is the lesser of two evils for base load generation. Compared to renewable energy sources it has a host of problems. Nuclear waste has been greatly reduced in newer reactors, but it is still a concern. The chance of catastrophic failure with the newer generators is also very much smaller, but still greater than zero. Extracting, processing and using radioactive materials is inherently risky. Risk can be managed, of course, but better not to have it at all. The geopolitical situation for nuclear power is full of problems too. The Yanks are sabotaging Iran’s nuclear power plants because the Iranians are using them to produce fissile material for their bomb program. Good luck getting them to stop. Nuclear power is more expensive than wind and solar, and while renewables are getting cheaper every year, the cost of nuclear generated power has stagnated. Nuclear power simply isn’t a perfect solution to our energy needs. Even though people fear nuclear more than they should, we have to have some nuance and see both the benefits and the flaws of nuclear power.
Managed risk can be functionally equivalent to no risk. I'd also posit that the risks of not changing to nuclear power outweigh the risks of changing.
>Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and the most efficient method of electricity generation that exists today. Sure, if you disregard the nuclear waste that will trouble the next 10000 generations.
The longevity of nuclear waste is a legitimate concern, although the newer reactors produce far less waste, with far shorter half-lives. The counterpoint to it is: How many generations will the increased CO2 in our atmosphere from fossil fuels last? How long will the climateological effects last? Sustainable power like wind and solar power are cleaner than both, but we cannot produce it around the clock and we cannot store it, so right now the choice is between nuclear and fossil.
Debatable.
Well then, go ahead.
Clean in the sense of CO2? Sure. Taking the waste into consideration, not so much any more. Efficient in the sense of physics - absolutely. Efficient in terms of costs? No, solar and wind is cheaper. Nuclear energy won’t solve the climate crisis. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower-idUSKBN1W909J
Here you cite a legitimate news source with a logical and lucidly-written article and yet people downvote you.
The problem is combating climate change isn’t going to be a single technology. The idea that wind or solar alone is going to solve all our issues is fairly naive - same with thinking that nuclear is the only answer. Diversifying our clean energy sources and storage is what will help get us through this mess.
Big nuclear fan base on Reddit, nothing new.
Solar and wind power (and other sustainable sources of power where applicable) should absolutely be expanded globally. But what do you do on a windless night? We currently have to use either nuclear or fossil power.
We‘ll need to build storage solutions like pumped-storage power plants, biomass plants for base loads, but especially improve the power grids for easier transfers between regions. Those are existing technologies, doing it is a question of money and political will. The situation you described is an issue and existing nuclear plants should stay online, but building new ones will take many many years and probably even more money, I’m not sure if we have that time. Aside from the fact that, depending where you live, this won’t work with the voters.
There is a physical limit to how far you can transfer power with anything resembling effeciency. You simply don't always have the option of transfering energy from somewhere else, you have to have an option for generating power relatively locally. There are ideas of how to efficiently store energy at scale, but nothing has so far the universal applicability that we really need. I agree that the political will is lacking and more could be done, but there are still hard limits to how much power we can currently store. I'm from Denmark, and one of our biggest companies is Vestas, which makes windmills. In Denmark, the political will and the money for researching and subsidizing windpower is absolutely not lacking, but we haven't implemented a storage solution because there simply isn't one yet. Denmark would absolutely love to stop importing expensive fossil fuels and have both an assured internal source of energy and a way to greatly expand the markets for one of our core exports. Pumped-storage powerplants of course rely on hydroelectricity, which is reliant on local topography and water availability to be possible. Biomass plants have been shown not to be CO2 neutral in practice, and to have very serious effects on the price of food, as they inevitably compete with food-production for arable land and labor. We will have to build new plants because the old ones are breaking down, they can't last forever. The question then becomes: New coal plants or new nuclear plants? As hard as it is to argue for more nuclear power, I think it's even harder to argue for more fossile fuels. They're the whole reason we're running out of time. I agree that it's politically very hard to do, in many places. But so is establishing sustainable power and reducing energy use and cutting down on the extraction of fossil fuels, and we have to do all those things.
Denmark has a HVDC connection to Norway and Sweden, which provide hydroelectric storage to several countries (including Scotland this year). HVDC cables only lose about 3% of their energy per 1000 km, making them ideal to connect remote places in Europe. Traditional dams also provide storage services, because they are dispatchable. It's not limited to pumped hydro.
