Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 2/05/2025 9:38 am, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Thu, 1 May 2025 22:12:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
 

On 2025-04-30 23:28, Joe Gwinn wrote:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:33:17 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
<robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

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The Wall Street Journal just published an analysis.  The authors are
Spanish.
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How the Lights Went Out in Spain
The country flew too close to the sun — which is to say it relied too
heavily on unreliable solar power.
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The following link should not require a subscription.
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.<https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-the-lights-went-out-in-spain-solar-power-electric-grid-0096bbc7?st=MbzSqb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink>

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I believe that one to be biased against renewable power.

 The WSJ is one of the main newspapers of the Finance world.  The UK
equivalent is the Financial Times, although FT's politics are closer
to the EU than the US.

The Wall Street Journal may be "one of the main newspapers of the Finance world" but it s still owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he used it to keep his fossil carbon advertisers happy by publishing a lot of climate change denial propaganda. The financial world doesn't know much about science and couldn't care less.

Anyway, the Finance folk worry about profit and loss, and so are not
against renewable power per se.

In fact they are in favour of it, because it is cheaper. The fact that it tends to be intermittent ought to worry them, but engineers are good at masking the intermittency with gear like quick-start gas-turbine power generators and - recently - grid scale batteries, so the financial world ignores what they know to be a soluble problem.

What they are against is mandating and subsidizing:  If X is such a
good idea, it will just take over naturally, without requiring
mandates and subsidies. So they will question X, whatever it happens
to be.  Just stop all government actions there, and let the market
settle the issue.

Good new ideas don't just take over naturally. People have to invest loads of money into the new systems, and governments are good at doing that. The natural route is via niche markets, where the new idea is particularly advantageous, and you scale up manufacturing progressively to let you exploit economies of scale to make the product cheap enough to compete in markets that are closer to the main stream, but it does take a while. Anthropogenic global warming is moving fast enough to justify investing serious money now to slow it down and eventually reverse it.

Circling back, basically, the engineering numbers don't work.  It's
easy to show that decarbonizing cannot work, as the total CO2 content
of the atmosphere is simply immense, and there is 50 times that much
stored in the ocean deeps.  And China is building coal plants as fast
as they can, so we (US+UK+EU) are a roundoff error compared to China
et al.

China is investing a lot more in renewable generation that it is in replacing old and inefficient coal plants with modern, much more efficient coal plants, though it is still spending a lot on that.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/
https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/chinas-renewables-push-fuels-coal-power-investment/
China added 125GW of wind and solar generating capacity in 2022 compared with 146GW of new coal-fired capacity. In 2023 it only added 117GW of new coal fired capacity and was expected to add only 69GW in 2024.
It did retired some old, inefficient cola-fired plants, but not all that much geerating capacity.
They clearly aren't building new coal-fired plants "as fast as they can" though they are still building a lot of them.
The reports make it clear that they have the same problem as the west - once you have built a coal-fired plant you want to keep on running it to collect the money from the customers who buy the power.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney