Isn't there a sweet spot where solar is too much of your energy mix -- due to its intermittency? I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )
If you're in the Atacama Desert, I doubt it's 40%, but not really relevant.
This is ALL renewables, not just Solar - the article states that Solar is ~20% now in the EU.
Wind typically counts for ~15%, and Hydro (which may or may not be counted as renewable) counts as ~15%.
So most places can pretty easily get to ~40% solar, ~15% wind, ~15% hydro = ~70% renewable.
Throw in ~20% Nuclear (basically all of Europe before Germany sh*t the bed), and you're at ~90% - with limited need for storage - a large portion of which could come from infra that already exists for pumped hydro and regular overnight solar storage.
We're quite a ways away from diminishing returns.
We're ~8 years away from a global ~40% of electricity coming from solar EVEN IF it continues to grow at ~30% YoY.
Ex worked in an NGO that fights the expansion of hydro in Portugal.
There are several reasons. It's destructive, has very high emissions, and doesn't actually generate that much power because we have long-ish drought seasons. Hydro was fueled or fueling corrupt construction deals while destroying natural reserves and wildlife. In some cases, night-time hydro was much more expensive than any other power source.
You mean low water levels? Isn’t it caused by agriculture water use? A dam allows to use more water (for agriculture) but one can choose not to use more.
>I think I read that once you get to like 40%, you need to spend a lot more on storage.
You can get pretty high before the economics get sketchy. Below analysis concluded that for many sunny places that point is in the 90%+. Most of EU will be lower than said sunny places, but point is it's not 40%. And the sprinkling of wind, nuclear, geo, hydro means there is a fair bit of room to still push.
Plus both solar and storage tech is still moving rapidly
I don't know of any specific thresholds, but it's worth mentioning that 54% of Q2 was renewable, and solar peaks in Q2. Solar was also only 36.8% of that renewable generation (just under 20% of Q2's total), so there's a long way to go before solar is 40% of the total energy mix.
If there is an important threshold when solar reaches 40% of the full year's production, then solar will need to almost quadruple before that's a concern. For all of 2024, solar was 22.4% of renewables, and renewables were 47% of the total[1], meaning that solar was 10.5% of total electricity over the full year.
During winter, France uses ~50% more electricity per day than during summer.
And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
If you don't have month-long battery storage, in order to be fully solar based France would need to produce 20 times more electricity than needed during summer.
> And during cloudy days in winter, solar produces 10%-15% what it produces during summer.
This doesn't matter. If you look at the monthly stats, solar panels in France produce ~3x more in the summer than the winter at a month by month view. As such, you only need 3x extra overall, and some day to day storage.
Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology. Hydrogen (or other e-fuels) or long term thermal storage.
> Or you use a different technology optimized for long term storage. Batteries are not that technology
I've heard this before but can you explain why? A cursory web search tells me batteries hold charge pretty well for 6 months. And the new sodium batteries from CATL are certainly cheap enough.
For long term storage, capex is king, not round trip efficiency. The capex of batteries ($ per kWh of storage) is much too high. There aren't enough charge/discharge cycles to amortize that capex. This is unlike with diurnal storage, where there are many thousands of cycles over which to spread that cost.
To go into more detail: you want to really aggressively minimize capex, even at the expense of round trip efficiency, for long duration (like, seasonal) storage. The interesting example from Standard Thermal is something that could reach a capex of $0.10 per kWh-th of storage capacity (yielding heat at 600 C). This is three orders of magnitude better than batteries. Even tossing in 40% round trip efficiency from converting this back to electricity using steam turbines it would be vastly superior to batteries for seasonal grid storage.
There are varieties of batteries with somewhat lower capex and lower charge/discharge rates. Form Energy's iron batteries are of this kind. They would occupy an intermediate timescale, perhaps ~1 week, which could be good for leveling wind output.
The issue is not sorely about negative price. It’s about keeping base capacity profitable so the grid doesn’t collapse.
The energy strategy of the EU was hopeless for a long time and is only marginally better now. It’s not as braindead as the monetary union but close. Germany was actively sabotaging France for a long time while having to restart coal power plants and investing in gas fuelled capacity.
Sadly the union is heavily unbalanced since the UK left.
I’m French. Unless something major changes, I hope we will be out before the UK comes back. I don’t see how anyone can be in favour of the EU after the Greek debt crisis.
I’m not too surprised about my original comment being downvoted while being entirely factually true. It was a bit much from me to expect people to understand the underside of running too much intermittent energy sources and how this is currently dealt with (the braindead part). I invite the champions of solar to explain to me the current plan of the EU for actually running the whole grid past 2050 while phasing out the coal and gas (hint: there is none).