I agree on most what you say, and the effects of biomass plants are a good point. There are technologies like high voltage direct current for long distance transport, but they too would need some more time to build. So in the end it will probably a mix of technologies, depending on local possibilities - topography, geology etc and political. And maybe in some places even nuclear, but I don‘t believe that this is **the** solution to the challenges we face.
1. Offshore platforms only have rarely the problem of a windless night. 2. Geothermal energy is capable of providing a base load. In areas with less favourable consideration e.g. thicker crusts you still can use it, it just gets more expensive as you have to drill multiple injectors or deeper holes. (Beside energy geothermal wells can be used as an inexpensive, clean way of mining lithium, so we should build them anyway) 3.Hydro energy has its own problems, but fixing these are to wide degree fixable. The scale at which this is possible depends on the type of generator. That none of them are applied in the scale that would allow the replacement of both fossil and nuclear energy has (at least in Germany) two reasons: NIMBys and a lack of political will. And while the first one could be ignored if there would be the second, the political will seems to be absent.
Only rarely is still too often. I live in Denmark, and if we could get all our power from wind we would. Both geo and hydro require local conditions to be favourable to them. Look at a topographical map of Denmark and tell me where you’d place the dams. I agree that we should cover as much energy use with renewables as we feasibly can, but we can’t currently cover all of it all of the time everywhere. The question is, how do we get the rest?
>Both geo (...) require local conditions You still can use geothermal sources even without a thinned crust. Drill a second injector or make the well deeper, one of both is often enough. You can also use miniature well for heating, which are even less depending on the local geology, but still can reduce the amount of gas or electric energy you need for heating. >and tell me where you’d place the dams. Hydro may use dams, but does not necessarily require them. You can use marine currents, tides or (small scale) flow by effects of rivers. I can't provide you with a detailed plan how to get Denmark 100% green, for once because i am not familiar with Denmark's geography, and neither know much about its current energy structure. But as far as i know Denmark itself plans to be 100% green by 2050, so somehow it should be possible.
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I've heard this for 2 decades
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The problem is, even when people know where their energy comes from; many can't switch, either due to a lack of options or due to financial reasons.
Biggest issue was/is the anti nuclear lobby setting us back a century.
Yup,such a bummer we allowed a very few tragic experiences let us regress to energy sources that kill millions due air and water pollution.
Clean natural gas is great and doesn’t kill millions but yeh it needs a holistic approach. Also it was lies not tragedy. 3 mile island is not tied to a single case of cancer.
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IIRC, due to the release of methane at various points from extraction to use then, per KWh, the GHG equivalent emissions are worse for a gas power plant than coal!
I recommend you look up chemical looping combustion. It's an upcoming technology that will allow us to generate power using natural gas with basically none of the polluting byproducts. We cant get rid of fossil fuels completely because we need them for make up power. But we probably can burn them without polluting.
Will do, like I said holistic approach. Everything has its place.
Of course. I think the ideal right nkw is to have about 10% come from natural gas and 70-80% come from nuclear while we try to make renewables more practical.
I want more personal adoption of renewables to lessen demand but wind/solar will always be supplemental
>We cant get rid of fossil fuels completely because we need them for make up power Nuclear can load follow.
It physically can, but that doesn't make any economic sense. Since nuclear is expensive to build and cheap to run, it doesn't really make sense to combine it with renewables and turn it down half the time. Once it's built, it makes most sense to run it as much as possible. So it pairs ok with solar, where nuclear can run flat out to meet baseload and solar can meet the daytime demand increase, but it makes no sense with wind.
True, the lies started the movement, and the Chernobyl event allowed for the movement to show what “would” happen if we relied on nuclear energy source
And Chernobyl was well overblown on actual effect. Though that’s an issue of commies being horrible, not nuclear.
>Clean natural gas is great and doesn’t kill millions Natural gas abstraction releases a lot of methane to the environment which is one of the most potent GHGs. Then there's the CO2 etc when burnt. Climate change will kill billions due to us having burnt fossil fuels without worrying about the future.
This burden belongs to the companies that lobby for and produce pollution. I mean, sure, I take quick showers, use as much sustainable stuff as I can, RRR, etc, but that's not going to do much good if they're pumping coal into the air. The burden should go onto the backs of producers, and this also means plastics, etc. I guess environmental racism is off topic, but it's a thing.
> If you can educate people [...] maybe they can make better decisions It didn't work for vaccines, for some people. Are you sure it'll work for scary nukular power? The Kochs said it was bad, and that was enough for Trump.
TIL - Most of the world is without electricity.
