for them prices are kinda similar. Their npp is 2.5bn/unit. But inland construction is banned.

you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings

ren will not reach 100% in EU because of necessary grid costs and plain data that shows there are continental weather patterns that VRE+bess alone cant solve. Hydro is already mostly tapped and Norway+Sweden dont want interconnect expansion

fyi it's mostly because of becoming net importer and deindustrialization. Amount of low carbon TWh is unchanged since 2015

hydro is mostly tapped, solar on the other hand can grow a lot. And we are talking about electricity, not energy in general. Tackling energy is more about electrification.

Germany is against nuclear so the best it can do is expand renewables with fossils firming, gas to be more precise per fraunhofer. It's better than doing nothing bc it's clear nuclear topic will not change anytime soon there.

Germany is using in day to day about 20-25gw of coal, the rest is reserve.

The price is indeed a challenge - DE spends over 10x more than France on transmission and curtailment and that's on top of EEG fee. Add to that high CO2 tax and you get very high prices

it's winning regardless - every kwh of solar is a kwh less of fossils. You can achieve even deeper decarbonization with nuclear but the perfect shouldnt be the enemy of good. There are countries where nuclear is politically hard and changing ppl's opinions is hard too. So it's either ren+ some fossil firming or just fossils

Another advantage of solar that it is decentralized and difficult/too costly to shut off by a country bombing you (Ukraine benefits from this) (unlike a big centralized power plant).

I think the biggest potential is in the 3rd world countries for which hydrocarbon import is a big drain on their convertible monetary reserves (especially now with the rising oil prices).

A farmer with enough free land and significant diesel bills for his farm machinery would also benefit from having his own solar farm and electric machinery.

Two future developments might be especially useful: 1) extremely cheap (sodium?) batteries (not necessarily ultra compact/light per kwh, just cheap). Moving in that direction but significant price reduction is still needed.

2) an ultra-cheap PV foil you can just roll out and not care too much about the longevity (not sure how feasible, but would be awesome and really handy in many situations)

full decentralization is not a feature but a bug imo - you spend a lot on transmission. Germany now spends 10x more than france on transmission and curtailment and has highest prices in EU. It's the best to have a hybrid - centralized pp and centralized solar/wind parks but distributed evenly across country. Ukraine had also massive loss of ren power because most solar+wind was in south (because of better weather) and destroyed by russia or captured.

Electric machinery is good but crazy expensive, esp in farming sector. Eastern EU still buys bellorusian tractors because of their price...

PV is already sufficiently cheap, the problem is new units start competing with existing units so gains are getting smaller unless you have lots of hydro or bess

Agree about huge sums being spent on fossils, it's a strong grip and getting off isnt cheap either becaus of necessary grid upgrades

You are looking at it from the point of view of 1st world country that has a functioning highly centralized generation and distribution system.

My view is more from the 3rd world country where the generation and distribution is insufficient and unreliable.

To goal is to have local generation closely tied to local production, greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission. Yes, it does not work as well as well functioning global system, but that is not the reality of the 3rd world. And can be achieved much cheaper/simpler than a well-working global system.

Sort of like Africa leapfrogging land lines and going directly to cell phones.

Electric machinary does not have to be crazy expensive. As electric cars do not need to be crazy expensive, that is the market the west is willingly leaving to China/rest of the world. (Just go to China/Asia and see cheap electric cars. For locals, the electric is the cheapest option.)

Re: PV is already sufficiently cheap: For 1st world, and for the current applications. Bringing the battery costs down would enable much wider use of solar.

Last year I have been to remote parts of Indonesia. Almost all local transport was by small boats, with japanese ICE engines. The availability (logistics of getting the fuel to small remote islands) and cost of fuel were quite limiting. If each village/homestead had their PV farm for charging their boats, their life would be transformed.

"greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone. You still need transmission, especially with VRE where you want to distribute generation to capture higher variety of weather.

