Germany spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment each year. Households have highest prices in EU per Eurostat despite EEG subsidies. Even if everything goes well gas expansion is still required to firm renewables. All this while it still burns coal and gas.
Going nuclear was sane in the past and sane now. If Germany wants to prove expanding nuclear is dumb it should try first to have lower annual emissions, while spending less than double the cost of entire french fleet.
France is the biggest winner in EU- it'll build both nuclear and renewables achieving deep decarbonization
EEG Subsidies no longer exist. Germany's high electricity price is due to the weird af Laws on Renewables, terrible planning, and well Gas Power, which is just expensive as shit.
eeg still exists. It just moved to state expenditure when before it was paid directly. "weird af Laws on Renewables" - which laws?
Gas firming was planned long time ago and mentioned even by fraunhofer
Specifically alot of the laws on Windpower. Where it has to be amount x away from any populated place. Meaning there is only something like 0.1% of the area of Germany where you would be allowed to built Windparks.
My bad on the EEG i thought that stopped since I do not pay it anymore directly.
I doubt wind laws expansion makes it that expensive. Laws were recently liberalized anyway.
But there are many more cost factors. With co2 tax, gas and coal firming are getting very expensive. Add to that massive transmission and distribution expansion/upgrades costs for distributed grid, add massive curtailment costs and you get what you get
No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish.
Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts
And during that time France was net exporting 14GW to neighbors at dirt cheap prices. There's no reason to fix this. It's a nothing burger pushed by 'concerned' people
All thermal plants have this same issue, not just nuclear. And if you lose the natural gas peakers (which are also thermal and thus has this issue), you lose your baseload renewables too. Not that it matters, renewables used for baseload make more CO2 than just using FFs. Variability is a terrible quality in an energy source.
No, natural gas _peakers_ don't need water for cooling, since they don't have steam turbines like combined cycle gas plants. Cooling is only necessary in thermal plants to condense the steam on the low-pressure side of the steam turbine.
And excessive stability is also a terrible quality in an energy source. The only reason we used to put up with base-load power plants was because they were cheap; if they weren't we might as well have used peaker plants all the time.
Right, so rather than "We should have more thermal plants" what you want is a non-thermal electrical generator, and what do you know all the major renewable sources qualify, whether that's a wind turbine, hydro-electric or PV.
Do you know what else you'd get a lot of if it's so hot in the summer that you can't use lake and river water for cooling? Sunlight to run your PV. Because that's exactly why the water was heating up.
you can in fact use water for cooling. It's that sometimes you may be concerned about fish and not hurt it, esp with passthrough systems. But there are even more adv solutions (wastewater, dry cooling combo)
Problem isn't nuclear cooling per se. It's the designs of these nuclear reactors which expected to work with mild European weather. India and China have nuclear reactors working in desert without any cooling issues. Of course, as most of EU and west atrophied in building nuclear reactors in general, building new reactors or modifications won't be economical.
it's not economical because in the same period summer prices are dirt cheap. EDF is already maxing export in that period, where do you want to squeeze some extra GW? why would you?
That said, cooling does have an effect on ecosystems. Not the worst energy plant impact on that regard, but still not like it's all environmental friendly.
And of course, there is the what to do with the waste dilemma. And at least with current French park, there is a dependence on the rarer kind of uranium.
Waste dilemma? You either bury it (Onkalo, Cigeo, Fosmark, etc...) like any other waste that must be isolated forever (herfa neurode) or you do some recycling one way or another, or both.
Impact on environment from nuclear is minimal per UNECE. And cooling impact is minimal too, esp with towers. Uranium can be sourced from a variety of countries and enriched locally. Nuclear in general needs least amount of mining and materials per kwh
The advantage of swiss system is fast transfers. Hsr would likely break this system (no point in arriving faster if your connection gets longer by 10-15min
I'm Swiss and I disagree, and so do many experts. First of all, arriving earlier is always good, because many people who get off on that stop still arrive earlier. Also, people who connect to a different mode of transit, such as Trams or S-Bahns very likely can catch an earlier connection.
In addition, if we built proper high speed lines, would could increase the frequency so much that it doesn't actually matter anymore.
So it doesn't actually break the system, it improves it.
It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages, one of which is german with tons of loval dialects. It's so homogeneous that each canton has own sub regulations. It's so homogeneous that in it's biggest city, Zurich, 34% of people are foreigners and 45% born outside of Switzerland.
But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre, >90% of population has option to get 1GBit fiber
There are always reasons why something can't be done, just like solving frequent school shooting problem in US
I remember moving there, hearing talks about how international Zurich was, and then realizing most of those foreigners were German. :-) It's diverse on paper (and probably to the Swiss), but it's not like it's a cosmopolitan melting pot.
Most immigration happens between neighboring countries e.g. the biggest immigrant group in Los Angeles are Mexicans.
If you exclude neighboring countries Zurich has a foreign born population share of 27% (compared to 18% of Los Angeles). If you only look at the last 10 years Zurich has foreign born non neighboring immigration of 10% (compared to 4% for Los Angeles).
If you only look at intercontinental migration then Los Angeles wins with 14% (compared to 8% of Zurich).
So yes Zurich is less cosmopolitan then LA, but most of it is just because the US has more diverse neighbors.
Americans are so used to racialized society that they tend to see "white" as a natural diversity/homogenity category, same with "Asian". And so they see "white Switzerland" as a homogeneous country.
That is absurd for anyone who lives in the Old World. Some of the worst wars in history were fought amongst people whom you wouldn't be able to tell apart in a sauna.
Heck, even Palestinians and Israeli Jews are physically very similar.
"White", "brown" etc. aren't meaningful categories in the Old World, with a few exceptions like South Africa. Most of the Old World is intensely tribal.
you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings
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