Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes @jwildeboer at some point in time we had a "base load" in germany too [that light green coloured line at the bottom] https://mstdn.io/@march/110203828227475945
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes I tend to think that the so-called base load is a stochastic phenomenon.
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This means that the concept of "base load" is not really relevant, because there is no consistent base. And when the residual load goes negative, the wholesale price of electricity goes negative as well.
Last year the Netherlands had negative wholesale electricity prices for about 7% of the year, and that amount is only going to grow.
You can't afford to run a nuclear reactor when electricity prices are negative, but you also can't shut it down every day either.
@notjustbikes sadly bs. like #MeritOrder and extensive #Lobbyism by #Corporations prevent that these prices reach consumers, espechally in #Germany!
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@notjustbikes
The "base load" argument is a classic, and I have been hearing it for >20 years. There is some validity to it, but a lot can be mitigated by battery storage and grids.Nuclear power has the same supply chain risks as oil: do you want to buy from Russia, Kazakhstan or Niger, which is also Russia controlled.
@residuum I agree with your first bit, but I don't really agree about nuclear having a supply-chain risk.
The physical amount of Uranium that is used in nuclear reactors is quite small, and it doesn't need to be delivered constantly like oil or gas.
Plus there's lots in Canada and Australia.
There are other reasons why nuclear doesn't make as much sense as it did in the 90s.
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This was always my understanding of how renewables make the concept of "base load" irrelevant, again, as a person with a literal degree in Electrical Engineering.
But I was gaslit by so many people that I felt the need to research the current situation again today.
This could just be people using out of date information, but I suspect this is anti-renewables propaganda. Otherwise I don't know why so many people would even know what a "base load" is.
@notjustbikes I'd always understood generator base load to be something like having to keep all your lights in the house on at a low setting, just glowing, so then when you needed proper light, they'd be no delay in coming up to full brightness.
Or is that an incorrect analogy? -
This was always my understanding of how renewables make the concept of "base load" irrelevant, again, as a person with a literal degree in Electrical Engineering.
But I was gaslit by so many people that I felt the need to research the current situation again today.
This could just be people using out of date information, but I suspect this is anti-renewables propaganda. Otherwise I don't know why so many people would even know what a "base load" is.
When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
NP is BS for a number of reasons, but particularly in the current situation, both from a geopolitical and climate perspective.
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@notjustbikes sadly bs. like #MeritOrder and extensive #Lobbyism by #Corporations prevent that these prices reach consumers, espechally in #Germany!
@kkarhan @notjustbikes sadly also bs:
firstly, the merit order is slowly dying out because it makes no economic sense.
secondly, even given government subsidies and other special treatment, energy providers don't want to build nuclear plants anymore because it, again, makes no financial sense. corporations and their lobbyists aren't inherently evil. they just want to make as much money as possible and being evil is often a side-effect of that.
(i used to study sustainable economics) -
@kkarhan @notjustbikes sadly also bs:
firstly, the merit order is slowly dying out because it makes no economic sense.
secondly, even given government subsidies and other special treatment, energy providers don't want to build nuclear plants anymore because it, again, makes no financial sense. corporations and their lobbyists aren't inherently evil. they just want to make as much money as possible and being evil is often a side-effect of that.
(i used to study sustainable economics)Yeah, nuclear reactors are crazy expensive, so much so that it's hard to get a loan to construct one. Which means most financing needs to come from the government.
This may change as small modular reactors (SMRs) become more common, but even then, I think these make more sense for industrial uses, such as powering a datacentre, rather than being connected to the grid.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes the only honest reason for using nuclear power is the desire to have nuclear weapons.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes oh hey, that was actually my missing link as to why fossil fuel companies promote nuclear!
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes Quite likely it's some kind of astroturf propaganda... and weirdly tailored for nuclear given the more reasonable argument would be for peaker plants, not base load.