Anyway I invite everyone to take a look at what the EU used to do nuclear, how it was purposefully omitted from the definition of clean energy for years, how they used to fine France despite its energy being clean, how it forces the French energy operator to sell at a loss, how it impedes France properly managing its dams and then look at who actually pushed for these policies while buying Russian gas and burning coal. The whole thing is a complete joke. At least they apparently saw the light on nuclear. That’s a start.
Even Flamanville is basically German industrial sabotage by the way of Siemens. Without their stupid bureaucratic "security" requirements the project would have been completed much faster and cheaper.
It seems insane to me that we agreed on partnering with a country that was aggressively against nuclear for a nuclear project.
It has been a long time since the last war now and everybody seems to have forgotten how Germans can be dangerous arrogant ideologues. The influence they yield on the EU is crazy and I don't think there is a way to properly balance it now. They are actively committing acts of war by the way of their political institutions but we do nothing.
Inevitably the past will repeat itself...
Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
That’s a risky bet but I personally prefer that to the current situation. I would honestly be ok with staying in the union if we could exit the euro while staying but I don’t think it’s possible.
> Hard to tell. We could devaluate. That would help with both the debt situation and our exports. The UK is not doing that bad at all.
1. It is widely recognised, and irritates the poorer countries, that Germany and France benefit from the relatively weak Euro for their exports.
2. If you left the EU and obviously the Euro and devalued your currency, you end up with wild inflation. If there is anything a population hates, it is high inflation. Given your political situation in France currently, no government would last a year in that scenario.
3. Devaluing obviously causes bond rates to rocket, which means rolling over your current debt because extremely serious.
4. On top of that, mortgage rates rocket, people hate that too.
There is a reason countries don't just print money and devalue all the time. If it was that easy, everyone would do it.
> That would help with both the debt situation and our exports.
But the debt is denominated in euro. If you leave euro and create a new currency, the bonds will still be in euro, while your new currency will be worth much less. It's basically easier and less painful to default on the spot than to go through this.
I honestly can't understand the urge to get bankrupt. France is already famous for the revolution and eagerness to protest but this looks like you want to cause chaos just for the sake of it.
Entirely depends how on we leave. We could convert the debt when we exit. That's unlikely to please our debtors hence the gamble but "c'est la vie".
Anyway, independently of the debt, the euro is a huge weight to drag for the French economy, technically for pretty much all the economies of the eurozone part for Germany.
Yes, converting the debt more or less equals a default.
I don't see French economy being very dynamic without the euro. If the thought is to take on lot of debt denominated in local currency and then inflate it away (faster than what happens with euro), that only makes things volatile, not dynamic.
> Yes, converting the debt more or less equals a default.
It's not technically a default but it would definitely have a negative impact on France ability to borrow after so I get your point.
> I don't see French economy being very dynamic without the euro.
The French economy dynamism was doing mostly ok before the current wave of political instability. France still has great infrastructures, a highly educated population and cheap energy if we exit the european energy market which is artificially tying our energy price to gaz thanks to the shortsightedness of our neighboors. Plenty of advantages we could leverage.
Devaluation would solve the issue of the population being politicaly unready to lower its standard of living to lower labour costs on top of helping with the debt burden.
Then, there is the obvious political benefit of untying us from people we share neither the culture nor the vision. The argument that pulling sovereignity to gain power is a charade. The utter failure of the commission negotiation with the US revealed what should have been apparent from the start: the emperor has no cloth. Why agree to be in an union which only apparently serves to prop up Germany?
> which is artificially tying our energy price to gaz thanks to the shortsightedness of our neighboors.
There were plenty of opportunities to reform the price-setting mechanism of EU energy market, wonder why that never happened. There are several - frankly probably most - countries that are unhappy about it. I don't really understand why nobody makes it a top priority agenda.
> Devaluation would solve the issue of the population being politicaly unready to lower its standard of living to lower labour costs on top of helping with the debt burden.
Ah yes, make people poor in addition to making the state poor. How could that go wrong.
It’s me being dramatic for useless flair. I edited it out a minute after posting because it adds nothing to the discussion but you read it before I did.
Different situation. France has only itself to blame for the current situation and has plenty of things it can still do to avoid a crisis. Plus the debt holders are very diversified.
The Greek crisis is very different because the debt was mostly held by German banks - the German did to do something of all these excess savings and the Greek economy suffered a lot from the euro. Reforms were needed but the way the whole thing was handled is a disgrace.
I frequently see this sentiment but it's not really very informed or informative. Greek creditors took huge haircuts on the debt - that never gets mentioned.
Then, Greece had a choice, just like every other country always has a choice when faced with a debt crisis: Accept the terms of people who will bail you out, or default. It is always like this, because no-one is going to bail you out if it is apparent that the situation will just repeat. The Greek people voted to reject the terms of the bailouts, which meant leaving the Euro, printing their own currency, and accepting that the global capital markets would not be buying their bonds for the foreseeable future. The Greek government saw the choice and ignored the people, because they knew the alternative to the bailout was far, far worse. The only reason they ran that referendum was to try use it to bargain for better terms, they never had any intention of defaulting.
That's not me being misinformed. That's you intentionaly misrepresenting the situation.
The question is not if the Greek could refuse. The question is was the terms put forward by "the Greek creditors", that is to say Germany, were fair and in the interest of the union as a whole. If I put a gun to your head, no one will listen if I tell them I gave you a choice you could have refused. You just had to take the bullet.
Germany basically refused to Greece what they themselves got in 1953 despite the situation being in part caused by their own complete mismanagement of the economy, a situation they have yet to fix by the way.
I don't know what is more repugnant: what they did or that there is people defending it and having so little shame they pretend others are misinformed.
It’s a monetary union with no common fiscal policies and no mechanism to correct disparity between members. Complete train wreck since it has been put in place.
Germany has been abusing it from the start running huge trade surplus, compressing salaries, using its excess savings to buy foreign debts instead of investing and being shielded from monetary appreciation by the consumption and investments of other countries. The euro is basically Germany robbing blind the other members while pretending to be virtuous and blocking most of what could have improved the situation.
> and no mechanism to correct disparity between members
AFAIK, they created some mechanisms after the 2008 crisis. Every country there now effectively prints money in differing rates, and the EU only regulates some limits.
not really. At this point, solar is basically free, and having extra free energy has all sorts of benefits. For the EU, in particular, it greatly reduces their dependence on Russian oil and gas. if all you do with extra solar is replace 2 extra hours a day of natural gas consumption, you effectively make yourself have 12% more storage, which decreases Russian leverage.
in EU: gas, oil is still 60% of usage. You are not going to heat you home during winter with electricity anytime soon, same like we are not all gonna drive electric cars this decade.
Heat pumps account for 2/3 of new heating installations in Germany [1].
Modern buildings with effective insulation seem to make them quite viable, but that hinges on the availability of attractive electricity prices.
The second factor is that carbon-based fuels may become more expensive over time, so perhaps electricity costs “just” needs to remain stable to become attractive.
I'm sorry but this thread does not talk about using PV to heat your home in the winter. But it is absolutely possible to use electricity to heat homes, it's widely used in northern countries. And the nice thing about electricity is that it can be generated in one place and used in another.
This thread is talking about reduction of dependence on oil&gas supplied by various nefarious regimes, though. Still quite a challenge in the winter, with barely any sun out there.
"it can be generated in one place and used in another."
It can, but we are far from having such a robust grid all across the continent. I am not even sure if we are getting closer. Both economic and political aspects come into play, which might be harder to address than the purely technical ones.
For example, France really does not want cheap Spanish solar energy to flood the French market, hence the inadequate connection over the Pyrenees.
Everyone knows that, including the European Commission, but France is one of the two really big continental players who can do anything they want and cannot be effectively punished. The "everyone is equal, but some are more equal" principle.
If you mean getting rid of oil and gas on a short scale, there won't be majority for that. By 2040 or 2050 maybe, with some significant exceptions (I don't believe in large electric jets; small aircraft maybe).
I think >95% of global electricity will be renewables or nuclear by 2032[0], >85% road vehicles green by 2035[1]; for everything else, limits are *at a minimum* 50% of the MTBF for the equipment but may be even harder, e.g. hydrogen jet fuel is theoretically possible but there's no obvious path to it.
[0] just extrapolate growth curves for PV and wind and you get 100% by then even without nuclear, but in practice last 5% of anything is hard
[1] needs new electricity not yet on the various grids, but not as much as the thermal power of the fuel burned as EVs are more efficient; mainly limited by production of batteries, and that itself is accelerating
Solar and wind are extremely reliable, because they are distributed. Unlike large-scalec fossil or nuclear, a single plant going offline isn't a big deal.
Solar and wind are quite predictable - it's just weather forecasting. We have a pretty good idea what it is going to produce 7 days from now - we just can't control it.
Solar and wind can provide rotational mass. Existing installations just aren't engineered for it, because grid following makes more sense in a fossil-heavy grid. If extra inertia is needed, batteries are the perfect source for it, as it can instantly scale from -100 to +100 to soak up excess or fill in shortages. Or we can just install a bunch of flywheels, no big deal.
Is the EU also ramping up (battery?) storage? Or are they getting near the max of what they can do with solar? (Or do I have it all wrong :/ )