keepthepace
@keepthepace@slrpnk.net
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 3 days ago:
Careful: negative price ≠ negative cost. Below zero prices are a market artifact usually.
The fact that this happens during peak HVAC use is a nice thing though.
And yes, we need intermittent industries, but the problem is, when you invest money in hardware, even to mine bitcoin (I would rather sell GPU time to train deep learning models personally) or to produce hydrogen, every hour not spent running your capital-intensive hardware is considered a cost that is not really compensated by energy price unless you run on donated hardware.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 3 days ago:
Circuits breakers are an obvious solution and there seems to be reasons why these are not implemented. I am not knowledgeable enough about the question but there seems to be a lot of counter-intuitive incentives that makes the energy market drop sub-zero occasionally. It is more of a market artifact than the absence of circuit breakers.
I have seen people in France explain that this is Germany undercutting prices to ensure France can’t have profitable private solar power companies but this sounds a bit conspiracy-theory to me, as Germany is not the only one doing it (but the biggest one in terms of volume)
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 4 days ago:
These are the prices on the European market for electricity exchange between countries. It has a whole can of worms when it comes to problematic incentives, but it is indeed not consumer prices and (IMO) designed to enrich useless intermediaries.
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 4 days ago:
RTE (French national grid operator)'s realtime data. It is indeed awesome to have realtime trackers of that!
- Comment on The Amount of Electricity Generated From Solar Is Suddenly Unbelievable 4 days ago:
I’ll give another factoid:
In a sunny day, around noon, many EU countries have below-zero prices for electricity exports:
It comes with a different set of issues, but this is not prospective or a hypothetical: this is the world we are living in, with the operator of the French grid warning that we are currently at solar saturation.
Now we need the other part of the puzzle: energy storage. On a HUGE scale.
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 5 days ago:
It took 40 years to have solar energy and batteries up to the task, and we are not there yet. Yes, it could have been a choice to more massively invest in R&D in these fields, but you still need electricity while you shut down nuclear plants. Don’t do it unless you are ready to replace them with something else than coal. We are not there yet. Germany relies on France’s nuclear capabilities to import electricity at night.
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 6 days ago:
Yes, it is not a problem for the power plants, it is a problem for the fauna and it only impacts reactors without cooling towers. And I may add, this is a problem for the fauna caused in big part by the global warming which nuclear plants help prevent.
- Comment on Can somebody please explain why the world hasn't gone nuclear yet? 6 days ago:
Its a type of energy that gets more expensive
We choose to make it so. Constantly adding security features and not financing research. It could have gone done has well if we had pushed for small reactors, helped the EPR more, not shut down the research into plutonium as a fuel…
Trash is not solved
It is inert and a lot of it has the potential to be a future fuel. “Put it in a hole below the water table” is pretty close to a solution.
A minor error can have a huge environmental impact, especially in densly populated areas like Europe
It will be hard to be as impactful as coal or thermal engines, which are considered to be responsible for about 48 000 premature deaths yearly here in France. If nuclear energy allowed a country to decarbonate, it could “afford” a Chernobyl per year and still save lives.
Plants need cooling, most use rivers and that does not mix well with rising temperatures, and have to be shut down in summer
That’s simply not true. Every year journalists fall for it but here is a breakdown:
- Every year some plants undergo planned maintenance in summer, not because it is too hot but because there is less consumption (winter heating is when the peak is)
- Some plants do lower their outputs, the most they had to do it so far was by 0.2% of the total output of the country because of environmental regulations that basically forbid any heating of the water above certain temperatures.
- It only touches plants that don’t have the iconic cooling towers. Plants with cooling towers do not warm rivers, in some case they may even cool them down.
As long as there are liquid rivers, plants will be able to cool down. We will have much more serious problems before this becomes an issue.
Nuclear plants are not flexible and can’t react to energy availability
It can. As I am writing that, it is 1pm here, we are at 33GW of nuclear production, mostly because there is a lot of solar power and Germany is flooding us with electricity with negative energy. At 4am, we were at 42GW of nuclear. Image
Most fuel is produced by less reliable states.
Minerals are fungible, therefore consumers go for the cheapest. It usually means countries where semi-slavery is the norm and environmental regulations are not a thing. They do tend to be shitty countries yes. Non-fossil mineral resources however are found pretty uniformly over the globe (having mountains helps). There are uranium mines in France that we shut down because of labor cost.
No public backing
That’s the main problem. The above lies have been repeated ad nauseam and local opposition means that opening new nuclear plants is basically impossible. This is a policy and opinion problem mostly.
I am bitter about it. The sane plan was to go full nuclear in the 90s, double the electricity production, get rid of coal and thermal vehicles that way and slowly transition over 40 years into solar as we either get batteries costs down or develop space based solar power.
Now we are getting the transition but it was oil-fueled instead of nuclear-fueled and this choice was made by people misled into believing they defended the environment by fighting nuclear power.
Yes, wind/solar + batteries is the future (though I don’t think these are cost competitive with nuclear yet. Solar alone is, batteries not) but opting out of nuclear was a very costly option for the climate.
