this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
77 points (93.3% liked)
Europe
1555 readers
403 users here now
News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: La Mancha, Spain. Feel free to post submissions for banner images.)
Rules (2024-08-30)
- This is an English-language community. Comments should be in English. Posts can link to non-English news sources when providing a full-text translation in the post description. Automated translations are fine, as long as they don't overly distort the content.
- No links to misinformation or commercial advertising. When you post outdated/historic articles, add the year of publication to the post title. Infographics must include a source and a year of creation; if possible, also provide a link to the source.
- Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. Don't post direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments. Don't troll nor incite hatred. Don't look for novel argumentation strategies at Wikipedia's List of fallacies.
- No bigotry, sexism, racism, antisemitism, dehumanization of minorities, or glorification of National Socialism.
- Be the signal, not the noise: Strive to post insightful comments. Add "/s" when you're being sarcastic (and don't use it to break rule no. 3).
- If you link to paywalled information, please provide also a link to a freely available archived version. Alternatively, try to find a different source.
- Light-hearted content, memes, and posts about your European everyday belong in !yurop@lemm.ee. (They're cool, you should subscribe there too!)
- Don't evade bans. If we notice ban evasion, that will result in a permanent ban for all the accounts we can associate with you.
- No posts linking to speculative reporting about ongoing events with unclear backgrounds. Please wait at least 12 hours. (E.g., do not post breathless reporting on an ongoing terror attack.)
(This list may get expanded when necessary.)
We will use some leeway to decide whether to remove a comment.
If need be, there are also bans: 3 days for lighter offenses, 14 days for bigger offenses, and permanent bans for people who don't show any willingness to participate productively. If we think the ban reason is obvious, we may not specifically write to you.
If you want to protest a removal or ban, feel free to write privately to the mods: @federalreverse@feddit.org, @poVoq@slrpnk.net, or @anzo@programming.dev.
founded 4 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Pumpspeicherkraftwerke. We have 31 of them in germany. Which is pretty much the maximum possible because you can't build them just everywhere. And quick search says these things are economically unsustainable because of the extremely high construction costs but very low revenues. It is wasted money.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it waste. It's an inherent problem of any energy storage, and we need energy storage if we want to go all in on renewables. Storage has to pay for the energy it stores and can only sell that energy for profit if there is enough demand on the grid, so it sits idle for a lot of time, but you still have the building and maintenance costs.
My wording was poorly chosen. You are right of course. Its not a waste in that sense. But when better alternatives are available, which will hopefully soon achieve an acceptable level of efficiency, it makes no sense to build more. Apart from the space problem.
It's only wasted money because we deliberately chose to have for profit businesses run infrastructure essential to the functioning of a modern society. In a nationalised power grid, it wouldn't matter that a storage system has to use electricity in order to store it, because all that matters is meeting the demand and keeping the grid stable. Of course, if all that matters is profits, storage systems will only be economical to a very small subset of operators.
It's only the maximum possible due to NIMBYs, misguided self proclaimed "environmentalists", German bureaucrats and their petty shit preventing a dozen or so of new ones from being built in the past two decades. On top of that, idiotic "energy market" rules make them very unlikely to operate at profit, but thanks to the neoliberal ideology,, essential infrastructure can't be state operated.
Feel free to tone it down a little.
Your discussion of reservoirs/pumped hydro seems a bit one-sided too. Environmental concerns around e.g. sawing off hilltops to build a reservoir (happened in Czechia) or of destroying aquatic eco systems by sucking up/shreddering fish along with river water or drying up river beds are pretty real. Not to mention that reservoirs are already massively affected by climate change, as could be seen particularly well in China in recent years.
You know what's also destroying ecosystems, but at a way larger scale? Climate change.
Landslides caused by reservoirs can be avoided by proper planning.
With your mindset, there won't be any possibility of transforming power generation to something less environmentally damaging, because everything new you build has to do some sort of environmental damage. Wind turbines will shred some birds, water turbines will shred some fish, you'll need land to build any of those, you might even have to cut down an odd tree, or two.
Wind turbines shredding birds is almost the definition of concern-trolling whereas the issues with hydro impacting aquatic life are at a much larger scale.
NIMBYs are a political reality in a democracy. The power grid has to be built with them in mind. The alternative would be Chinese-style dictatorial measures, which aren't something you want in a democracy.
NIMBYs aren't very democratic either, it's a small, but loud minority holding an entire society hostage.