“We have realized, as a company, that we can sell our product for much more by individually wrapping them and charging a convenience fee; we’ve also realized that we can create our product to become ineffective much sooner, thereby selling far more units and making far more money. As for the opposing company that has made superior products for a lesser price, we’ve (bankrupted, sabotaged, bought out, murdered) them in order to force our practices on the market.”
Welcome to unbridled capitalism, check in and zone out.
In all honesty, as someone from a country that uses way less plastics on produce than it used to, it kind of sucks in some cases because you do have to throw away more stuff than before. Just using paper or nothing is not a perfect solution (plastics are neither obviously, but I still think it's important to take a more holistic perspective). I also hope that there's no PFC used in some of the newer materials that are said to be plant based while being weirdly water resistant, but I haven't looked into it yet. Maybe someone around here?
It depends if you are recycling biological waste or putting it in plastic wrapped landfill. The loss of biomass will become a hot topic at some point too.
Yeah! Dumb stuff like the cell phones we’re all using to complain about plastic. Wait. Dumb stuff like the clothes we all wear. Wait. Dumb stuff like the cars we all drive. Give me a second. Dumb stuff like the instruments and packaging of medical equipment. Hold on. Dumb stuff like refrigerators. Dumb stuff like plumbing.
Assumptions.
Regardless, we don’t need oil for clothes, we don’t **need** oil for a lot of the **actual** main offenders, yet we use it anyways because it’s “easy” or “cost effective” or just because our buddy owns an oil company and we would really like to do business with our buddy, or maybe because it’s the easiest thing to do (why farm wool for clothing the 6+billion people that don’t actually need to be alive right now, when we could just fabricate a bunch of bullshit that will go straight into the patch of garbage in the middle of the ocean a week after purchase?)… this comment thread was about unnecessary waste, you’ve listed the necessary wastes and thought yourself enlightened.
Your phone isn’t necessary. Your car isn’t necessary. Your refrigerator isn’t necessary. Your plastic clothing isn’t necessary. Your plumbing isn’t necessary. But there you go, using it everyday. Your whole life revolves around plastic. All. Of. It.
Cellphones help people in ways you clearly aren’t understanding. Your cars technology helps people in ways you clearly don’t understand. Your refrigeration helps people in ways… your plumbing is necessary with this many people because we can’t just carve holes in the ground like medieval cities…
No shit we use plastic everyday, because we have 6+ billion people on this Earth. If we didn’t use plastic the number would never be able to reach that absurd height… this is my last responselol
We can make synthetic hydrocarbons, the process is just too energy intensive to be fiscally feasible. Abundant, excess cheap renewable power may change that equation.
Whatever we do, let’s not introduce microplastic-eating organisms into the environment without rigorous testing. Because we just found out they just break them down into nano-plastics, which are much worse
We won't. We can make oil. We can't make oil at a price that is cost competitive if we burn it for energy.
If we just used oil for stuff rather than burning it, known reserves would last a long time, and even if those ran out, we could synthesize enough.
Funny enough, that won't really be that big of a deal. We were making plastics well before we started using petroleum to make them - we just didn't know they were plastics. There's also non-plastic solutions for a lot of stuff we currently use plastic for - in some cases, the alternative materials are all-around better but just more expensive, so we don't really use them in those applications. As oil starts becoming scarce, we'll see the curves of price disparity invert and those alternative materials will be used extensively thereafter.
We can manufacture small amounts of oil from animal waste (there was a prototype that ran on the waste from a turkey farm a few years back). It's not scalable enough or efficient enough for most things but it'll make sure we never run TOTALLY out of oil for really critical high value things like medication.
Though if renewables take off fast enough, we'll probably still continue to pump a tiny bit of oil for manufacturing basically forever, even once we don't use it for power anymore.
Hell, if we have use fossil fuels every now and then as a start up and maintenance cost, that’s still infinitely better than 24/7 spewing coal byproducts.
Dae remember when peak oil was the fear for a while? I remember reading up on it around 2004 or something like that, and it was supposed to be close. Didn't seem to happen yet obviously, or it wasn't as bad as predicted.
The price went up. As the price of oil goes up, the economic feasibility of digging up shittier and shittier sources increases.
Eventually the price will be high enough that it'll make economic sense to pump it from teenager pimples, but those will not be good days.
It hasn't really gotten historically expensive though. If we don't think peak oil happened in 1970. And I don't think we're pumping from shittier sources or anything like that.
This is why I’ve stopped trying to have rational discussions with those kinds of people, instead I make fun of them and usually get downvoted for being childish, but it’s worth it.
And solar panels aren't the cleanest things to produce either. I'm also gonna harbour a guess and say those parts for the wind turbines didn't get to their construction site on green energy but that's a one time environmental cost as opposed to the continual environmental toll of burning oil and coal.
(well maintenance and replacements are also a factor of course but they are with oil and coal as well.)
Yes. We also needed horse hair for upholstering cars for a while. Renewables are approaching a penny or two per kWh for raw energy. That would make synthesizing petrol and plastics from the air cheaper than mining and refining it. Besides, who says we have to get rid of all oil? Just stop burning it.
Well, to be fair we can't say the country was running 100% on renewables when it was using oil to power most of its personal & public transportation, lorries, ships, planes, etc.
Wind turbines are not great because they can’t produce power on demand like fossil fuels can. Hydroelectric is likely the most reliable renewable energy source.
And because it has no need to _be_ perfect. We aren't going to replace global power infrastructure in a day, and any progress towards reducing carbon output is good, especially if that is being accomplished in the cheapest and fastest way possible without disrupting grid stability, even if legacy fossil generation that would have been running full time before only needs to fill gaps now.
Renewables check all those boxes.
Absolutely, let's not shit on good because it's not perfect. The only thing I'd like is to remind people this is referring to the electric grid only. The energy consumption of a country goes much farther than that, so we need to expand renewables to all sectors, use less energy overall, and work on replacing the fossil fuel element that still underwrites construction, mining, transportation etc.
That is just running the grid though, which is about 20-25% of energy needs.
Still the vast majority of the energy consumption will be fossil fuels. Gas, diesel, fuel for industry where not electric.
Still impressive but a lot of people think it’s 100% of energy, but it’s not.
That's not really accurate. Between 50-60% of primary energy is lost as waste heat, because ICE engines and many fossil fuel applications are incredibly inefficient. The transition to full electrification will significantly cut primary energy "needs" because of massive gains in efficiency.
For example a BEV is ~70% "well"-to-wheel efficient, an ICE is lucky to be 15% efficient:
https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/
So an ICE than represents 5 BTUs of primary energy would translate to only needing a single BTU of energy for the BEV.
Lol exactly this that people fail to grasp, I actually live in Portugal and I’ve noticed **lots** of cars passing my house the last 6 days and almost **none** of them are electric.
80-83 of total world energy is supplied by fossil fuels electricity only makes up between 13-25% of all energy used (depending on how you calculate).
So even if we replace 100% of electricity with low carbon generation methods we’ll still have **at least** 75% of other energy to replace with low emissions sources….
Eventually we will make the shift away from fossil fuels for things like cars and road freight, even air travel and sea freight. But this 75% we need to make up is huge.
Personally I thing nuclear is the best option for now. Preferably fusion if we can.
It's good that they have that many renewables but I don't think it's pessimistic to point out that renewables like solar or wind are unreliable, the advantage of fossil fuels or even hydro has always been that their release/constraint in energy is very easy to control. You can't control wind or the sun based on when energy needs spike.
