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Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
ViewTrick1002 · 2 days ago
Please stop guessing and making stuff up?

Anti subsidy reports in 2019 [1] landed on a what was seen as a worryingly large €10B for the entire Swedish market based subsidy system over the period from 2003 to 2045. 2018 the actual costs landed on €300m.

In 2021 the price of the system went to zero and was subsequently phased out for new producers. You know; market based subsidies.

In other words, much less than €10B will ever be spent on it.

Please stop making stuff up because you can’t bring yourself to accept how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is.

Are suggesting that we should build peaking nuclear power plants to solve firming? Because that is Sweden’s problem. Managing a January cold spell coupled with low wind is what is used to calculate the resiliency.

What capsize factor should we calculate? 20%? That is way higher than a January cold spell but let’s go for it.

Running Vogtle at a 20% capacity factor leads to 80 cents per kWh electricity.

What you are suggesting is completely batshit insane when actually putting a number on it.

Who cares if the final bit of firming is fossil based with possibility to be decarbonized through synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen when we still have large portions of the economy to deal with?

Don’t let imaginary perfect be the enemy of good enough.

[1]: https://timbro.se/miljo/ny-rapport-subventioner-till-fornyba...

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
I'm suggesting phasing out fossils including gas firming.

Hydrogen firming is extremely expensive per Lazard, it's strange you are bringing it up while complaining about nuclear. Needless to say their numbers are for US. For europe it'll be more similar to Germany https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/shipping-green-hydrogen...https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-report-says-making-g...

Nuclear can achieve this and you can reform capacity market to guarantee 60%cf if you need, because you know, you still need firming power and maybe you want to avoid too high transmission expansion and grid forming inverters.

If ren strategy alone can't achieve this due to gas firming, then you deploy less ren. Sweden can expand ren as long as hydro can firm it. Past that, you don't have other realistic option than nuclear if you want to phase out fossils entirely

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
zekrioca · 2 days ago
> Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

Take cars, for instance. When someone buys an EV rather than ICE, do you think the EV uses the same amount of energy than the ICE car?

> what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Sure, what do you think that needs to be done when there is a limited resource such as electricity? Yes, more production, but until then, what should the grid do if the demand is growing?

> Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

It is two different models, one is centralized (nuclear) and the other is distributed (solar). The planning is essentially different.

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
Ice didn't use electricity. It used energy from fossil fuels. Are you comfusing things? Electrification does add electric demand. It reduces total energy consumption due to efficiency but electric demand still grows

Yes, you need vastly more transmission for a distributed ren grid. Both for deployment and for avoiding curtailment

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
ViewTrick1002 · 2 days ago
Nothing even comes close. We’re talking tens of billions of euros.

”Get something on the grid” when the mangled number put out in PR communication is 2035.

So realistically early to mid 2040s. Why not just build renewables and storage and have ”something on the grid” counted in months and years instead of decades?

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
Sweden did spent similar amounts for ren subsidies over years, that's why I'm not sure it's the biggest. If the goal is 1.5gw nuclear, that would be about 20bn for bwrx if fully funded by govt, looking at Canada. 20bn is a lot, but on the other hand Sweden for sure did spent similar amounts for ren over years.

renewables cover different aspect of demand. What you do if you don't have enough firming power? Hope neighbors will have spare power? That's why you start planning nuclear now, or you'll start planning gas later, just like Germany

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
zekrioca · 4 days ago
(I) Electrification displaces energy demand. Efficiency controls growth of demand. Various limits have been reached with efficiency. (II) Demand response is not about “do not use power because we don’t have enough.”, it is about “here is some money so you shift demand to a later point in time when saturation is lower.” (III) It doesn’t take years to find better ways to manage the grid as is. Do you think there won’t be a need to upgrade large portions of the grid to handle new nuclear plants?

THE UK gets 30% of its electricity from wind and another 5% from solar; Denmark gets 70% from renewables, mostly wind. Iowa gets 65% of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind; California, whose economy is larger than that of most countries, gets 38%, mainly from solar.

But some lobbyists are trying to kill momentum, especially those who see nuclear as a silver bullet. It is not.

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
Electrification doesn't displace demand. It adds more demand.

what you described with demand response is equivalent of rationing- use power when weather is good because otherwise you'll not afford it

Don't confuse transmission needed for 1GW of nuclear vs 10GW of solar with 10% cf and more redispatching requirements

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
ViewTrick1002 · 2 days ago
Politically Sweden the current government is wanting to expand nuclear power through the largest subsidy program in Swedish history.

The company supposed to build them held a tender for first SMR, then pivoted to large scale reactors and shortlisted three options. Then that tender disappeared and now they have shortlisted 2 SMR options.

What is happening is a no one wanting to admit the absolutely ludicrous costs and hope the question will fizzle out.

Which as we all know are paper products which rely on ”scale” to achieve anything. No one seems to talk about who will buy the couple hundred SMR prototypes to achieve said scale.

