I call greenwashing on those “statistics”. According to IRENA, Sweden had around a quarter of their electricity from fossil fuels. The document is from 2020, but I don’t think it changed this much in three years. A very good step in the right direction, but we have to keep it real. Creating 100% renewable energy is awesome, but having to import a lot of dirty energy from abroad isn’t really helping much on the global scale.
I’d be glad, if any Swede could debunk me, if I interpreted this document falsely. The document on my home country Switzerland was pretty spot on, so I assume it is correct for other nations as well.
Creating 100% renewable energy is awesome, but having to import a lot of dirty energy from abroad isn’t really helping much on the global scale.
If the power networks are connected, you sometimes have surprisingly little control over it, tbh.
Plus “We need to be self-sustaining in our power production” is a very different thing than getting all the energy you produce to be green. It’s not as simple as “Well just build more wind/solar/tide generators!”, it requires a complete rethinking of how you route and balance your network as even the most energy-producing countries regularly import power depending on current load and network state.
That is to say, don’t belittle an achievement of producing 100% green energy. The other part, no longer consuming any non-green imported energy, is a nearly unrelated problem.
If the power networks are connected, you sometimes have surprisingly little control over it, tbh.
That’s true. I wonder how those statistics are made, where they say how many % of imports are from what resource, that I have seen floating around. Could be estimates, I guess?
There are hurdles with going 100% green, no doubt about that. Like you said, the infrastructure has to accommodate for changing output and all that. Sweden does it right and the Swedes can be proud of themselves.
Other nations still have to follow Swedens lead. Quite a few countries just took down their nuclear reactors without having a plan how to compensate the lost energy. Switzerland itself could claim a respectable renewable electricity mix with all our water pumping plants. But we still import like 70% from abroad, a lot from France and Germany. The latter beeing quite the “smoker”.
I hope you see my point a bit. I’ m just fed up with that “Look, we are so green!” narrative, because they only show the statistics in their national borders. Sweden was just a poorly chosen example on my part.
That’s true. I wonder how those statistics are made, where they say how many % of imports are from what resource, that I have seen floating around. Could be estimates, I guess?
Yeah I guess based on the power production percentages of the countries and companies they paid for imported power.
Sweden does it right and the Swedes can be proud of themselves.
Reading this as a Swede is kind of funny because we have a lot of criticism internally in this subject. Our electric prices have been wild these past few years, like, bankrupting businesses and people wild.
I remember reading an article about a bakery shutting down because they got an electric bill on like 70k, in addition to all the other operating costs.
One thing that has changed since 2020 is that Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has placed an emphasis on stopping dependence on Russia, which has also put a focus on renewables.
I interpreted “right now” in the message as “today”, or “when the post was made.”
Some days are purely renewable. Others aren’t. In the winter when electricity usage goes up it’s not uncommon for us to import fossil fuel electricity from other countries. The green party also suggested powering up natural gas plants as we were shutting down nuclear. Ngas obviously isn’t renewable.
Svenska Kraftnät has a “control room” with graphs and timelines on exports/imports and energy sources.
“Värmekraft” is power produced by burning things, it can be coal, oil, wood fuels, garbage, etc.
“Ospecifierat” (unspecified) includes power produced in facilities with more than one type of source, where you cannot separate what produces what.
Now imagine if we’d nationalize stuff like internet like we did with Hydro-Quebec (Electricity). Maybe then we’d stop paying ludicrous prices for the bare minimum.
It’s not always this extreme, but there’s usually a few hours every week where the price is negative. I’ve heard that the reason is that the Dutch wind turbines keep running when it’s not profitable, so they crash the prices for everyone. Anyway, timing the car charger makes a lot of sense. I haven’t paid for driving in several months.
That’s because nuclear energy is green. It doesn’t produce any greenhouse gas emissions. You having bought into the fearmongering about nuclear doesn’t change reality.
Given that my inextant basement wouldn’t be a facility equipped to store or process nuclear waste had it existed, I’d obviously have some reservations. Having lived near such a facility however, and having been involved politically with it, I have no big qualms about it no. Why do you?
Nuclear power is often assumed to be greenhouse gas neutral because it is indeed nearly neutral if it comes to the process of generating energy. But resources like uranium has to be gathered, plants has to be built, and it needs a solution for the final disposal.
While I don’t think we should close existing power plants, but there are much better solutions. Better in terms of economy and pollution.
There are also numerous studies about the costs of a nuclear power plant…
Me saying that you’re right doesn’t make sense? A house built using cement isn’t CO2 neutral. A house built using wood uses less CO2, but it isn’t neutral either. A nuclear reactor won’t be CO2 neutral, even if the fission process or the turbines don’t generate any CO2. A wind turbine by comparison, while it won’t have the same output capacity as a nuclear reactor, would use a lot less CO2 to manufacture and assemble.
Nuclear power is extremely green when compared to fossil fuel and can act as an excellent stopgap while ramping up renewable energy sources. You’re right that it isn’t a long term solution, but even replacing a few coal fired plants with nuclear ones for the next 30 years would be better than running the coal plants for 20 years until you can displace them with renewables.
That’s a lie. The statistic you’re skewing is about radiation near nuclear power plants under normal operation. It’s not about the radiation nuclear waste for many thousands of years. Exhaust gases from coal plants are very slightly more radiating than natural background radiation but the amount is so tiny, it doesn’t matter. (The CO2 is bad, though.)
And it’s much more green than solar if you consider only greenhouse gas emission over the whole lifetime, including construction. But there are other problems for sure.
Wrong, I wish the Reddit Nuclear circlejerk won’t come to Lemmy. Over multiple studies the mean value is more like 66g of CO2 but it still produces more emissions than solar per kwh. source
Ok I knew my data were old but I wasn’t expecting such a change. I based my answer on the latest “complete” report I knew and it was from 2011. I was expecting the solar to reduce emission as the technology improved obviously, but I found it very strange that the nuclear emission was higher in your source than in the one from 2011. After reading carefully it turns out that the change in safety and regulations for building new nuclear powerplants changed and lead to a big increase of the co2 emission during building. I thought that most of the co2 emission from nuclear was from uranium/plutonium extraction and enrichment but apparently the building itself is a major part of it.
Does it still produce more emissions than solar when your have spin up the natural gas plant every winter because people need heat and the sun isn't out?
Does it still produce more emissions than solar when your have spin up the natural gas plant every winter because people need heat and the sun isn’t out?
Wind blows regardless of season. Geothermal is active around the clock. Hydropower works best in rainy seasons.
Wind is just as unreliable as support and hydro/geothermal are very niche forms of power that don't really work at the scales needed to run large scale civilization.
All green energy is intermittent. We need storage and/or we need nuclear. Storage isn't technologically feasible yet. Nuclear is. We need to reduce emotions soon. Build nuclear plants. Keep trying to figure out storage so we can decommission them later
Wind is just as unreliable as support and hydro/geothermal are very niche forms of power that don’t really work at the scales needed to run large scale civilization.
Geothermal literally works everywhere where you can dig a deep hole and claiming that hydropower is niche is just an insane lie.
All green energy is intermittent.
I thought nuclear is green? Now you’re just saying the opposite of what you said before just to fit your agenda.
How come of all the countries mentioned in the Tweet screenshot all except France manage just fine with renewable energies? Funny…
You will need a lot of really deep holes to make significant power in most places. Of course you can get to the mantle from anywhere on earth. That doesn't make it practical.
Now you’re just saying the opposite of what you said before just to fit your agenda.
Don't be a pedantic shit.
pumped storage
Works when you have a lake on a mountain and a lake below the mountain. 90 percent of places? No such luck.
After all those decades of trying to figuring out where to store the highly toxic waste and so far nobody figured it out.
Literally just in a mountain or deep underground. It's been figured out
You will need a lot of really deep holes to make significant power in most places. Of course you can get to the mantle from anywhere on earth. That doesn’t make it practical.
Each hole needs to be only dug once and then generates heat for easily a billion of years.
Don’t be a pedantic shit.
How uplifting of a statement you made there. I guess I hit a nerve there.
Works when you have a lake on a mountain and a lake below the mountain. 90 percent of places? No such luck.
“The lake on the mountain is built upon a flat surface, requiring a dam around the entire perimeter.”
Building a roughly circular dam sounds not so hard.
Literally just in a mountain or deep underground. It’s been figured out
Funny how nobody does this then. The concerns by scientists about potentially contaminating ground water is just fearmongering then…
Really I think your entire attitude here stems from a really big underestimation of how difficult large scale projects line geothermal boreholes and dams are, and how large these projects would have to actually be.
Really I think your entire attitude here stems from a really big underestimation of how difficult large scale projects line geothermal boreholes and dams are, and how large these projects would have to actually be.
OTOH building nuclear reactors, keeping them safe enough not to blow up, and then handling nuclear waste: Piece of (yellow) cake! Digging a hole to pump some water in: So difficult. Digging a hole to definitively totally safely store nuclear waste: Sooo easy.
Yeah, you’re just hilariously out of touch with the scale of these projects.
Absolutely. I obviously vastly overestimate what’s involved with nuclear power: building a nuclear power plant, maintaining that plant, mining uranium, shipping it, processing nuclear waste, storing nuclear waste, etc. when in reality all one needs to do is to dig a shallow hole in the ground, dump the fuel rods there and it’s all done. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Yep, this usually eshews the nuclear parts of building construction and fuel transports. That being said, older solar panels and wind farms are a problem as far as I remember from local news, as they’re tricky~impossible to recycle and die pretty quickly. Newer generations replacing them of course no longer have that problem, but if anything that shows that the comparison is a bit senseless in the first place.
If nuclear waste is so harmless, how come since decades nobody on the planet has ever figured out how to get rid of the waste? Or are you the fist one, offering your basement for that harmless stuff?
Im case someone asks: Increasing nuclear power generation in Germany means buying fuel rods from Putin, who invests the money in war not that far away from Germany…
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