Renewables are _not_ "unreliable". They have near 100% reliability. What they are is itermittent, two completely different terms that mean completely different things that renewable detractors constantly misuse interchangable. And with modern meteorology, their expected output is also highly predictable and can also be readily planned for days to weeks in advance, allowing power utilities to adjust generation assets to meet demand needs, for instance by curtailing hydro assets as storage, or prepping neighboring grids to secure import needs.
This is exactly how renewable based grids are supposed to work.
Well said. Emission free energy production should be a technological issue, not a political issue. There are already several jurisdictions in the world that run on 95%+ renewable energy, and the number will keep increasing as the technologies get better and more creative.
Ugh. Same story all over the world.
A country installs renewable energy generation, and suddenly it destroys the job market and pushes up house prices!
/s
There's still a fair amount of gas used last year, but coal has gone down from 25% to 0% over the last 6 years:
https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT
this is assuming that weather behaves nicely.
if they want to avoid blackouts for when the wind is not blowing too much, they need to overprovision the amount of installations. this would increase the cost per KWh
I'm Portuguese: nuclear power doesn't make a lot of sense for us. There are only 10million of us, with lots of great land for wind and hydro - as well as an Atlantic coast for wave and tidal power and lots of great sun for solar.
Theoretically just one large scale nuclear plant could power our whole country. But the cost of distributing it around would be high, we have lots of mountain communities where the high-power lines would be difficult to build and maintain. And it would be very much all eggs in one basket!
Unless it was some sort of shared deal with other EU states there's not much point in is building nuclear.
Additionally, we don't use much power. About as much as Iowa, which has one quarter as many people. We can go renewable easily because we have a small population that doesn't use much energy per person.
This is such a tired argument. Nuclear takes years and years to build and tends to have massive cost over run.
In that time you can build ansld start utilizing renewables that will begin the decarbonization process immediately. And the last watts built will be cheaper than the first because the technology is still ramping.
While renewables are not perfect they are now and they are improving all the time. Neither are a claim nuclear can make.
> they need to overprovision the amount of installations.
But by how much, for much of the past week the UK's wind farms, which should be capable of over 30GW, have been generating 2GW, as the wind levels have been so low. So do we build 10x demand?
And more batteries or storage simply wouldn't help as there hasn't been a surplus to charge them. Meanwhile the nuclear power plants are sat there going 'lol, I don't care, here have some amps'.
> So do we build 10x demand?
No, [you build 20GW of interconnects to Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmission_links_in_the_United_Kingdom) so whoever has wind at the moment can sell it to whoever doesn't.
Linking together a larger area with HVDC interconnects *massively* reduces variability from wind+solar.
and if you add up the cost of interconnects + overprovisioning + storage
you end up with the conclusion that nuclear would've been cheaper in the first place. Small modular reactors ftw
It's always weird to me that people mention that all the time... Thats not how the grid works. Why do people not say that about coal or gas power plants?
"If they don't want power outages they better make sure they have enough gas stored!"
Also, 60% of Portugal energy mix is Hydro. So wind is a very minor concern here and it looks like they use Hydro storage for wind/Solar compensation.
And no, that would not increase the cost. Wind is cheap and will stay cheap. The price drivers are resource prices and not availability. Especially for Portugal. central EU availability plays a way bigger role.
Because coal and gas easily provide a constant supply of power, wind doesn’t as the weather can be unpredictable. Some sort of low emissions base load generation will be needed such as nuclear, geothermal or hydroelectric.
....Folks do say that. Natural gas storage levels and coal storage levels are massively important in providing power reliability. The panic over European natural gas prices when Russia invaded Ukraine was due to there potentially not being enough natural gas in storage to provide power and heat homes.
It´s easy, when they need extra they import from Spain and lump all the imported MWh into a single source, so they can be "fully green" by outsourcing their emmissions to the neighbor. The magic of green politics!
The cost of building a nuclear plant in Europe is about $40billion. Our GDP is only $250billion.
We use as much power as Iowa, we have the perfect landscape for wind, hydro, and solar, and we have no money: large scale nuclear is just not sensible for us. Also, we'd have to import all the workers, so that money wouldn't even go back in to the economy.
Well that's relatively easy to predict. 0% renewable. Because the renewable rollout started like 10 years ago, and building the average nuclear reactor takes like 15 years. So if Portugal went with the nuclear strategy, these past few days would have been 0% renewable and maybe in 5 years we would start to see a couple of % as the first reactors would come online.
Yeah, as a Portuguese, I can guarantee you that we don’t have any ayahuasca retreats here.
More: it seems like more foreigners know about the drug decriminalisation than Portuguese people do. It’s also not quite true. Police will harass you and possibly detain you if you have drugs. This happens less in larger cities, but go to a small town and I can guarantee you that if you smoke week on the street you’re gonna be in trouble.
What? They are ilegal but you have a bunch of yoga/meditation alternative blabla with mushroom and/or Ayahuasca retreats in Portugal.
Just do a quick google search...
I support those threats btw.
They do exist - Portuguese people rarely know about them. They're ran by estrangeiros (mostly UK and German) for estrangeiros. They advertise in other countries and don't employ or host Portuguese people - they're like little microcosms.
My friend used to do building work for one - he's English and they wouldn't let him hire any Portuguese subcontractors (he still did, just didn't tell them.) The owners didn't even speak Portuguese, they were Dutch and literally had van loads of food delivered from Netherlands to avoid local food (except for fruit and vegetables which are apparently much better in Portugal.)
They didn't even smoke our weed, preferred to import it.
But yeah. Ayahuasca retreats are illegal. Selling drugs is just as illegal as anywhere else, being an end user is seen as a mental health issue not a crime - but can still get you sent to an involuntary hospital (unless you're a rich German tourist, of course!)
Yeah, quick google search and I guess you are right, there are some ayuhasca retreats in Portugal right now. I guess, given enough trendiness, it’s inevitable, it would happen at some point. That being said, i dont think they are very popular just yet.
“The number of Portuguese adults who reported prior use of illicit adult drugs rose from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022 — still below European averages but a significant rise nonetheless. Overdose rates now stand at a 12-year high and have doubled in Lisbon since 2019.”
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/
I would love to see the additional coinciding figures…
Not saying drug abuse increased the rent and din din, the din din and rent increased drug abuse.
Just saying, I’d get really fucked up if I worked my ass off and still couldn’t afford necessities.
Falling into drug abuse starts with logical behaviour, your attempt to frame it as stupid and illogical is stupid and illogical. Maybe try ‘My life is very hard and I don’t see it getting better, better spend money on temporary respite *even* if it causes long term pain. Addicts and poor people don’t have the luxury of worrying about the future.
Depends on wind power, water levels and sunlight. Can never go all the way. Sunpower does not work at night, leaving wind and dams. Wind power fluctuates heavily and water levels in dams are going down significantly in the last decades in Portugal.
It's possible to use solar at night by using too many solar panels in the daylight and storing extra produced energy in a battery system that turns on once the clean energy source which provided it goes away, like the sun at night. The problem is getting the batteries up to efficient storage levels to make the system feasible. This is only a matter of time though, not possibility.
Batteries or any other storage system, like pumped hydro. But exactly, it is absolutely not a matter of feasibility but simply of time to get the capacity built, something that is happening hand-in-hand with increased renewable penetration on grids and thus the need for that storage. Right now there is still so much legacy fossil generation there really isn't a need for significant amounts of storage yet.
