alt Hacker NewsThe past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
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Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
You have to think about these things as a portfolio rather than just by minimum price.
If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).
1/5th the price of nuclear.
Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.
There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).
>On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas.
I'm a little bit sad that pumped hydro doesn't get more attention in the discussion. It might be too late for it to matter, with improvements in battery prices and ongoing lithium discoveries. But that only underscores the fact that it should have been allowed to matter twenty years ago. Utilities have slow-walked solar all around the world because of concerns about the grid stability, which has been well within the reach of pumped hydropower to fix since many years ago. In fact major pumped hydropower projects were mostly carried out in the United States during the nuclear power optimism era.
It is a little destructive to construct pumped hydro reservoirs. But it generally isn't as damaging as a conventional hydroelectric dam. The reason lies in the source of the water. In a conventional dam, you need a lot of water flowing in from up high, so you dam a major river near its lower cataracts. This disrupts the migration of fish and animals along the river and impacts the whole ecosystem of the rather large drainage basin upstream, and disrupts the migration of fish. But when a closed-loop pumped storage reservoir is created above an existing lake, usually a much less important stream is selected. Its immediate valley is still inundated, but the area of effect is much less. It does tend to prolong the use of the existing dam, but we are already preserving basically all existing dams.
It might still be appropriate in some places where imports are less affordable like Latin America or it might appeal to protectionists in the West. In general, hydro is usually cheap.
Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.