- Comment on 4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment | In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system. 1 week ago:
0.7 on the Kardashev scale. En route to 1.0!
- Comment on Director General Grossi’s Statement to UNSC on Situation in Iran | IAEA 4 weeks ago:
They enrich uranium up to 60%. It is very costly and there is no civilian need for that. No one believes it is a civilian program.
I am very critical of Israel on Gaza, but on the Iranian nuclear program, there has been decades of procrastination, ambivalence and, since the last Trump episode, downright idiocy, in the handling of the diplomatic discussion. I kinda believe it when they say we were at the point where strikes were the only option to avoid a nuclear Iran.
Then again, the world pretends that Israel has no nukes whereas it is an open secret. All the other nuclear nations, including Pakistan and India, consider that the only way to be safe in such a situation is the MAD doctrine. Yet we expect Iran to stop its nuclear program and pretend its main enemy has none. I am not sure how idiotic we thought they are but even to religious fanatics it was pretty obvious that the only way for them was to have their own secret program.
This is a complex clusterfuck where you can’t easily split the actors as good guys/bad guys. There are lots of rational decisions and lots of totally idiotic religion-fueled ethnic hatred.
- Comment on Johannes Kepler's accidental marriage equation – ParallaxNick (15:42) 1 month ago:
Chaque fois qu’on en parle j’ai ce webcomic en tête, j’y peux rien chaque fois il me fait rire.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 2 months ago:
Oh I think we will get there quicker than people believe and it comes with so much advantage in terms of noise, mechanical complexity, energy efficiency, waste heat, vibrations, ease of danger, maintenance, that I think electrification is now largely a matter of cost and that energy density will be worked around as soon as the rest is affordable.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 2 months ago:
Solar panels dont produce fuel for thermal engines and are intermittent. In the longer term we want electric vehicles and batterie to absorb intermittence but in the short term it has its uses
- Comment on On May 1, German ran almost entirely on renewables energy during the day 2 months ago:
And from French nuclear power outside of the solar peak:
Sorry about the graph in French, it comes from RTE, the electricity distribution network here. This is a graph of the import/export. Orange is Germany, the thick gray horizontal bar is the zero: things below are exports from France and above are imports. During midday we typically import below-zero surplus electricity from Germany and re-export at around 100€/MWh.
It is not a simple situation and it does not lend itself to simplistic judgement. There is some criticism here in France that German’s surplus and inability to absorb it makes it unprofitable to develop solar power locally. The manager of RTE already warned that in the current conditions, adding renewables to the grid may prove counter-productive.
We have reached the point in France + Germany and probably Spain where renewables are at saturation until we find better ways to handle the intermittence. This is a good problem to have, but one that was warned against years ago.
We have so some pumping into the dams but that’s a very limited capability.
- Comment on Hosting files on the LAN to trusted folks at a LAN party -- FTP? 2 months ago:
Yes, I meant as a client. I thought you were looking at options to hook up guests to a openssh-sftp-server
- Comment on Hosting files on the LAN to trusted folks at a LAN party -- FTP? 2 months ago:
Filezilla is also a popular option
- Comment on Hosting files on the LAN to trusted folks at a LAN party -- FTP? 2 months ago:
sFTP. If you have a machine with a ssh server, it has sFTP capabilities.
- Comment on Wind/solar motorcycle [with 50 km solar/wind range] looks like an April Fools' joke ... but it's legit 3 months ago:
Yeah the turbine on top does not make sense while driving. It could be something used while it is parked.
Yes, there are contraptions that can extract energy from downwind or upwind vehicles. This is not one of those. On any decent road speed that thing will drag like hell.
- Comment on Mining is an environmental and human rights nightmare. Battery recycling can ease that. 3 months ago:
Exactly. Cobalt does not lose its interesting properties if it is mined in a country with good environmental regulations by unionized well-equipped adults, or even better, robots. What changes is that then it becomes a bit more expensive.
It is the way international trade is organized that is problematic, not the fact that we use minerals.
- Comment on 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change 4 months ago:
It’s not visible but the toll of radiation on other living beings and the environment is, and should not be neglected imo.
When I am saying that the death toll from Fukushima is between 0 and 1 it is because the effect of radiation is accounted for and that the level of exposure we are talking about makes it possible that it raises additional deaths by 1. When a zone is declared radioactive, humans tend to avoid it, which does wonders for all other lifeforms.
because the ocean is not a dumpster.
Oh I think I used a mistranslation, I did not mean to say “water bed” but "water table. I am not talking about using the ocean as a dumpster. It would be a very poor idea. We are talking about geological storage, which means within the rockbed, in geologically stable regions. All the projects I am aware off are land based. And when they are below the water table, there is very little ways for it to raise to the surface.
- Comment on 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change 4 months ago:
- delay
- cost
Are mostly political and mostly due to anti-nuclear opposition. France did a oil to nuclear electricity transition in 10 years while increasing (a lot) is total capability.