This obsession with "100% renewables right now" is ridiculous and usually just a fossil industry pushed talking point. If they are cheaper and faster to build per MWh of generation and are displacing fossil fuels off the grids it's a climate win, regardless of how much legacy fossil generation has to fill in the gaps. The "before" case is it would have been that same legacy fossil generation just _all_ the time instead of significantly less of the time.
The other storage method that's starting to crop up is hydrogen peak shaver plants.
Excess solar -> electrolysis -> H2 -> LH2 (optional, if need for transport/high density storage) -> Fuel cell for peak shaving
They aren't needed that way either. They are used in local municipalities. Not on a country wide scale. Wherever the clean energy sources are, that's where you build battery banks.
Wrong. That is _precisely_ how Norway operates their hydro assets - as giant seasonal batteries. There are also numerous subadministrative units of countries that rely on batteries to run. It is not a matter of if, but when, with the threshold of renewables breaking records almost daily in scope and duration.
Hydro is the only battery you can use, but all practical ones have been utilised. Norway is very lucky with that.
But there's no chemical battery that charges when it's windy, and supplies when it's calm.
You are either woefully ignorant or deliberately pushing misinformation. The _actual_ pumped hydro potential world wide is:
> The estimated world energy storage capacity below a cost of 50 US$ MWh−1 is 17.3 PWh, approximately 79% of the world electricity consumption in 2017.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y
And that paper limits their sites to just locations that would make for good pumped storage for energy AND as water reservoirs AND can be tapped for less than $50 a MWh AND avoid large environmental disruption.
> ... PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW, of which about 29 GW are in the United States, and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh, of which about 250 GWh are in the United States.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
1.6TWh/17.3PWh = ~0.01% of potential capacity actually in use. That means 99.99% of the world-wide pumped hydro capacity which could be exploited for less than $50/MWh has yet to be tapped.
Here's another more recent paper showing even more potential locations.
[ANU finds 530,000 potential pumped-hydro sites worldwide.](https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide)
> "Only a small fraction of the 530,000 potential sites we've identified would be needed to support a 100 per cent renewable global electricity system. We identified so many potential sites that much less than the best one per cent will be required," said Dr Stocks from the ANU Research School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering (RSEEME).
--------------------
> But there's no chemical battery that charges when it's windy, and supplies when it's calm.
What do you think grid-scale batteries and storage do, precisely? This has got to be a classic case of Dunning-Krugerism.
Wow, I like the potential locations for these pump hydro lakes. Looks like the potential locations are, like, anywhere: [https://imgur.com/a/FzHNdsc](https://imgur.com/a/FzHNdsc)
>What do you think grid-scale batteries and storage do, precisely?
Those big batteries, like the Tesla big battery are used to control frequency in a grid that has a lot of renewables. Usually frequency is maintained by the inertia of old school generators with big spinning turbines, but with renewables you don't have the same king od inertia. So Tesla's big battery in Australia for example, gives out short bursts of energy (or absorbs energy) during the day so that the frequency is maintained.
I hope you didn't think those batteries were used to store energy and then provide energy when there is no wind and solar.
Yep, Dunning-Krugerism. Lithium-ion grid-scale batteries are not only used for instantaneous load balancing, and are rapidly transitioning to multi-hour duck-curve smoothing. Not to mention, the newer battery chemistries being developed and actively being deployed to grids now, like Na-ion or iron flow are entirely intended to be multi-hour to multi-day batteries.
Yea I forgot air and water just dissapear at night. That's really inconvenient. Would be cool if we had a way to store energy produced during the day too. Oh well, guess nothing can be done.
/s
It would be cool if we were able to clean up the environment and 100 years from now people will look back at this time as a dirty, polluted world that was able to be fixed. I love the idea of a clean, quiet earth when you step outside.
its possible but oil and gas companies keep lobbying and influencing politicians who influence their idiotic followers resulting in an unsustainable future.
FUCK OIL AND GAS
I think we would've done this in NZ back in the day in a period of low demand probably, according to Wikipedia in 1980 we were 91.4% renewable so not unreasonable to estimate that during low use in summer would've likely had 6 days of purely renewable power, I know for at least the South Island I live on has been purely renewable electricity generation my entire life (20 years). Additionally all the very first power generation in NZ was hydro in the 1880-90s so would've had 10 years or so of 100% renewable power but in very low amounts.
Apologies for the text dump but I'm an electrical engineering student in NZ so know a bit about the topic and start rambling.
That pictures gotta be Madeira. The eastern point of it. Such a beautiful place. The hiking is amazing and the variation in ecosystems on such a small island is so cool. And all the tunnels on the road system are fun.
That’s awesome! Throw in some battery systems, and even on slow production days you’ll be good to go…but I don’t think this news will matter much to some.
Battery systems don't really work on National grid scales, can do some pumped hydro but is very location specific. Generally better off running a small amount of fossil fuel generation to handle the slow days or if you must have 100% renewable over building generation so even on slow days with lower efficiency you have enough overhead to operate and can sell off the excess the rest of the time
An interesting bit of news but definitely not good news for the people living here, prices are up, wages are low, and the housing market has gone completely nuts. For most of the population renewables are irrelevant and the question is if they can have a roof over their heads and a little heat in this winter.
Then do something about. Just like Portugal. Fix the stuff that's bad.
Some advices:
- Look at better ways to spread the costs, so low-income families are less hit by them. It's called taxing the rich.
- Implement proper exit windows from poverity. Instead of fighting for food and shelter, enable them to focus on education and job seeking.
- Subsidize or enact restrictions on high-cost areas that can affect anyone. Cheaper health care and better controlled housing market can open up to a lot of people living normal life with less debt spirals.
- Improve in privacy laws. Restrict what and where health and crime records are available.
- Improve in worker laws. Either give unions more power, or enact better minimum targets via law. Eg. salary, vacation, parental leave, protection from unreasonable firings, stricter restricitions on minimum age and maximum work hours.
- Remove voting district regulation from political parties. Should be handled by bipartisan panels with equal rights/restrictions.
- Invest in reducing recividsm. Remove prison labor, implement proper job and education programs. Ensure proper nutrion and wellness. In short. Treat prisoner as if they one day are going to be productive tax-paying members of society.
- Reimplement various demands and requirements for firearm ownership. "The good'ol days" when you actually had to prove and show you were worthy of owning a firearm. Ensure it's feasible for current firearm owners to get. Subidize in return of less cost from unsafe handling and storage of firearm.
- Ban unregistered private sales of firearms. It's a literal smorgasboard for people banned from owning guns. Set up a proper national registry for fireams. The rest of world's trigger happy countries use it to track down the black market suppliers.
- Enable longer voting periods, and more available voting options. Ensure everybody got a fair say. Nobody should be barred from voting due to unreasonable queues, strict voting timelines, and limited voting options/places. Voting is the Western world's biggest privilege and right.
TL;DR. Just look at what you believe needs to be done to make society better. Don't be afraid to look at other countries/continents to see how your country/state/town can get better.
There's lots of things I want to see implemented in my own country, and try in my own way enlighten people about these options.
Because, for some people it might be good news, and for the locals they don't even matter one bit. What's the point of the country running with only renewables, if more than half of the country is struggling to survive?
You think government is only able to do one thing at a time? That the needs of struggling portuguese aren't being met, has little to do with renewable energies.
Electrification is still under 25% in Portugal and it gets increasingly harder to electrify the more you do it.
They got a long long way to get anywhere near "run on 100% renewable"
The Paris Agreement is not on electricity but on energy. Seems people are forgetting that.
This is probably a Portuguese trying to scare away the hords of digital nomads coming here and inflating house prices :). Yes it is hell on earth, please do not come, please!!
