Collapse

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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.

Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.

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Renewables Are Not the Cheapest Form of Power | Art Berman (www.artberman.com)

submitted 9 months ago by eleitl@lemmy.ml to c/collapse@lemmy.ml

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[–] eleitl@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Worthwhile to point out what the author thinks about nuclear https://www.artberman.com/blog/can-we-just-get-over-nuclear/

The argument is that renewable pricing does not include nesessary storage for buffering intermittent production, offloading the task to the grid.

The improvents ongoing are asymptotic. I.e. we are running into diminishing returns. Arguably we will see price reversals due to increased material and energy prices as fossils and mineral extraction declines. Right now renewables are almost completely fossil energy extenders or multipliers, which is fine initially but won't do in the long run.

Notice that we need renewable production to cover the primary energy demand, not just current electricity production.

[–] sonori@beehaw.org 1 points 9 months ago

That doesn’t really address why he uses a source that says that nuclear is absurdly cheap compared to anything else if he also believes that their isn’t any demand to scale up production.

And yes, renewable priceing often does include the cost of the batteries needed for buffering in the commonly cited category of generation+storage. It is worth noting however that this price is much higher than it would be worth a fully renewable grid. This is because not only does it take time to actually build the renewables, which means given their consistently dropping price that by the end the batteries and panels will be cheaper than current prices, but because long range distribution is far cheaper than the direct storage that figure counts.

While renewables are intermittent at a local level, at the continental scale between solar and wind the output is actually very consistent. It costs money to build more HVDC transmission lines of course, but currently thouse are cheaper than batteries or pumped hydro, although that may change if battery prices drop as low as their manufacturers are boasting they will.

Primary energy demand will decrease as more users more to electricity given that most of that energy demand that is currently done with fossil fuels can only being turned into useful work at 40 to 60 percent efficiency, as compared to the 90 percent efficiency typically found with electrical motors. Not that it matters at all, as the only impact primary demand has at all on the cost of sources of electricity generation(the thing we are debating) is that we are going to need to see a large scale up in net electricity generation.