Getting electricity for some unreliable home usage is one thing and should be pursued if there's no viable alternative, but the moment you want to go the next step, transmission is a must.

I am thinking Africa, not Northern Europe with winter, snow and weeks of overcast.

In tropics/subtropics, even during monsoon season, you have plenty of sunlight, the needs for storage and long distance transmission capacities are much lower than in more solar-hostile environments.

> "greatly alleviating the need for global long-distance transmission" - the need isnt gone.

Yes, that's what the word "alleviate" means: less severe, not gone.

Plugin solar doesn't make much impact anyway even in Germany because of shades/angles and most of the time- no storage. Rooftop is another discussion

My balcony solar produced an average of 5kWh per day in the last month. That is about as much as I consume.

and did you consume it when it was produced?

I guess I consume most of it. There are 4kWh of batteries connected to the panels. I set my dishwasher and my washing machine to run when production is high.

so you have a ±2k eur battery on top of probably 1.6Kw solar modules costing about 1k eur, attached to balcony and generating about 5kwh/day? And probably with very nice sun conditions because otherwise you'd need more solar.

Now let's take french household prices per kwh of 25ct/kwh. It means at 5kwh/day consumption the bill would be 450eur/y. So a 3k investment in this case would pay for itself in 6-7 years.

For a german household with highest prices in EU payback would be in about 4y assuming 40ct/kwh

But realistically many will not even buy a bess not being able to capture all solar output and many will have worse solar conditions. I'm not sure balcony solar in Germany generates even 1% of total solar production in the country despite streamlined installation process

The batteries where 800€, the panels about 400 and the inverter I think around a hundred (all from Amazon). All the stuff I needed to attach the panels to the balcony and the cables where surprisingly expensive.

Are you sure with the numbers? Maybe for failed projects like Vogtle it may be true but otherwise, the cost is about 4.7ct/kwh everything included looking at swiss open data. And Goesgen didn't run at 100% CF all these years.

Same costs for HPC, FV3, Polish AP1000s and EPR2s as well.

I don't see the relevance comparing with a plant that start construction over half a century ago?

Do you want to compare maybe with barakah which was not a foak and didn't have the supply chain issues like with epr/ap1000?

You mean middle eastern labor and design that doesn’t fly with western regulations?

Sounds applicable!

Let’s first acknowledge that KHNP pulled out of all western projects except the Czech one after their settlement with Westinghouse. They don’t exist as an option.

Then let’s look at the Czech subsidies. They aren’t materially different compared to any other modern western nuclear construction.

They’ve shaved a few billion from the headline number but the project is still pure cost plus putting all construction and financial risk on the governments tab.

Barakah is Korean design partly based on Westinghouse patents. That's why for Barakah they had a deal with Westinghouse just like with Czechia. The design is in line with western regulations. Labor is not that relevant for such projects. By far the biggest problems are depleted supply chain and immature design (Both EPRs and Vogtle started when their design wasn't finalized. On top, EPR suffered major design changes for each build due to specific regulations, especially in UK)

Czechian govt subsidies were approved by EC and are pretty ok cost-wise. Even 11bn/reactor is fine considering FLA3 is 23bn. On the other hand, Germany spends on EEG alone each year almost a full equivalent of a failed FLA3. And with new transmission subsidies it's even higher. Both EEG and transmission subsidies are not subject to EC approval, unlike subsidies for nuclear

But agree with the other comment - your remarks sound rather racist

Hmm...any evidence for your weird and to be frank a bit racist claims about "middle eastern labor and design" as well as regulations?

You may not be aware of this, but the UAE is one of the richest countries in the world, on par with with the United States and ahead of Denmark and most of the European nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

The design is South Korean.

So: where is your evidence that labor/design/regulations are sub-par?

Do they? Did japan start the clock later too with it's first ABWR?

We weren't talking about Japan.

We were talking about timelines. Chinese timelines are faster than western but slower than Japanese. So maybe you can expand your thought about how China is counting years differently