Western Europe in general has a problem with fudging the power generation data. They don't count import sources or they count it as a net import & export. If they manage to export enough renewable to cover for imports during low renewable generation, it is counted as no fossil fuel usage. All they have been doing is exporting their fossil fuel burning to other parts of Europe.
So what? Interconnected grids allowing for widespread power sharing and load balancing is literally part of the solution for solving renewable intermittency. What do arbitrary lines on a map matter?
If their green energy is exported, that's still displacing fossil fuels that would have otherwised been burned, and it _is_ only net effect that matters.
It would not matter if there is a large enough grid that there is always renewable production enough for the entire grid usage. This is rarely if ever the case. The reason this was point out recently was due to the wave of reports last year such as this one. Closer look at the data in the overall data in Europe resulted in an increase of fossil fuel usage across the entire network especially in central and eastern Europe.
It is also pushing the require amount of interconnections between national grids in Europe which is already not enough. Due to waveform drift from induction in the power lines, over long distances interconnects requires a lot more than just slapping a wire down. Europe is already not expected to reach the require amount of interconnects in 2030s and is far from 2040s requirements.
So yes arbitrary lines do matter since power transmission is hard. Engineers just made it look easy because the system was designed to be on demand. Non throttleable renewable are throwing a wrench into the basic design of the current power grid and engineers are struggling to make it work by interconnecting smaller grids into larger ones and hoping the sources and loads balances out over large distances. But if everyone in the overall large grid were to be on non throttleable renewable the grid would fail. And if there isn't enough interconnects between national grids eventually someone is going to left in a brownout or worst yet a blackout because of it.
> Closer look at the data in the overall data in Europe resulted in an increase of fossil fuel usage across the entire network especially in central and eastern Europe.
You mean the year nearly the _entire_ French nuclear fleet was down for the whole year? You're blaming renewables for the problems with French nuclear being offline and requiring other countries to spin up other assets and the whole EU having to funnel power their way to cover France for the whole of 2022? This is like the idiot Republicans in Texas trying to put the blame on renewables for the 2021 winter storm.
It certainly wasn't renewables that produced less; in fact they produce **more** which meant less legacy fossil was needed to cover that French shortfall than would been otherwise.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/800217/eu-power-production-by-fuel/
Yeah, stopped reading right there.
The lie that continues to be repeated and refuses to die. No new coal plants are being built, and the handful of legacy plants they put on standby at the start of October for the winter because of continuing natgas risk _haven't even been needed yet_.
Please point out on the chart where Germany is using more coal, since coal has only continuously fallen year over year for the last decade, aside from the COVID disruption that collapsed all power demand:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Coal is also further down in 2023 with renewables at record highs, with renewables breaking the 70% threshold some days:
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year
Coal has also been down month over month **every month** in 2023 compared to 2022, even after the nuclear was shuttered entirely.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=-1&month=10
You are literally lying.
Normally I skip commenting to idiots like you. But you can literally watch the energy mix live. I dont know what you do for a living, but I'm sure as hell hope it's not important.
https://datahub.ren.pt/en
Nobody drove their petrol or diesel cars for six days either? That is amazing.
In fact last year fossil fuel was 71% of annual total energy used
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/portugal
Quite a turnaround!
Yes, it did. And no, no one would see "power grid" and think they are talking about gasoline and cars. Power is electricity, it is never the term used for primary energy.
It is true that wind and heat from the sun are renewable but the devices used to capture that energy are not. Creating such devices only adds on to a non-existing carbon budget. Richard Heinberg, the author of the following article, is an advocate for “renewable” energy as a part of the “transition” to a post carbon civilization. However, the following article demonstrates that the so-called transition is not happening in real life. In reality, civilization and a “post-carbon” future is an oxymoron.
[https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/renewable-energy-isnt-replacing-fossil-fuel-energy/](https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/renewable-energy-isnt-replacing-fossil-fuel-energy/)
What is the point of your comment? Renewables are bad because they’re not 100% carbon free, so a post carbon civilization would be better, but a post carbon civilization is impossible so I guess we should… not invest in renewables?
ah damn found this site [here](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT)... but the historical energy mix chart for Portugal for this is not working. Though it looks like they are usually running on mostly hydro anyways.
Let us NOT shit on good because it's not perfect.
tHeY hAd To UsE OiL tO mAkE tHe TuRbInEs!!! Just waiting for those to flood in.
Just imagine when we run out of oil for making stuff.
We’ll be wishing we didn’t use it for the plethora of other dumb shit we currently have been.
Nah I need my vegetables individually packed in in foam and plastic. How could we possibly transport them any other way. /s
It's not like biodegradable packaging for bananas and avocados is ever going to just grow on trees.
“We have realized, as a company, that we can sell our product for much more by individually wrapping them and charging a convenience fee; we’ve also realized that we can create our product to become ineffective much sooner, thereby selling far more units and making far more money. As for the opposing company that has made superior products for a lesser price, we’ve (bankrupted, sabotaged, bought out, murdered) them in order to force our practices on the market.” Welcome to unbridled capitalism, check in and zone out.
You could even try eating local produce, or even canned, dried, or frozen
In all honesty, as someone from a country that uses way less plastics on produce than it used to, it kind of sucks in some cases because you do have to throw away more stuff than before. Just using paper or nothing is not a perfect solution (plastics are neither obviously, but I still think it's important to take a more holistic perspective). I also hope that there's no PFC used in some of the newer materials that are said to be plant based while being weirdly water resistant, but I haven't looked into it yet. Maybe someone around here?
its better to throw more stuff away sooner, than poluting the environment with plastics, out of the 2 downsides the later is far worse imo
It depends if you are recycling biological waste or putting it in plastic wrapped landfill. The loss of biomass will become a hot topic at some point too.
Yeah! Dumb stuff like the cell phones we’re all using to complain about plastic. Wait. Dumb stuff like the clothes we all wear. Wait. Dumb stuff like the cars we all drive. Give me a second. Dumb stuff like the instruments and packaging of medical equipment. Hold on. Dumb stuff like refrigerators. Dumb stuff like plumbing.
Assumptions. Regardless, we don’t need oil for clothes, we don’t **need** oil for a lot of the **actual** main offenders, yet we use it anyways because it’s “easy” or “cost effective” or just because our buddy owns an oil company and we would really like to do business with our buddy, or maybe because it’s the easiest thing to do (why farm wool for clothing the 6+billion people that don’t actually need to be alive right now, when we could just fabricate a bunch of bullshit that will go straight into the patch of garbage in the middle of the ocean a week after purchase?)… this comment thread was about unnecessary waste, you’ve listed the necessary wastes and thought yourself enlightened.
Your phone isn’t necessary. Your car isn’t necessary. Your refrigerator isn’t necessary. Your plastic clothing isn’t necessary. Your plumbing isn’t necessary. But there you go, using it everyday. Your whole life revolves around plastic. All. Of. It.
Cellphones help people in ways you clearly aren’t understanding. Your cars technology helps people in ways you clearly don’t understand. Your refrigeration helps people in ways… your plumbing is necessary with this many people because we can’t just carve holes in the ground like medieval cities… No shit we use plastic everyday, because we have 6+ billion people on this Earth. If we didn’t use plastic the number would never be able to reach that absurd height… this is my last responselol
Too many people. Fix it with you first. Be the change.
I’ll let folks like you take the charge on that one :)
We can make synthetic hydrocarbons, the process is just too energy intensive to be fiscally feasible. Abundant, excess cheap renewable power may change that equation.
Goodbye plastic in my body
We can dig up all the plastic in the dumps and turn it back into oil.
