Natural gas prices in Europe have been climbing over the past week, as recent world events bring uncertainty to the market. Should the continent be worried about its gas supplies?
Other then that high gas prices are great to move towards more green technologies.
First problem is that this is a short-term issue, and there is going to be no major changes in power generation over the next few months.
The second problem is that two major low-carbon-dioxide-emitting power generation methods, solar and wind, are intermittent. That is, they are not reliably available. To deal with that, you need to either store power generated when they are working or have a ton of capacity to generate power via other means to fill in for when they are offline.
Power storage is expensive. So what normally happens is that if you do wind, you also do natural gas or similar, and fill in the “gaps” in wind generation by burning natural gas.
Most natural gas is not used in power plants, but for heating homes and in all sorts of industrial processes in a lot of cases that is for heating. Shutting down gas power plants is just an easy way of saving gas. In general in the next decade the challenge is less to get the grid 100% clean, but more to connect things to it, with heat pumps, electric cars, new industrial production processes and so forth.
That being said wind and solar are intermittend, but most of the time we have some wind and sunny days are also fairly common. That becomes even more true the larger the grid is. To put it quite simply it is always windy or sunny somewhere in the world, it is just a matter of transporting it. Within the EU that is already happening. Other then that overbuilding renewables is a good strategy as well, for days with some clouds and less strong wind. Those are much more common the perfect days. As for storage periods of no wind or solar are on average fairly short. So most of them can be bridged with fairly small power storage. With a days worth of storage on a nation sized grid, you can in most cases run 95% wind and solar with overgeneration. We even have quite a lot of it with reservoir hydro already. Some of that can even be seasonal.
That being said, last year the EUs electricity grid was 60% low carbon electricity already and that share is rising. So it makes already sense electrify everything possible. Intermittency is a problem, but it is not usolvable and in fact we are already working on a lot of the solutions.
You are absolutely correct, there won’t be major changes in power generation. But in such times there absolutely can be major political decisions which decide / push towards major changes in the mid-future. It was true in the past and Corona and the war in Ukraine showed it’s still true today.
No you shut up you little soyboy, your parents were coal miners so you are probably still holding that generational anger like, grow up already and go do a sheep while you’re at it you bitter thatcher hating welshman 🏴🏴🐏🐏🐏🏴🏴🏴🏴
First problem is that this is a short-term issue, and there is going to be no major changes in power generation over the next few months.
The second problem is that two major low-carbon-dioxide-emitting power generation methods, solar and wind, are intermittent. That is, they are not reliably available. To deal with that, you need to either store power generated when they are working or have a ton of capacity to generate power via other means to fill in for when they are offline.
Power storage is expensive. So what normally happens is that if you do wind, you also do natural gas or similar, and fill in the “gaps” in wind generation by burning natural gas.
So it’s not really an either-or proposition.
Most natural gas is not used in power plants, but for heating homes and in all sorts of industrial processes in a lot of cases that is for heating. Shutting down gas power plants is just an easy way of saving gas. In general in the next decade the challenge is less to get the grid 100% clean, but more to connect things to it, with heat pumps, electric cars, new industrial production processes and so forth.
That being said wind and solar are intermittend, but most of the time we have some wind and sunny days are also fairly common. That becomes even more true the larger the grid is. To put it quite simply it is always windy or sunny somewhere in the world, it is just a matter of transporting it. Within the EU that is already happening. Other then that overbuilding renewables is a good strategy as well, for days with some clouds and less strong wind. Those are much more common the perfect days. As for storage periods of no wind or solar are on average fairly short. So most of them can be bridged with fairly small power storage. With a days worth of storage on a nation sized grid, you can in most cases run 95% wind and solar with overgeneration. We even have quite a lot of it with reservoir hydro already. Some of that can even be seasonal.
That being said, last year the EUs electricity grid was 60% low carbon electricity already and that share is rising. So it makes already sense electrify everything possible. Intermittency is a problem, but it is not usolvable and in fact we are already working on a lot of the solutions.
You are absolutely correct, there won’t be major changes in power generation. But in such times there absolutely can be major political decisions which decide / push towards major changes in the mid-future. It was true in the past and Corona and the war in Ukraine showed it’s still true today.
Why not just go nuclear
Because we don’t have a time machine to go back to 2003 where when we’d have to have started planning the necessary nuclear plants.
Because politicians love short term thinking. Seems to be changing lately, though. At least about nuclear power.
Stfu
No you shut up you little soyboy, your parents were coal miners so you are probably still holding that generational anger like, grow up already and go do a sheep while you’re at it you bitter thatcher hating welshman 🏴🏴🐏🐏🐏🏴🏴🏴🏴