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
I'm not sure about largest subsidy program. Large reactors make more sense but since Korea was banned by US, realistically it's better to pick Hitachi to get something on the grid
Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
ceejayoz · 4 days ago
> Germany would need the equivalent of 20-30y of global bess deployments to ditch fossils

“In 2019, California had 770 megawatts of battery storage. Now, it's 14 times higher, at 10,383 megawatts, and by the end of this year, it expects to add another 3,800.”

We saw the same curve with solar and wind. 20-30 years worth today will be peanuts in the near future. You’ve outlined a very achievable goal.

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
If you think 2-3TWh for a single country, assuming ideal conditions and no demand growth is an achievable goal, welp
Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
purerandomness · 4 days ago
In Germany, the search for an underground facility is ongoing. They hope to find a facility somewhere in 2046 [0]

In 2024, the cost for storing nuclear waste just up until 2100 was estimated to be 170 Bln. [1]

This cost is always, without exception, excluded in the calculation of the cost of generating a MWh. It's externalized, paid for by the next generations of taxpayers.

Gösgen's open data, just like all the other data, does not include waste management cost.

Gösgen is a perfect example for how brittle and outdated the technology is. The nuclear plant is off the grid since May 2025 and will remain down until at least February 2026 [2]

Just like the newly-built Flamanville 3 (12 years late, 10+Bln over budget), it's off the grid until further notice. [3]

The world is phasing out nuclear.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlagersuche_in_Deutschland

[1] https://www.zeit.de/wissen/2024-08/atommuell-endlager-suche-...

[2] https://www.schwarzwaelder-bote.de/inhalt.akw-faellt-aus-ker...

[3] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...

Moldoteck · 2 days ago
1- no, it's not ongoing but stalled. Last year almost a billion was spent for searching. Can you pinpoint where the money went?

2- It's covered by kenfo, auto reinvested fund paid by operators. It has about 24bn. In comparison Onkalo in Finland did cost 1bn to build. A similar repository is built in Sweden in Fosmark

3- Goesgen data does include the tax for both waste handling and decommissioning, didn't you read the data?

4- you don't seem to understand why Goesgen is offline. It's not about being brittle. They installed new equipment that performed too good and they need to upgrade other connected components

5- Flamanville did cost merely ~a single year of German EEG subsidies for renewables

6- 2024 was record TWh from nuclear, for like, ever. It'll grow more, mostly due to Asia unless Hitachi/Whous/EDF will do something

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
AndrewDucker · 5 days ago
The government, by saying that there was a single zone, despite the electricity not actually working that way (because interconnectors don't have infinite capacity), were defying economics.

By breaking the country in to zones, where the electricity that's bought can actually reach the users they then apply the actual economics of the system properly, and encourage suppliers to build where the demand can be satisfied by them.

Moldoteck · 5 days ago
But in the past it made sense to have a single zone- prices were similar. So industry developed where possible. Now what you ask is that due to the ren generation, the pricing should change, so that industry that was formed long before current ren push needs to restructure/move to more advantageous locations because otherwise it'll use competitiveness. If you are fine with such development and it's consequences, you could ask for such reforms.

Situation is very similar in Germany - most industry is concentrated in the south while most productive wind in the north. In the past it didn't matter since prices were similar with coal. But now, since you can't magically create wind in low wind/unproductive areas, the options are either split zones and kill part of industry, which Germany doesn't want, or to keep a single zone and build expensive transmission like sudlink.

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
zekrioca · 5 days ago
They have lots potential for wind (~20%) and hydro. Peak demand is increasing, but lasts for very specific amounts of time during a day, it doesn’t justify the increases in base load. These peaks could be certainly fulfilled by smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification before new building new power plants. Yet, many of these will be needed despite nuclear, but since nuclear is the elephant in the room, they are going with it first, while stalling everything else. They are even trying to convince Germany to do the same.
Moldoteck · 5 days ago
"smarter grid management, demand-response, and electrification" - electrification increases the demand, maybe you meant efficiency?

Demand response is basically - please don't use power because we don't have enough or because it's expensive. That's not an appealing option.

Smart grid management is good but it'll take years to reach good condition - you need to expand/upgrade transmission and distribution systems with proper equipment.

Germany has it's own path that's more or less stable for a long time- coal+gas firming, tons of ren and major transmission expenses, to the point govt will start subsidizing them

Moldoteck commented on Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him   electrek.co/2025/08/25/sc... · Posted by u/xbmcuser
mnw21cam · 5 days ago
We also have this rather unusual energy market where the price for energy is set by the supplier with the highest price necessary to meet demand at any particular time, and all the suppliers get paid that price. Most countries use a system where the suppliers get paid how much it costs for them to generate individually, and the users pay an average of that all.
Moldoteck · 5 days ago
No, most countries use the same merit order mechanism like UK. The difference is that in those countries gas peakers are competing with cheaper hydro (nordics), coal(Germany) or nuclear (france). UK nuclear is pretty small, so gas competes only with itself for setting the price.

u/Moldoteck

KarmaCake day1122January 20, 2022View Original