The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
Some countries have sun, some don’t. They might need nuclear. That is the reality.
Which countries? The UK is famous for its cloudy weather, yet solar is feasible there. Finland and Sweden are building more and more solar. Not sure where you’re talking about.
UK has wind.
I’m taking east Europe for instance.
FWIW, Baltic countries are going hard for solar, see https://lemmy.world/post/17098210
Baltics powered by Finnish and Swedish nuclear.
Well, that’s a bald-faced lie. Maybe if we were only talking about Lithuania, which does import big chunk of its energy budget from Sweden, but Estonia and Latvia generate most of their energy on their own - and according to the linked article, plan to generate even more in near future.
Context is everyting. Here’s some cold hard facts for you:
As of 00:00 on 19/07/2024:
% being the overall percentage of electricity consumption.
So >1GW imported from SE/FI out of ~4GW total in the Baltics is imported from countries with 40-50% nuclear baseload.
Everyone is or at least tries to portray they are. Your article could be written for almost any country in the world.
But that doesn’t mean a country can be run on solar alone.
Who is suggesting solar alone?
Many people seem to think that’s the idea. I don’t know about you, but when you frame the discussion as solar vs nuclear, that is what you are suggesting.
I mean, it’s fair to compare the two techs but that’s different from suggesting that you need a single approach to generation. No one is seriously suggesting that only solar for generation is sensible
I’m not sure if this is your first conversation on the topic but the debate is almost entirely on renewables vs nuclear.
No, the article definitely could not be written for any country in the world, because it lists concrete actions, numbers for past few years, and concrete plans for next few years.
But judging from your comments here and elsewhere in the thread, you do not care about discussion, and will move goalposts whenever it suits you. You are not a nice person. So, PLONK.
Not true. You don’t seem to know much about energy policies in EU.
But well… Bye
Why does eastern Europe get less sunlight?
It’s like 3 am there
Less than Spain. There is a winter. Geography and suitable areas less common. Distribution network made for power plants.
Nuclear plants can be a better cost effective fit.
Darkovia has zero sun
Until a weather event blocks out most of the sunlight. An extreme scenario would be what happened to the dinosaurs, however smaller scale versions or that, such as large volcano eruptions, seem entirely possible and could heavily restrict the amount of sunlight you have access to for long periods of time.
Portugal lies in Southern Europe, we get plenty of sun, and we make heavy use of solar, but that still isn’t enough sometimes, and I’m pretty sure we sometimes get our energy from Spain, who themselves use nuclear.