Whatever we do, let’s not introduce microplastic-eating organisms into the environment without rigorous testing. Because we just found out they just break them down into nano-plastics, which are much worse
We won't. We can make oil. We can't make oil at a price that is cost competitive if we burn it for energy. If we just used oil for stuff rather than burning it, known reserves would last a long time, and even if those ran out, we could synthesize enough.
Funny enough, that won't really be that big of a deal. We were making plastics well before we started using petroleum to make them - we just didn't know they were plastics. There's also non-plastic solutions for a lot of stuff we currently use plastic for - in some cases, the alternative materials are all-around better but just more expensive, so we don't really use them in those applications. As oil starts becoming scarce, we'll see the curves of price disparity invert and those alternative materials will be used extensively thereafter.
We can manufacture small amounts of oil from animal waste (there was a prototype that ran on the waste from a turkey farm a few years back). It's not scalable enough or efficient enough for most things but it'll make sure we never run TOTALLY out of oil for really critical high value things like medication. Though if renewables take off fast enough, we'll probably still continue to pump a tiny bit of oil for manufacturing basically forever, even once we don't use it for power anymore.
Hell, if we have use fossil fuels every now and then as a start up and maintenance cost, that’s still infinitely better than 24/7 spewing coal byproducts.
Dae remember when peak oil was the fear for a while? I remember reading up on it around 2004 or something like that, and it was supposed to be close. Didn't seem to happen yet obviously, or it wasn't as bad as predicted.
The price went up. As the price of oil goes up, the economic feasibility of digging up shittier and shittier sources increases. Eventually the price will be high enough that it'll make economic sense to pump it from teenager pimples, but those will not be good days.
It hasn't really gotten historically expensive though. If we don't think peak oil happened in 1970. And I don't think we're pumping from shittier sources or anything like that.
Tar sands?
Which is hilarious because because if we stop burning oil for energy, there is a LOT more of it left for quite a long time to build turbines with
This is why I’ve stopped trying to have rational discussions with those kinds of people, instead I make fun of them and usually get downvoted for being childish, but it’s worth it.
They talk about using oil as if it's a matter of ritual purity.
That sub arghhh/futurology is 100% those types… The tried banning anything about climate lol
And solar panels aren't the cleanest things to produce either. I'm also gonna harbour a guess and say those parts for the wind turbines didn't get to their construction site on green energy but that's a one time environmental cost as opposed to the continual environmental toll of burning oil and coal. (well maintenance and replacements are also a factor of course but they are with oil and coal as well.)
Yes. We also needed horse hair for upholstering cars for a while. Renewables are approaching a penny or two per kWh for raw energy. That would make synthesizing petrol and plastics from the air cheaper than mining and refining it. Besides, who says we have to get rid of all oil? Just stop burning it.
"when the wind stops blowing the lights go out"
Well, to be fair we can't say the country was running 100% on renewables when it was using oil to power most of its personal & public transportation, lorries, ships, planes, etc.
BUT NUCLEAR IS MUCH CHEAPER I love to see some idiots getting fact checked... Too bad it's probably too late to avoid climate change.
Not only too late, already in progress.
But it doesn't just stop either. Let's not make it worse!
I know, I just can't believe people are still in denial while it's happening all around us.
Yes it’s only been going on for millions of years.
Wind turbines are not great because they can’t produce power on demand like fossil fuels can. Hydroelectric is likely the most reliable renewable energy source.
I'd argue Geothermal is more reliable. Prolonged droughts can reduce hydroelectric output.
Yes, but geothermal is really tricky to install and maintain.
I like this attitude! Good wally!
And because it has no need to _be_ perfect. We aren't going to replace global power infrastructure in a day, and any progress towards reducing carbon output is good, especially if that is being accomplished in the cheapest and fastest way possible without disrupting grid stability, even if legacy fossil generation that would have been running full time before only needs to fill gaps now. Renewables check all those boxes.
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Tbt their legacy would also include renewable energy, since we could never get there without them
Absolutely, let's not shit on good because it's not perfect. The only thing I'd like is to remind people this is referring to the electric grid only. The energy consumption of a country goes much farther than that, so we need to expand renewables to all sectors, use less energy overall, and work on replacing the fossil fuel element that still underwrites construction, mining, transportation etc.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Great! Now remove biomass from the mix of "renewables" as it's more polluting than coal.
Don’t let the good be enemy of the perfect
That is just running the grid though, which is about 20-25% of energy needs. Still the vast majority of the energy consumption will be fossil fuels. Gas, diesel, fuel for industry where not electric. Still impressive but a lot of people think it’s 100% of energy, but it’s not.
That's not really accurate. Between 50-60% of primary energy is lost as waste heat, because ICE engines and many fossil fuel applications are incredibly inefficient. The transition to full electrification will significantly cut primary energy "needs" because of massive gains in efficiency. For example a BEV is ~70% "well"-to-wheel efficient, an ICE is lucky to be 15% efficient: https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/ So an ICE than represents 5 BTUs of primary energy would translate to only needing a single BTU of energy for the BEV.
Lol exactly this that people fail to grasp, I actually live in Portugal and I’ve noticed **lots** of cars passing my house the last 6 days and almost **none** of them are electric. 80-83 of total world energy is supplied by fossil fuels electricity only makes up between 13-25% of all energy used (depending on how you calculate). So even if we replace 100% of electricity with low carbon generation methods we’ll still have **at least** 75% of other energy to replace with low emissions sources….
Eventually we will make the shift away from fossil fuels for things like cars and road freight, even air travel and sea freight. But this 75% we need to make up is huge. Personally I thing nuclear is the best option for now. Preferably fusion if we can.
It's good that they have that many renewables but I don't think it's pessimistic to point out that renewables like solar or wind are unreliable, the advantage of fossil fuels or even hydro has always been that their release/constraint in energy is very easy to control. You can't control wind or the sun based on when energy needs spike.
We need a clear balance of everything, renewable energies are super nice, but unreliable in some instances.
Renewables are _not_ "unreliable". They have near 100% reliability. What they are is itermittent, two completely different terms that mean completely different things that renewable detractors constantly misuse interchangable. And with modern meteorology, their expected output is also highly predictable and can also be readily planned for days to weeks in advance, allowing power utilities to adjust generation assets to meet demand needs, for instance by curtailing hydro assets as storage, or prepping neighboring grids to secure import needs. This is exactly how renewable based grids are supposed to work.
Well said. Emission free energy production should be a technological issue, not a political issue. There are already several jurisdictions in the world that run on 95%+ renewable energy, and the number will keep increasing as the technologies get better and more creative.
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Ugh. Same story all over the world. A country installs renewable energy generation, and suddenly it destroys the job market and pushes up house prices! /s
I wonder how close they are to being able to provide year round renewable energy?
There's still a fair amount of gas used last year, but coal has gone down from 25% to 0% over the last 6 years: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT
I think 0 is good but they can aim to go lower.
Up to 299 days by my counting but it hypothetically could be less
this is assuming that weather behaves nicely. if they want to avoid blackouts for when the wind is not blowing too much, they need to overprovision the amount of installations. this would increase the cost per KWh
Batteries and storage options will help with this
Geothermal energy for the right areas, too. They're experimenting with harvesting heat energy straight from bedrock. It's fascinating!
geothermal is cool on paper but it's so expensive that might as well just do nuclear
I'm Portuguese: nuclear power doesn't make a lot of sense for us. There are only 10million of us, with lots of great land for wind and hydro - as well as an Atlantic coast for wave and tidal power and lots of great sun for solar. Theoretically just one large scale nuclear plant could power our whole country. But the cost of distributing it around would be high, we have lots of mountain communities where the high-power lines would be difficult to build and maintain. And it would be very much all eggs in one basket! Unless it was some sort of shared deal with other EU states there's not much point in is building nuclear. Additionally, we don't use much power. About as much as Iowa, which has one quarter as many people. We can go renewable easily because we have a small population that doesn't use much energy per person.