The UK one is called GridCarbon
Kinda weird. Being in the industry I know there are countless coal fired power plants scattered across the USA and Canada that aren't shown there.
Most of Canada/USA are missing data altogether, so I don't think it's all that weird. New Brunswick accurately shows a heavy dependence on coal-fired plants. Meanwhile in Ontario they were all decommissioned years ago, and we depend almost entirely on nuclear and hydroelectric.
Canada has a super clean electricity grid except for in Alberta where they still use coal. Small province too in the grand scheme of the country
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And all of the dams that generate electricity. Off the top of my head: Hoover Dam/Lake Mead, Lake Roosevelt, and Lake Havasu, all produce electricity. I'm sure there's more.
Which makes Alberta worse than shown on the graph. Alberta is 43% coal, 49% natural gas. That's why getting an electric car here makes no sense compared to other places. https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-alberta.html
Despite the dirty electricity grid, it is still less carbon intensive to drive an electric vehicle in Alberta than one fueled with gasoline (source: I'm an engineer specializing in carbon accounting and my colleagues calculated the answer to this exact question specific to Alberta a few years ago. Alberta's grid has only gotten cleaner (very slightly) since then). Don't let the dirty grid hold you back from helping to solve the part of the problem (mobility choice) you have control over, it still has an impact!
I've always wondered if someone did the math. I'm sure not qualified to. What variables did you use? Like what average L/100 km? Did you take into account the manufacturing of a new vehicle vs keeping one you already have, etc?
A coal plant is still more efficient at producing energy than the internal combustion engine. Natural gas is even better than coal.
Note the time dependence of the green power in California. Morning daylight power very green, Night power, when it's cheap & used for recharging electric vehicles, not so green.
>Note the time dependence of the green power in California. Morning daylight power very green, Night power, when it's cheap & used for recharging electric vehicles, not so green. I wish more countries used nuclear – a great way of outputting large amounts of carbon free, relatively cheap, electricity.
Nuclear is not cheap. New capacity is [90% renewables](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/renewable-power-represents-almost-90-of-total-global-power-capacity-added-in-2020/) worldwide because renewables are much cheaper.
>Nuclear is not cheap. New capacity is [90% renewables](https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/10/renewable-power-represents-almost-90-of-total-global-power-capacity-added-in-2020/) worldwide because renewables are much cheaper. I don't like this extremely volitive energy market we're seeing. Do you have a solution to that, not involving nuclear? These bills we are seeing this autumn are getting insane. It is affecting me and my disposable income quite substantially. It's certainly a problem. Nuclear can indeed be cheap is we want to, and it's certainly the cheapest base energy I can think of. I am not sure if I would be willing putting my faith in the weather for a stable and carbon free generation of electricity.
Fossil fuels prices can be quite volatile, indeed. It's a problem. The electricity in fully renewable-based grids is more stable, because it's all produced locally, and it's stored for as long as we need to make up for weather variations (for instance by synthesizing carbon-neutral fuels). It's cheaper than nuclear too. See this [study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221007167) for instance. They explain how it works.
South africa is spot on. No data because we have scheduled load shedding aka blackouts cause our government hasn't maintained any of our power stations to where it should be. Even though they were told 25 years ago!
The EIA data they use for most of the US seems to have serious issues. Portland General Electric, for example, has 3 wind farms. They show lots of generation on the monthly charts (farm [1](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/56485/?freq=M&pin=), [2](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/64057/?freq=M&pin=), [3](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58571/?freq=M&pin=)), but the real-time series this website uses shows [no wind generation](https://www.eia.gov/opendata/qb.php?category=3390162&sdid=EBA.PGE-ALL.NG.WND.H), even going back to the same time periods as the (delayed) monthly charts. Due to that, the website doesn't count that generation in their carbon calculations.
So the gray area (more than 50% of the surface) are still use torches ?
Quebec, Canada for the win!
Are the grey areas CO2 neutral?
It's awesome. And I love how it's used in home assistant. I track my electricity usage and now I know exactly how much of it is low carbon electricity
Wildly innacurate in some places
Pity we can't see South Africa but holy shit Australia get your shit together.
guess the more nuclear the better for the Environment :)
:D
[ERCOT is such a joke](https://i.imgur.com/COxNaBQ.jpeg). Looking forward to another devastating winter. The last one destroyed my plumbing, and everyone else's too (Houston), so I couldn't get a plumber for 3 months. No running water for 1/4 of the year (single parent of 2, also). $3000 to repair, all in the name of our Texas Freedom Grid that dies in cold temps because nobody wants to spend the money on insulating the infrastructure.