Coincidentally this post was very close to yours in my feed: https://mastodon.green/@solar_chase/116402052661720866The author is great for no-bullshit data based discussions on renewables and especially solar.
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Since releasing my oil video I've had so many people claiming that renewables will never work and we need nuclear power instead.
What's odd is that almost all of the messages mention that nuclear power is the only solution for the "base load".
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
@notjustbikes on the topic of what if takes to switch away from fossil fuels, someone found this super interesting video/conference presentation with lots of hard numbers that I want to re-share with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc
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This means that the concept of "base load" is not really relevant, because there is no consistent base. And when the residual load goes negative, the wholesale price of electricity goes negative as well.
Last year the Netherlands had negative wholesale electricity prices for about 7% of the year, and that amount is only going to grow.
You can't afford to run a nuclear reactor when electricity prices are negative, but you also can't shut it down every day either.
You can't shut it down at all, unless you shut it down for several days.
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Energy consumption goes up and down throughout the day, but the "base load" is the minimum amount, even at the lowest point in the day. So nuclear power is good for providing this "base" because it's consistent and always running.
The issue is that renewables sometimes output so much electricity that, especially when it's sunny, the grid makes *way* too much electricity. The electricity consumption of the grid minus renewables is called the "residual load", and it very very often goes NEGATIVE.
@notjustbikes so here's a data point: National Grid is the entity that runs the UK grid. The CEO of National Grid called "baseload" an outdated concept 11 years ago:
https://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/14/national-grid-ceo-large-power-stations-for-baseload-power-is-outdated/ -
You can't shut it down at all, unless you shut it down for several days.
@Drahreg01 Yes. I know. As I said, I literally studied this stuff in University.
Canada was a leader in nuclear energy when I studied there and I learned WAY too much about how CANDU reactors work. They're amazing. But they're not also not the right solution for the 21st century.
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This means that the concept of "base load" is not really relevant, because there is no consistent base. And when the residual load goes negative, the wholesale price of electricity goes negative as well.
Last year the Netherlands had negative wholesale electricity prices for about 7% of the year, and that amount is only going to grow.
You can't afford to run a nuclear reactor when electricity prices are negative, but you also can't shut it down every day either.
@notjustbikes this is also my understanding and with the proliferation of affordable large-scale batteries it feels that nuclear is basically obsolete and too costly
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because ...
They also abhor the idea of a decentralized grid, with local production, maybe even in the hands of the people who consume the power, because it threatens the structure of the current grid, with few well known producers and a lot of distributed consumers.
There is a tiny piece of truth in this, as a grid that also accommodates a lot of distributed producers requires a lot more digital control and modernization, and it also requires a somewhat different structure in cabling and power distribution, but on the other hand such a structure will be a lot more flexible and resilient, too.
Financially, some large scale fossil power producers (RWE in Germany, for example) are partially state owned and profits from them are being used to pay for state pensions or finance other parts of repeating state payments. These parts of the state resist ANY kind of change with an almost unsurmountable stubbornness, and these kinds of dependencies are also badly documented.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes Yea, the liberals were trying to push for nuclear SMRs last election, but they lost **hard**, but there was such a massive misinformation push, it just failed because... the liberals are such a mess I suppose.
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When I did some reading on the current situation, I found a lot of sites out of Australia that were repeating this "base load" idea, in the context of nuclear power.
I suspect that this is fossil-fuel propaganda.
Fossil fuel companies love promoting nuclear power because they know it takes decades to get a reactor built (if it gets built at all), and in the meantime, everyone keeps using fossil fuels.
It's the perfect way to cripple renewables without being obvious about it.
@notjustbikes This worked flawlessly in the last election in Sweden 4 years ago. The winning coalition bet EVERYTHING on this narrative and it did seem to be part of them winning the election. 4 years later the main outcome of this is almost all renewable projects have been cancelled due to the market uncertainty that was created.
Election coming up in September and they seem to bring back the favorite from last time, let’s see if it works twice. Polls indicate no.