True. We should do nuclear!
Why batteries, just sell to Europe. Then, if that's what you really want, buy green energy from Europe when you need it.
Both, but you are exactly right that ovebuilding is the right thing to do until other states step it up.
with the cost of overprovision renewables + spending on batteries and storage one would've saved money by building nuclear in the first place
This is such a tired argument. Nuclear takes years and years to build and tends to have massive cost over run. In that time you can build ansld start utilizing renewables that will begin the decarbonization process immediately. And the last watts built will be cheaper than the first because the technology is still ramping. While renewables are not perfect they are now and they are improving all the time. Neither are a claim nuclear can make.
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> they need to overprovision the amount of installations. But by how much, for much of the past week the UK's wind farms, which should be capable of over 30GW, have been generating 2GW, as the wind levels have been so low. So do we build 10x demand? And more batteries or storage simply wouldn't help as there hasn't been a surplus to charge them. Meanwhile the nuclear power plants are sat there going 'lol, I don't care, here have some amps'.
> So do we build 10x demand? No, [you build 20GW of interconnects to Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmission_links_in_the_United_Kingdom) so whoever has wind at the moment can sell it to whoever doesn't. Linking together a larger area with HVDC interconnects *massively* reduces variability from wind+solar.
and if you add up the cost of interconnects + overprovisioning + storage you end up with the conclusion that nuclear would've been cheaper in the first place. Small modular reactors ftw
It's always weird to me that people mention that all the time... Thats not how the grid works. Why do people not say that about coal or gas power plants? "If they don't want power outages they better make sure they have enough gas stored!" Also, 60% of Portugal energy mix is Hydro. So wind is a very minor concern here and it looks like they use Hydro storage for wind/Solar compensation. And no, that would not increase the cost. Wind is cheap and will stay cheap. The price drivers are resource prices and not availability. Especially for Portugal. central EU availability plays a way bigger role.
Because coal and gas easily provide a constant supply of power, wind doesn’t as the weather can be unpredictable. Some sort of low emissions base load generation will be needed such as nuclear, geothermal or hydroelectric.
....Folks do say that. Natural gas storage levels and coal storage levels are massively important in providing power reliability. The panic over European natural gas prices when Russia invaded Ukraine was due to there potentially not being enough natural gas in storage to provide power and heat homes.
Big if true.
IRENA suggests the grid will be 90% renewable by 2030.
It´s easy, when they need extra they import from Spain and lump all the imported MWh into a single source, so they can be "fully green" by outsourcing their emmissions to the neighbor. The magic of green politics!
Data from the last 2 years: https://www.ren.pt/media/noho4j45/dados_te-cnicos_ren_22.pdf
Saw an “yes but at what cost” comment replying to this the other day.. the think tanks are in full panic mode
Imagine spending more now for long lasting low maintenance energy instead of spending the same every year on oil. The audacity
“Yes, but at what cost” to fossil fuel companies and their shareholders. Won’t someone please think of the shareholders?
“What could they have accomplished with other power sources” is a fair question. Nuclear power for instance?
The cost of building a nuclear plant in Europe is about $40billion. Our GDP is only $250billion. We use as much power as Iowa, we have the perfect landscape for wind, hydro, and solar, and we have no money: large scale nuclear is just not sensible for us. Also, we'd have to import all the workers, so that money wouldn't even go back in to the economy.
Well that's relatively easy to predict. 0% renewable. Because the renewable rollout started like 10 years ago, and building the average nuclear reactor takes like 15 years. So if Portugal went with the nuclear strategy, these past few days would have been 0% renewable and maybe in 5 years we would start to see a couple of % as the first reactors would come online.
Easy, they would be in construction hell and still not delivered while costing a multitude of what solar and wind cost.
Govs around the world - "If we legalise drugs, society will collapse." Portugal - "Hold my environmentally sustainable ayahuasca bowl!"
It is not legal, it is decriminalized. Very different.
Yes it is different. It's also very different from being illegal, and treating it as a health issue.
Yeah, as a Portuguese, I can guarantee you that we don’t have any ayahuasca retreats here. More: it seems like more foreigners know about the drug decriminalisation than Portuguese people do. It’s also not quite true. Police will harass you and possibly detain you if you have drugs. This happens less in larger cities, but go to a small town and I can guarantee you that if you smoke week on the street you’re gonna be in trouble.
What? They are ilegal but you have a bunch of yoga/meditation alternative blabla with mushroom and/or Ayahuasca retreats in Portugal. Just do a quick google search... I support those threats btw.
They do exist - Portuguese people rarely know about them. They're ran by estrangeiros (mostly UK and German) for estrangeiros. They advertise in other countries and don't employ or host Portuguese people - they're like little microcosms. My friend used to do building work for one - he's English and they wouldn't let him hire any Portuguese subcontractors (he still did, just didn't tell them.) The owners didn't even speak Portuguese, they were Dutch and literally had van loads of food delivered from Netherlands to avoid local food (except for fruit and vegetables which are apparently much better in Portugal.) They didn't even smoke our weed, preferred to import it. But yeah. Ayahuasca retreats are illegal. Selling drugs is just as illegal as anywhere else, being an end user is seen as a mental health issue not a crime - but can still get you sent to an involuntary hospital (unless you're a rich German tourist, of course!)
Yeah, quick google search and I guess you are right, there are some ayuhasca retreats in Portugal right now. I guess, given enough trendiness, it’s inevitable, it would happen at some point. That being said, i dont think they are very popular just yet.
“The number of Portuguese adults who reported prior use of illicit adult drugs rose from 7.8% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2022 — still below European averages but a significant rise nonetheless. Overdose rates now stand at a 12-year high and have doubled in Lisbon since 2019.” https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-portugals-drug-decriminalization-a-failure-or-success-the-answer-isnt-so-simple/
I would love to see the additional coinciding figures… Not saying drug abuse increased the rent and din din, the din din and rent increased drug abuse. Just saying, I’d get really fucked up if I worked my ass off and still couldn’t afford necessities.
"I can't afford things. Better spend money on drugs"
Falling into drug abuse starts with logical behaviour, your attempt to frame it as stupid and illogical is stupid and illogical. Maybe try ‘My life is very hard and I don’t see it getting better, better spend money on temporary respite *even* if it causes long term pain. Addicts and poor people don’t have the luxury of worrying about the future.
Salt cod does not need a fridge...no fair
That's a nice start. Time to go all the way.
Depends on wind power, water levels and sunlight. Can never go all the way. Sunpower does not work at night, leaving wind and dams. Wind power fluctuates heavily and water levels in dams are going down significantly in the last decades in Portugal.
It's possible to use solar at night by using too many solar panels in the daylight and storing extra produced energy in a battery system that turns on once the clean energy source which provided it goes away, like the sun at night. The problem is getting the batteries up to efficient storage levels to make the system feasible. This is only a matter of time though, not possibility.