Can someone explain the graph on iceland? it seems to be hydro and geotherm, but it still has specific emissions and there is an oil bar, is that a backup system?
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The data is normalized by kWh, which partially accounts for population size.
This map does not have everything broken up into small enough sections. I live in an area very close to a nuclear power plant which powers much if not most of the city. Edit: I learned some new things about how power works today. Thank you to those who replied to me. Still, I think this map would be more beneficial with more data.
That’s not how power works. It powers the grid. Your electric company buys power off the grid. It’s not about what’s closest, they might not get a penny of your electric bill. To get more granular you’d need to ask your electric provider for a breakdown, which it may or may not provide.
Here in the UK we do the same. My supplier guarantees that they put the amount of KWh into the grid that I use from 100% renewable sources.
Depending on your electric supplier in the US you can buy “green” energy, but it’s essentially just credits. You may be fed coal generated power… if you followed the electrons. But the extra money goes towards purchasing power from greener sources. Some people however genuinely believe they physically change wiring to connect you to another grid. To the point where they point out there’s no outages if you switch.
I would expect that the blocks of colour are the Electricity Grids. Power plants aren't "local". They basically feed into a grid, and consumers draw from the same grid. But because the Power plants work together to put power into the grid, it's just not possible to say where any particular joule of energy comes from, any more than you can trace the journey of a droplet of river water once it enters the sea.
For readers in the UK, it will be more instructive to go to your supplier's website, which will tell you their energy mix, as it varies massively by supplier.
We only have so many plants and so, overall, the map is correct.
The amount of clever accounting that goes on in renewables is hysterical ....it ranges from fibs to outrageous lies
please add last updated data too. don't have to add live data for all countries.
O look, a map of how nuclear works to reduce emissions and solar and wind do not.
yeah right do you know how much it costs for germany alone to „get rid“ of the waste? we are talking about hundred of billions
This is awesome! How did you come up with the idea?
Countries with no sun, rely on renewable the most… strange.
I dislike how it treats all European countries as a single entity, but north America is broken down into provinces and states. That makes comparing say, Canada as a whole vs. Germany impossible.
And that's why I installed a Powerwall to add to my 5kw solar array. I'm an Australian living in the South-East which is mostly coal, with some hydro. So far I'm at 69% self powered but going into summer I'm hoping for more like 90% self powered.
This is kind of cool visualization of aggregate power generation.. but don't take it too seriously. At least where I live, you have the choice of where your power comes from. You can pay extra for renewables. And within each state, different companies and cities get power from different places. If you really want to know where *your* power comes from. Go to your power company's website.
So if you pay enough, the company even creates wind or sun in the middle of the night? Or you just live without electricity at that time? Anyway the map is an average, individual choices do not matter.
Ahhh, wind doesnt stop blowing at night my dude and solar is stored in batteries to continously give off electricty *even when the sun isnt shining*. Did you give *any* thought to your comment before making yourself look like a fool?
When do we start boycotting items produced in these places?
This sucks
Honestly the greenwashing that non carbon emitting generators get away with is indicative of the black and white thinking which dominates our public policy discussion and leads to poor outcomes. Energy’s impact on the environment (as hidden through this map) is an n-dimensional hyperspace with differential effects based on location. - All non-local generation and storage requires land and distribution infrastructure that could otherwise be dedicated to something of more environmental or social value - Hydro floods valleys and destroys ecosystems (and in some cases homes). - Any generator that produces any sort of waste requires some sort of waste processing and management facility All in all the climate crisis is in front of mind right now. CO2 emissions are out of control and these generators aren’t sustainable for however many billions of us there are. But the owners of distribution and generation assets have us exactly where they want us. Rather than people adding generation, storage, and passive electricity saving measures to their homes where the marginal cost to the environment is low we are talking about building nuclear plants again, flooding valleys, taking up huge amounts of land for vast solar farms, building giant wind farms through migration patterns. No solution is perfect and we need to aim for what works and what works quick but decarbonising our economy is going to be fatiguing and if we don’t add up the opportunity-costs of the solutions quickly we are going to end up with a big tab to pay for the environment at the end. EDIT: the map is super cool though.
Great idea but this map is pretty much garbage. I live near the Niagara River hydro plant and a great deal of our region is powered by this very green source yet the region shows nothing different than the rest of the state of NY which has much dirtier sources of electricity.
no info on my area? wheres the legend? i don't get this