It was technologically, politically and economically feasible in the 70s. I agree that one should not dismiss the political aspect of the question, but I am unwilling to consider it as a stronger argument than “yes but conservatives are resisting renewables”. If we are having a political discussion, then we should consider that political positions are subject to change.
- Weapons proliferation risks
True. The more nuclear power, the more plutonium out there. That’s the only good argument in the 7 I believe. It is still pretty hard to enrich uranium or plutonium to weapon grade. If you could do that, I don’t think it would be much harder to simply start from uranium ore (which are present in much more places than commercially mined, most nations have deposits).
- Meltdown risk
Dams killed more people than all nuclear plants incidents. Coal mines accidents much much more. The result remains the same whether you count in absolute number or per TWh generated.
Fukushima Dai-ichi, Japan in 2011
Number of death: between 0 and 1. Reminder: it was caused by a tsunami that killed 19000 people, including several during dam failures.
Saint-Laurent France in 1980
Number of death: zero. France is a very nuclear-heavy country, yet the power plants that have killed the most in France are… dams again. 423 deaths.
- Mining Lung Cancer Risk
It says that almost 400 death can be attributed to uranium mining between 1950 and 2000
1950 alone had 643 miners die in coal mines in the US alone. In China it is much more: arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp
- Carbon-Equivalent Emissions and Air Pollution
Fun thing about these indirect emissions is that they are made of estimates from electricity used. The more nuclear or sustainable electricity in your mix, the lower willbe used there.
- Waste Risk
Stable solid waste stored under the water bed poses no risk. Here again, the dispersion of waste is mostly due to political opposition to geological storage.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 4 months ago:
I agree that capitalism needs to be criticized and neo-colonialism as well, but not under the guise of ecology. You can transition out of fossils while remaining in capitalism, you can get out of capitalism without getting out of fossils. These problems are important but perpendicular.
I would not expect, nor need from these people to talk about the benefits of wind turbines.
Why not? In the countryside I used to live in, I had the same person ask me to sign a petition against nuclear power plants and 3 weeks later against a solar farm project that would cut down trees. That militant activist was not aware of the amount of fossils that was going into the local electricity mix. She was genuinely surprised when I showed her that she is actively lobbying against a transition out of fossil fuels.
Locals are not dumber than centralized powers but they are not smarter either.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 4 months ago:
I know that during the Victorian era, women had more rights in Islamic countries than in UK. Women-initiated divorce was possible in some MENA countries long before it was possible in many European countries. Repudiation (male-initiated divorce) was also way easier and easier than the costly female-initiated one (where they had to repay their dowry)
That’s an extremely low feminist standard for 2025 to say “well we are not worse than the worst part of history”.
It does talk quite a lot about renewable energy.
It never talks about the positive impact it has on CO2 emission. Which is the whole point. Talking about the negative externalities of this effort is like focusing on all the side effects of a life-saving surgery without ever mentioning the life saving aspects!
I feel the criticism is not at all in renewables. It is in the relationships between rich countries and former colonies, whether they are trading oil, electricity or cocoa.
I’d rather live in a world without exploitation or coercion in our production system but I’d also rather live in a world where this system is used to transition out of fossil fuels than not.
- Comment on Europe greenwashing with north Africa’s renewable energy, report says 4 months ago:
There are several weird things in that report. There are definitely valid criticism of neo-colonialism, but I don’t see how it ticks the greenwashing box. The decarbonation achieved thanks to renewable power plants in MENA is real, it is not just a marketing campaign. Could it be done better? Yes. Does it help the climate crisis? Yes.
I also find this title weird: “Leveraging Communal, Traditional, and Ancestral Models in Pursuit of Feminist, People-First Wellbeing Economies”. In MENA, traditional/ancestral ways are not exactly femininist. Dont let the fight against colonialism trap you into believing that non-western ways are necessarily superior in every aspect.
You know what is absent in that report? Discussion about the climate impact of transtioning from hydrocarbon industries into renewable. This has been a constant criticism of Greenpeace and a pretty serious blind spot for an environmental organization: not caring much about CO2. Now I agree that CO2 emissions are not the only problem in the world and that it should not prevent us to fight the other problems, but criticizing a renewable transition without a word on its actual efficacy is really missing the point.
- Comment on In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees 4 months ago:
Thing is, I don’t think NASA and SpaceX compete. NASA is not a for-profit company and was happy to see successful private companies in the sector. They’ll happily be a SpaceX client so that they can focus on actual research and do things that are not profitable (yet)
- Comment on California just debunked a big myth about renewable energy 5 months ago:
And a weird way of saying that intermittence is solved…
- Comment on It took 68 years for the world to reach 1 terawatt of solar PV capacity. It took just two years to double it | RenewEconomy 8 months ago:
- Comment on Cry Harder, Kid 8 months ago:
If you have never seen a scallop run away, google it.
- Comment on She-Ra Lives! 8 months ago:
Personally I find it weird that we do generalities about a this population as it is very likely that they had all different cultures on the tribe level.
- Comment on Amateur Entomologists 8 months ago:
Nah the game is about friendship and time travels. The boss is kinda irrelevant.
