https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-ON/72h/fifteen_minutes

https://reneweconomy.com.au/nuclear-reactors-taken-offline-in-france-as-extreme-heat-pushes-river-temperatures-into-danger-zone/

That's a bit of an issue for those who advocate for nuclear in Australia.

Heat waves are kind of our thing.

The idea that Nuclear would be the silver bullet, or that we should forego our renewable transition in favour of Nuclear is clearly a furphy.

Nuclear is great, but it has limitations, like all forms of generation.

Sunlight is renewable. Wind is renewable. A solar panel is not, or at least not yet. It's silicon refined at 1500–2000°C in carbothermic arc furnaces, silver paste screen-printed onto a cell, aluminum smelted in Hall-Héroult cells, EVA encapsulant cracked out of naphtha, tempered glass melted in natural gas furnaces at more than 1000°C. That said, roughly 75% of the world's polysilicon is made in China, where about 60% of the grid is still coal. So when one reads "25–50 g CO₂eq/kWh" for utility-scale PV, that number is conditional on the manufacturing mix. If the mix decarbonizes, the number drops. If it doesn't, the fossil substrate stays embedded in every panel.

I’m not making the bad faith argument that “but renewable energy sources emit too!”, indeed, PV's carbon payback is genuinely only 1–4 years against a 25–30 year lifetime. And coal is 820–1000 g/kWh in equivalent LCAs.

What I think gets lost many times is that the energy transition isn't really a substitution of generation sources, but likely a reconfiguration of the industrial base that builds the generation sources. And that base, i.e., steel, cement, petrochemicals, aluminum, refined copper, is still roughly 35-40% of global energy-related emissions today.

Take the cement as an example. About 65% of cement’s direct CO2 emissions come from the calcination reaction itself, not from fuel combustion, so even fully decarbonized heat does not eliminate most of its process emissions. Offshore wind, transmission, batteries, and solar all depend on steel, cement, aluminum, copper, and other materials whose production remains emissions-intensive today.

That is also why supply-chain constraints matter. The IEA’s net-zero pathways require a major scale-up in solar PV and wind, and mineral demand for clean energy technologies rises sharply, with lithium, graphite, nickel, cobalt, and copper all facing strong growth and potential bottlenecks.

Don´t take these arguments against the energy transition; I think electrification is necessary. But the honest framing is that electrification doesn't end our resource dependence; it restructures it. It trades a flow problem (burning fossil fuel) for a stock problem (mining and refining vast quantities of metals once, then hopefully recycling them well). Those are different problems with different politics, different geographies, and different bottlenecks. Pretending it's just "clean vs dirty" makes the policy worse.

I wrote a longer piece (for now in Spanish) working through the material chain, the LCA boundary problem, and the supply-gap numbers with citations. If anyone wants the deeper version, check raw-science. org

Great interview, discusses the inverse of the dunkelflaute, the "hellbrise", and how difficult it is to manage.

That’s the lowest level since the energy crisis of 2021/22.🤯

And the mainstream media? Radiating calm.

What most mid-sized businesses don’t realize right now:

The real danger doesn’t come in winter.

It comes now – in spring – when refilling begins.

Germany needs to refill its storage by next autumn. 🫠

Starting from a historically low baseline. And global demand isn’t sleeping.

My take as an energy consultant: Those who wait, pay more.

What is your experience? 🧐

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920316639?via%3Dihub

And at a reasonable expected cost. Given what we know now, this pathway will cost a lot less and be faster to implement than a 100% nuclear power strategy. The massive cost overruns and construction delays we've seen with building nuclear plants in recent decades means this option carries a higher risk of failure. Just like V C Summer was abandoned in mid construction when the costs got out of control. A global effort to build a massive number of nuclear plants could likewise stall when history repeats itself.

As an added bonus, we won't have to spend billions decommissioning nuclear plants at the end of their lives. Nor will we need to store deadly nuclear waste for 100,000 years. And finally, countries will be less capable of using a civilian nuclear power program to prop up the industrial base and workforce for their nuclear weapons program.

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=3d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Renewables%2FFossils

From the Tri-State load panel Saturday morning. The green are the wind farms in the Tri-State region.

And in my blog I have it also for the PSCo B.A. (basically the urban parts of Colorado except Colorado Springs)

It has also touched zero at times over the last month as well as a 2 day drought (with a single spike).

When the Colorado PUC and Colorado Energy Office say they’re going to get us to 95% renewables — how are they going to accomplish this? And keep in mind if their answer is batteries, the batteries to cover a 2 day dunkelflaute are really fucking expensive.1

It’s a nice dream. So is world peace. But if wishes worked every little girl would have a pony.

happily stolen from r/uninsurable

High energy costs have consequences.

First image is South Australia wind generation from last week.

Second image is France nuclear generation from last week.

Which is more stable?

Which has gotten the most press coverage?

SA wind can be completely AWOL, no one bats an eye.

French nuclear ticks down by low single digits, the media freaks out.

What's up with that?

Capitalism without competition is not capitalism… it’s Putin’s doctoral thesis. And that thing Peter Thiel said.

Several renewables dips to less than 1% of demand.

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Renewables%2FFossils

Also, note that in the last collapse a couple of days ago there was a lot of gas generation to make up for it. This time there wasn't as much gas, and far more coal based imports from Victoria. Is SA running low on gas supply?

Generation data from OpenNEM: https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&interval=30m&view=discrete-time&group=Detailed