mirshafie

Germany could have closed their coal plants decades ago and decided not to. Now it has decided to be a leech on France's and Sweden's nuclear. Yes nuclear is expensive, so I hope you won't be surprised when France and Sweden finally put their foot down and let Germany try to run their grid on wind, or pay a premium on baseload.

And yes it sucks that the USA stirred up shit in Ukraine, throwing Europe and especially Germany under the bus. Luckily Iran is taking care of that.

Wait, is your claim still that EVs will form a significant portion of the grid? I thought that trope died sometime around 2020 when it was obvious that Elon is a megalomaniac.

Industries need massive amounts of energy, and reducing emissions necessitates a significant increase in electricity use (e.g. hydrogen synthesis which is required for many processes to go green is very energy intensive). EVs just aren't going to feed that. Lithium batteries won't feed that.

If we figure this out with batteries, it's likely going to be sodium or some other storage method. So far large-scale storage methods have been utterly underwhelming and it often borders on sci fi.

Here's the thing. I want to reduce carbon emissions now, not in 30 years. That means fusion is not under consideration, and it means that we need way more electricity. Solar and wind are, as you pointed out, cheap ways to add electricity to the grid, but there's a reason why no grid runs solely on solar and wind for any meaningful amount of time, and that's because it's not physically possible. There's not enough lithium on this planet to realize that fantasy. Sodium, yes.

So until we actually have an example of energy storage that can deliver to keep steel works and factories going, and that can scale, I'm gonna call bullshit.

Ok man good luck with that. Since the economy is so overwhelmingly in your favor, we should see battery capacity outpace energy need growth any time now.

Exactly this. And remember, Finland has some of the best water resources on the planet (highest concentration of lakes anywhere in the world). So most countries couldn't do what Finland is doing even if they wanted to, and Finland is still building new nuclear.

That's actually so fucked up. How can you encourage or even allow children to join activities that you know is going to injure them permanently?

German car manufacturing is doing badly partly because they suppressed electrical or even hybrid tech, but also because of high energy prices.

High energy prices are partly caused by an irresponsible energy policy. The war in Ukraine is the other part.

High energy prices also affect Germany's two other staples, mechanical engineering and chemical engineering. The chemistry sector is flatlining.

For context, chemical separation methods alone account for roughly 20% of industrial energy consumption worldwide, and Germany is a major player in this field. So high energy prices have a very real impact which can not be offset onto the buyers forever - the factories will just relocate and once they're gone, they won't easily come back.

True, and if we can make cheap batteries (e.g. sodium based) at scale then it absolutely could become a thing over the next decades. I just don't want energy transition to hinge on unproven tech. We can't play around with this, climate change is way too serious.

For even more context, the annual growth in electricity output is about 5x the addition of battery capacity.

For context, global energy output is 30k TWh/year. That's T for tera.