this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check (www.theregister.com)
submitted 6 months ago by kalkulat to c/[email protected]
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With a few SMR projects built and operational at this point, and more plants under development, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes in a report that SMRs are "still too expensive, too slow to build, and too risky to play a significant role in transitioning away from fossil fuels."

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago (1 children)

When you look at a large grid such as the EUs, you will find that wind + solar has no days without any electricity production and that worse case is at more then half of average electricity production of these sources.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&interval=day&legendItems=jw3w1&year=2023

As soon as you go weekly it becomes even more stable:

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=EU&interval=week&legendItems=jw3w1&year=2023&week=-1

We also already have a lot of hydro storage in form of reservoirs. Those are built already and can vary their output. It is more of a matter of changing how we use those.

[–] Womble 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Are we looking at the same graphs? Even going by the weekly one you are vairing by 2x between weeks, that is not stable generation by any serious measure. The grid needs have supply following demand with a tolerance of a percent or two not 50% difference, half a week of EU total energy demand is an insane amount of storage needed that would cost trillions of euros.

E: and if you look at 2022 its worse with a two week period in nov/dec getting down to just over 1/3rd of peak, you would need to have enough storage to cover this eventuality.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

That is why you overbuilt solar and wind and also add storage. Wind and solar can easily be shut down, so that is an option or the electiricty can be used for making heat and storing that, charge up EVs or something similar. So doubling the average needed solar + wind and having enough storage to balance out a day is enough. Also things like biomass and even more importantly conventional hydro storage are good options. Norway for example has 86TWh of hydro storage alone today.