One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
Researchers at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland have worked out what a globally cost-effective energy supply could look like. Based on their model, 76% of the world's energy would come from solar. Wind power would make up an additional 20%, with the rest coming from hydro, biomass and geothermal energy.
Yes, that does not really answer my question, though. A global average is somewhat interesting but with solar the situation is bound to vary widly by location. Also, does 'solar' then include battery storage?
Australia isn't Norway, there are variations in land area, latitude coverage, existing legacy infrastructure, etc. - I'm not writing a country by country break down for you - the IEA has pages per major countries that show progress and plans.
Solar includes energy storage - be that thermal, battery, hydro, etc.
Areas where solar is much less productive (e.g. Norway, Canada) tend to have lower population density, more abundant hydropower potential (which also means storage capacity) and more wind potential.
So, the ratio of solar, wind and hydro would be different under a 100% green energy scenario for them.
They often have grid interconnects to countries where solar does produce a lot, too.
I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons.
The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder).
In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.
My up time is better than the grid.
The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population.
One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years.
Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.
I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.
For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.
Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.
At a large enough scale everything gets different.
Yet the US government just asked for $200 billion to materialize out of thin air to support a needless conflict. Even if it cost a trillion dollars, that is decades of long term energy independence.
Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.
> Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.
> Sounds like a fair system.
Yes, people voted for tax credits for solar/renewables. It is a fair system. You know what isn't a fair system? Fossil fuel externalities causing childhood asthma and rising sea levels requiring rebuilding coastal infrastructure globally.
Tax payer is funding a lot of resilience stuff. At least in places where resilience exists at all. GP is where emergency services will charge their radios once their generator fuel runs out. Or whoever the local community improvises as substitute to emergency services, if there aren't any. As a tax payer who doesn't have the opportunity to do anything like that I really don't mind subsidizing.
I think the key is to combine it with a strong, digitalized grid and a lot of BESS—a technology which is now getting progressively cheaper, just like PV.
I believe it is realistic to expect that, in combination with other renewable energy sources such as wind (which, for example, generates more energy at night than during the day), biomass, and hydropower—along with the high level of grid integration currently taking place in Europe—the share of renewable energy could reach 100 percent in 10 or 15 years. Provided there is the political will to do so.
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
There must be some kind of calculation generally based on latitude?
A sub-question that I would be curious about is how much climate in that region then affects the total possible solar energy. How much is the variance from a naive calculation just based on latitude?
One other second-order effect is: developed economies are heavily weighted towards places that are cold / farther north than less developed places (as a very general rule). And, a lot of people don't realize how much less energy efficient it is per-capita to make a space human comfortable year round in a "cold" climate vs a warm one.
-That's a new way of comparing economies where the price and stability of energy is better in a warm, more equator proximate location.
You can look at maps of solar insolation[0] - these give you typical levels of solar input. There is of course weather variations, but the long-term trends should be consistent.
One thing that can catch me is how much more north Europe is than basically all of the USA. The general solar insolation is worse, yet they are still doing a healthy business of solar. The panels are so cheap that even if you are in a crummy environment, you can just add more.
It depends on how much generation you expect to 'waste'. Many plans are targetting a lot more generation than demand, with numbers sometimes stated as 300% generation potential for solar plus wind.
The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.
The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)
Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
Because? I just said. I'd rather _China_ don't own 1 billion pounds of our country's energy infrastructure. Are you being coy or are you seriously that naive?
Utterly perplexed you need more of an explanation.
And all those things you mentioned. I'd rather they were all home-grown but I can live with the French having a chunk of our Nuclear - because I like the French.
The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.
Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...
To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.
Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.
I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.
I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.
Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.
No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.
Not expert but one difference is that in Germany the standard wiring is radial circuits with 16A MCBs while in the UK it's ring wiring with 32A MCBs.
So in the UK we have 2.5mm^2 wires in a ring on a 32A MCBs... Of course a 2.5mm^2 wire is rated ~20A so any issues with the ring (sockets still work since connected from the other branch) can burn the wire before the MCB trips...
The "standard" wiring is 1.5mm² on 16A MCBs which are rated to trip at 1.13-1.45x nominal current (so 18-23 A). So this is already mildly improper because you can pull elevated currents continuously and dramatically shorten the life of the insulation.
We would call it "a serious code violation." It's prohibited in the NEC and always has been, it's objectively less safe.
From what I understand the UK allowed it because of a severe postwar copper shortage and it persists to this day because it's allowed and a bit cheaper.
> From what I understand the UK allowed it because ...
I'd say "severe post-WWII money shortage". After wartime expansion, the global copper industry could physically meet peacetime demands. But the UK was very close to national bankruptcy. And the Luftwaffe had turned an awful lot of their prewar housing into rubble. So - any cost that could be cut, was.
Police in HK will not ask you to unlock your business phone, or personal phone.
They are pro-business and want to remain an attractive international business hub so they are nice to foreign visitors. Likewise China (mainland) is nice to Western visitors and will not create trouble to you. If you visit the mainland these days (visa free if coming from Europe!) they also make efforts so that you are not impacted by the Great Firewall.
The way it works on the mainland and HK is that you must have shown by your actions that you are a "troublemaker" and got onto their radar. Then you are in trouble.
China is keen to attract Western visitors for tourism, business, and to stay if you're top talent (visa-free travel, new work visa for STEM talent) so they will try ot project a positive image.
That just boils down to “you have no real rights, but if you keep your head down and dont get unlucky, you probably won’t be targeted”.
I’m a white US citizen who worked on oil rigs in GCC countries (Arabian Gulf). I was put on a global watch list for 6 years due to my work in the middle east.
I still don’t know why - maybe due to colleagues in my contacts? There was a “mega church” near me that some of my coworkers attended which was the “minority religion” of Saudi Arabia, so perhaps I was a few degrees of Kevin Bacon from some people that Saudi had flagged. Or maybe just travel patterns - I often didn’t know exactly when my rotation would end and I frequently bought last minute flights to head back home / to vacation destinations.
I certainly was not put on a list for any of my speech (public or private), which had been extremely measured at the time (and still is), due to understanding that my host countries had different laws and constitutions from our own. I very carefully observed all the laws and social expectations. But nonetheless, I found myself on a list anyways and for that 6-7 year duration, all of my boarding passes globally got “SSSS” written on it and all my luggage + carryons got unpacked by hand and hand-searched prior to every flight, including connecting flights.
Every flight I flew those searches were a very personal 20-30 minute long reminder to carefully manicure who I’m in contact with, what I say, how/where/when I travel, and any other records/data that I might generate. I often had to give a heads up to anyone I was traveling with (colleagues or personal friends) that we had to leave a little extra early to accommodate those searches.
> That just boils down to “you have no real rights, but if you keep your head down and dont get unlucky, you probably won’t be targeted”.
It's not about luck in this case. They want to be 'nice' so you need to actively do something, that's not the same as as "keeping your head down". Also note that as a Western visitor to China, if they have flagged you they are more likely to deny your visa or to deny you entry than to look for further trouble. In general the least waves the better.
The issue with gas is Europe's own choice, which also makes this not true:
> "However, an analysis from the University of Oxford has found that maximising oil and gas extraction here would only save UK households up to £82 (€95) per year."
UK and Europe could produce a lot of gas and could then decide at what price to sell it locally, it would not have to be at international markets' prices.
It is policy not to do either in order to decarbonise. Certainly it is understandable not to encourage people to use gas, but on the other hand countries are reliant on gas and have then to import it...
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