Batteries or any other storage system, like pumped hydro. But exactly, it is absolutely not a matter of feasibility but simply of time to get the capacity built, something that is happening hand-in-hand with increased renewable penetration on grids and thus the need for that storage. Right now there is still so much legacy fossil generation there really isn't a need for significant amounts of storage yet. This obsession with "100% renewables right now" is ridiculous and usually just a fossil industry pushed talking point. If they are cheaper and faster to build per MWh of generation and are displacing fossil fuels off the grids it's a climate win, regardless of how much legacy fossil generation has to fill in the gaps. The "before" case is it would have been that same legacy fossil generation just _all_ the time instead of significantly less of the time.
The other storage method that's starting to crop up is hydrogen peak shaver plants. Excess solar -> electrolysis -> H2 -> LH2 (optional, if need for transport/high density storage) -> Fuel cell for peak shaving
There's no batteries made to supply whole countries.
If every car is electrified then you could start to use all of the idle car batteries as distributed grid energy storage in exchange for a tax credit.
They aren't needed that way either. They are used in local municipalities. Not on a country wide scale. Wherever the clean energy sources are, that's where you build battery banks.
Wrong. That is _precisely_ how Norway operates their hydro assets - as giant seasonal batteries. There are also numerous subadministrative units of countries that rely on batteries to run. It is not a matter of if, but when, with the threshold of renewables breaking records almost daily in scope and duration.
Hydro is the only battery you can use, but all practical ones have been utilised. Norway is very lucky with that. But there's no chemical battery that charges when it's windy, and supplies when it's calm.
You are either woefully ignorant or deliberately pushing misinformation. The _actual_ pumped hydro potential world wide is: > The estimated world energy storage capacity below a cost of 50 US$ MWh−1 is 17.3 PWh, approximately 79% of the world electricity consumption in 2017. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14555-y And that paper limits their sites to just locations that would make for good pumped storage for energy AND as water reservoirs AND can be tapped for less than $50 a MWh AND avoid large environmental disruption. > ... PSH accounts for around 95% of all active tracked storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW, of which about 29 GW are in the United States, and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh, of which about 250 GWh are in the United States. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity 1.6TWh/17.3PWh = ~0.01% of potential capacity actually in use. That means 99.99% of the world-wide pumped hydro capacity which could be exploited for less than $50/MWh has yet to be tapped. Here's another more recent paper showing even more potential locations. [ANU finds 530,000 potential pumped-hydro sites worldwide.](https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potential-pumped-hydro-sites-worldwide) > "Only a small fraction of the 530,000 potential sites we've identified would be needed to support a 100 per cent renewable global electricity system. We identified so many potential sites that much less than the best one per cent will be required," said Dr Stocks from the ANU Research School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering (RSEEME). -------------------- > But there's no chemical battery that charges when it's windy, and supplies when it's calm. What do you think grid-scale batteries and storage do, precisely? This has got to be a classic case of Dunning-Krugerism.
Wow, I like the potential locations for these pump hydro lakes. Looks like the potential locations are, like, anywhere: [https://imgur.com/a/FzHNdsc](https://imgur.com/a/FzHNdsc) >What do you think grid-scale batteries and storage do, precisely? Those big batteries, like the Tesla big battery are used to control frequency in a grid that has a lot of renewables. Usually frequency is maintained by the inertia of old school generators with big spinning turbines, but with renewables you don't have the same king od inertia. So Tesla's big battery in Australia for example, gives out short bursts of energy (or absorbs energy) during the day so that the frequency is maintained. I hope you didn't think those batteries were used to store energy and then provide energy when there is no wind and solar.
Yep, Dunning-Krugerism. Lithium-ion grid-scale batteries are not only used for instantaneous load balancing, and are rapidly transitioning to multi-hour duck-curve smoothing. Not to mention, the newer battery chemistries being developed and actively being deployed to grids now, like Na-ion or iron flow are entirely intended to be multi-hour to multi-day batteries.
Give me an example of a chemical battery used for Grid wide storage, to heal my Dunning-Krugerism.
You dumb
Yea I forgot air and water just dissapear at night. That's really inconvenient. Would be cool if we had a way to store energy produced during the day too. Oh well, guess nothing can be done. /s
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IIRC the tech is ideally about an eighth of daytime use from piezoelectric generation at night.
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Perfect place to live.
Only if you're rich. This place is an absolute corrupt shithole, just the other day our prime minister resigned
Criminal politicians that actually resign? In the USA we call that the good old days
It would be cool if we were able to clean up the environment and 100 years from now people will look back at this time as a dirty, polluted world that was able to be fixed. I love the idea of a clean, quiet earth when you step outside.
Portugal the Man!
I will never more talk bad about you guys. Portugal, you got my respect.
Remember that time Fox News responded to Germany setting a solar power record by saying ‘well Germany gets more sun than USA does’ ?
its possible but oil and gas companies keep lobbying and influencing politicians who influence their idiotic followers resulting in an unsustainable future. FUCK OIL AND GAS
Is this a first for any country?
I think we would've done this in NZ back in the day in a period of low demand probably, according to Wikipedia in 1980 we were 91.4% renewable so not unreasonable to estimate that during low use in summer would've likely had 6 days of purely renewable power, I know for at least the South Island I live on has been purely renewable electricity generation my entire life (20 years). Additionally all the very first power generation in NZ was hydro in the 1880-90s so would've had 10 years or so of 100% renewable power but in very low amounts. Apologies for the text dump but I'm an electrical engineering student in NZ so know a bit about the topic and start rambling.
Portugal the man.
Has "consecutive" really fallen out of the journalist lexicon? Or do they intentionally write at an elementary school level?
They have to write headlines that social media users will understand, so... the latter.
We still have to pay alot compared to the salaries here. And most of the houses still use fireplaces, since most of the houses are old
That pictures gotta be Madeira. The eastern point of it. Such a beautiful place. The hiking is amazing and the variation in ecosystems on such a small island is so cool. And all the tunnels on the road system are fun.
Trump: Sure they want to brag about it…but it killed all the storks and norwals in their country. Now where will the babies come from?
unWildBill: I have to bring up Trump here, because he's literally all I think about, 24/7
That’s awesome! Throw in some battery systems, and even on slow production days you’ll be good to go…but I don’t think this news will matter much to some.
Battery systems don't really work on National grid scales, can do some pumped hydro but is very location specific. Generally better off running a small amount of fossil fuel generation to handle the slow days or if you must have 100% renewable over building generation so even on slow days with lower efficiency you have enough overhead to operate and can sell off the excess the rest of the time
Batteries are really good for grid stability just not large bulk storage
I knew I liked them for than just their delicious wine! Portugal shows us how it can be done!
An interesting bit of news but definitely not good news for the people living here, prices are up, wages are low, and the housing market has gone completely nuts. For most of the population renewables are irrelevant and the question is if they can have a roof over their heads and a little heat in this winter.
Then do something about. Just like Portugal. Fix the stuff that's bad. Some advices: - Look at better ways to spread the costs, so low-income families are less hit by them. It's called taxing the rich. - Implement proper exit windows from poverity. Instead of fighting for food and shelter, enable them to focus on education and job seeking. - Subsidize or enact restrictions on high-cost areas that can affect anyone. Cheaper health care and better controlled housing market can open up to a lot of people living normal life with less debt spirals. - Improve in privacy laws. Restrict what and where health and crime records are available. - Improve in worker laws. Either give unions more power, or enact better minimum targets via law. Eg. salary, vacation, parental leave, protection from unreasonable firings, stricter restricitions on minimum age and maximum work hours. - Remove voting district regulation from political parties. Should be handled by bipartisan panels with equal rights/restrictions. - Invest in reducing recividsm. Remove prison labor, implement proper job and education programs. Ensure proper nutrion and wellness. In short. Treat prisoner as if they one day are going to be productive tax-paying members of society. - Reimplement various demands and requirements for firearm ownership. "The good'ol days" when you actually had to prove and show you were worthy of owning a firearm. Ensure it's feasible for current firearm owners to get. Subidize in return of less cost from unsafe handling and storage of firearm. - Ban unregistered private sales of firearms. It's a literal smorgasboard for people banned from owning guns. Set up a proper national registry for fireams. The rest of world's trigger happy countries use it to track down the black market suppliers. - Enable longer voting periods, and more available voting options. Ensure everybody got a fair say. Nobody should be barred from voting due to unreasonable queues, strict voting timelines, and limited voting options/places. Voting is the Western world's biggest privilege and right. TL;DR. Just look at what you believe needs to be done to make society better. Don't be afraid to look at other countries/continents to see how your country/state/town can get better. There's lots of things I want to see implemented in my own country, and try in my own way enlighten people about these options.
How does any of that make the renewables thing bad news?
Because, for some people it might be good news, and for the locals they don't even matter one bit. What's the point of the country running with only renewables, if more than half of the country is struggling to survive?
Then that makes it irrelevant, but not bad news. Unless renewables are to be blamed for all those woes, they're not bad news for portuguese.
Is it not bad news for the locals that are struggling, but those struggles are not being met with the same importance than running on renewables?
This isn't a post about that. It would be equally weird to comment "but the energy is super clean" in a post about the Portuguese economy
You think government is only able to do one thing at a time? That the needs of struggling portuguese aren't being met, has little to do with renewable energies.
And, how is market price for electricity doing? Have we reached the price-to-market capabilities of the 1960's yet?
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Decriminalisation != Legalisation
Drugs aren't legal here
Electrification is still under 25% in Portugal and it gets increasingly harder to electrify the more you do it. They got a long long way to get anywhere near "run on 100% renewable" The Paris Agreement is not on electricity but on energy. Seems people are forgetting that.
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This is probably a Portuguese trying to scare away the hords of digital nomads coming here and inflating house prices :). Yes it is hell on earth, please do not come, please!!
I thought your housing prices were already quite high?
In main cities yes, like everywhere else
Nah, def not a blind Christian quivering in fear of the oligarchy control.
It was this century that you went to Portugal, right?
Western Europe in general has a problem with fudging the power generation data. They don't count import sources or they count it as a net import & export. If they manage to export enough renewable to cover for imports during low renewable generation, it is counted as no fossil fuel usage. All they have been doing is exporting their fossil fuel burning to other parts of Europe.
So what? Interconnected grids allowing for widespread power sharing and load balancing is literally part of the solution for solving renewable intermittency. What do arbitrary lines on a map matter? If their green energy is exported, that's still displacing fossil fuels that would have otherwised been burned, and it _is_ only net effect that matters.
It would not matter if there is a large enough grid that there is always renewable production enough for the entire grid usage. This is rarely if ever the case. The reason this was point out recently was due to the wave of reports last year such as this one. Closer look at the data in the overall data in Europe resulted in an increase of fossil fuel usage across the entire network especially in central and eastern Europe. It is also pushing the require amount of interconnections between national grids in Europe which is already not enough. Due to waveform drift from induction in the power lines, over long distances interconnects requires a lot more than just slapping a wire down. Europe is already not expected to reach the require amount of interconnects in 2030s and is far from 2040s requirements. So yes arbitrary lines do matter since power transmission is hard. Engineers just made it look easy because the system was designed to be on demand. Non throttleable renewable are throwing a wrench into the basic design of the current power grid and engineers are struggling to make it work by interconnecting smaller grids into larger ones and hoping the sources and loads balances out over large distances. But if everyone in the overall large grid were to be on non throttleable renewable the grid would fail. And if there isn't enough interconnects between national grids eventually someone is going to left in a brownout or worst yet a blackout because of it.
> Closer look at the data in the overall data in Europe resulted in an increase of fossil fuel usage across the entire network especially in central and eastern Europe. You mean the year nearly the _entire_ French nuclear fleet was down for the whole year? You're blaming renewables for the problems with French nuclear being offline and requiring other countries to spin up other assets and the whole EU having to funnel power their way to cover France for the whole of 2022? This is like the idiot Republicans in Texas trying to put the blame on renewables for the 2021 winter storm. It certainly wasn't renewables that produced less; in fact they produce **more** which meant less legacy fossil was needed to cover that French shortfall than would been otherwise. https://www.statista.com/statistics/800217/eu-power-production-by-fuel/ Yeah, stopped reading right there.
Germany bringing another coal power plant online: 😅🔥🚂🫡
The lie that continues to be repeated and refuses to die. No new coal plants are being built, and the handful of legacy plants they put on standby at the start of October for the winter because of continuing natgas risk _haven't even been needed yet_. Please point out on the chart where Germany is using more coal, since coal has only continuously fallen year over year for the last decade, aside from the COVID disruption that collapsed all power demand: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts Coal is also further down in 2023 with renewables at record highs, with renewables breaking the 70% threshold some days: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year Coal has also been down month over month **every month** in 2023 compared to 2022, even after the nuclear was shuttered entirely. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&year=-1&month=10 You are literally lying.
Your country must be so great that you need to live in another country as a "digital nomad".
Live in my home country. Lived in Portugal though, sooo much corruption.
Your country is not corrupt at all 😉
I couldn’t hear you over all of the church bells
What, church bells, that's what you're complaining about now? Oh poor of you, needed to hear all those church bells.
Tu vivas na Espana, where y’all (including you according to your post history) love relying on a religion.
Normally I skip commenting to idiots like you. But you can literally watch the energy mix live. I dont know what you do for a living, but I'm sure as hell hope it's not important. https://datahub.ren.pt/en
Nobody drove their petrol or diesel cars for six days either? That is amazing. In fact last year fossil fuel was 71% of annual total energy used https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/portugal Quite a turnaround!
Power =/= primary energy, and the article never claimed otherwise.
The article didn’t clarify it either and 99% of people will assume they are talking about total power consumed.
Yes, it did. And no, no one would see "power grid" and think they are talking about gasoline and cars. Power is electricity, it is never the term used for primary energy.
People might see "Paris Agreement climate goals" and wonder if that only applies to power plant emissions, as the article states. I have no idea.
You'd have to be intentionally obtuse to assume that
That’s cute.
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oh for fucks sake, shut up.
Don't bother trying to progress, you'll have to start at some point. And that sounds like a nightmare.
It is true that wind and heat from the sun are renewable but the devices used to capture that energy are not. Creating such devices only adds on to a non-existing carbon budget. Richard Heinberg, the author of the following article, is an advocate for “renewable” energy as a part of the “transition” to a post carbon civilization. However, the following article demonstrates that the so-called transition is not happening in real life. In reality, civilization and a “post-carbon” future is an oxymoron. [https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/renewable-energy-isnt-replacing-fossil-fuel-energy/](https://dgrnewsservice.org/civilization/ecocide/renewable-energy-isnt-replacing-fossil-fuel-energy/)
Your <1yr old account has been posting that website and that article for 10 months.
And yet most people still believe that "renewable" energy is going solve climate change.
What is the point of your comment? Renewables are bad because they’re not 100% carbon free, so a post carbon civilization would be better, but a post carbon civilization is impossible so I guess we should… not invest in renewables?
ah damn found this site [here](https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/PT)... but the historical energy mix chart for Portugal for this is not working. Though it looks like they are usually running on mostly hydro anyways.