Post AbBixA2q9iXDbWMdSi by collectifission@greennuclear.online
(DIR) More posts by collectifission@greennuclear.online
(DIR) Post #AbBix4UcnVC8NxJjw8 by erinwhalen@mindly.social
2023-10-26T16:57:07Z
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According to this Progress Playbook article, Uruguay has been running on 100% renewables for four straight months now – cutting its production costs in half, creating 50,000 new jobs, and becoming a net exporter of electricity in the process. Impressive! 🌎 https://theprogressplaybook.com/2023/10/19/energy-independent-uruguay-runs-on-100-renewables-for-four-straight-months/#energy #renewables #environment
(DIR) Post #AbBix5coaXL9te9nLE by flowerpot@mas.to
2023-10-26T16:59:53Z
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@erinwhalen When I click on the link using Firefox or Safari, I get the following error message:
(DIR) Post #AbBix6dunvoZ3LgBhA by flowerpot@mas.to
2023-10-26T17:01:49Z
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@erinwhalen But I can reach this link:https://nickhedley.substack.com/p/energy-independent-uruguay-runs-onAre these the same article?
(DIR) Post #AbBix7QTtMf9TyOyOW by erinwhalen@mindly.social
2023-10-26T17:46:58Z
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@flowerpot - you can also see the original podcast + transcript at this link: https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/podcast/how-uruguay-went-almost-completely-fossil-fuel-free/
(DIR) Post #AbBix899DIOLiVIe12 by collectifission@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T00:38:55Z
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@erinwhalenI don’t want to sound pedantic, but I find these headlines very misleading:1. This is only about electricity, which is around 12 TWh per year. Total energy for the country is around 65 TWh (numbers from IEA).2. If you look at total energy is around 59%, which still sounds impressive but 72% of that is biomass and as such still very polluting.3. Uruguay is poor with a per capita energy use of 1/3th of NL. Industry focus on extraction and mining. This isn’t scalable.
(DIR) Post #AbBixA2q9iXDbWMdSi by collectifission@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T00:40:05Z
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So, good job on the progress, but they’re not there yet, and it’s only an inspiration for many other countries in a limited sense.
(DIR) Post #AbBj1c9Rb9oNvvZo4e by peterbrown@mastodon.scot
2023-10-26T20:19:29Z
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@erinwhalen Costa Rica is already 100% renewable; other Latin American countries have a bit to go yet!
(DIR) Post #AbBj1g8AnpAiH90qeG by ElTico@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T03:47:32Z
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@peterbrown @erinwhalen 1/3My country Costa Rica has indeed made a lot of progress in building an electric grid from mostly low carbon sources. However, Costa Rica is not 100% renewable, not even focusing on just electricity and not even close if we take non-electric energy into account. (See the attached image, source https://www.iea.org/countries/costa-rica)
(DIR) Post #AbBj1igHJzdoBUz75M by ElTico@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T03:48:45Z
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@peterbrown @erinwhalen 2/3Costa Rica (and Uruguay) import a lot of oil for transportation. And even if we focus on electricity only, Costa Rica is at best 98% renewable. We have bunker oil plants such as Garabito (200MW), which is (one) of the bunker or diesel backups that we have for the dry season. See the attached image where you can see 324MW being generated by oil and the share of renewable energy dropping below 80% earlier this year on May 12.
(DIR) Post #AbBj1m0awufuVNVsfY by ElTico@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T03:49:32Z
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@peterbrown @erinwhalen 3/3Personally I'd much rather have my country build one BWRX-300 to replace all of the oil we use to backup renewables. I'm not a fan of Geothermal because it involves fracking we have enough tremors as it is here, biomass is just bad, takes too much land and water. We have already built wind turbines at all the good spots we had, and it's too cloudy here for solar to make a significant contribution.
(DIR) Post #AbBj26uHFb6DJridEm by erinwhalen@mindly.social
2023-10-27T03:01:56Z
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@collectifission - Thanks for weighing in! I appreciate you taking the time. Do you have any links for the stats you provide? I'd love to learn more. Same goes for any information you might have about the biomass pulp mills. I looked but couldn't find any studies or articles that seemed particularly critical of them.
(DIR) Post #AbBj2C2y8i1TGGp8ym by collectifission@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T03:08:35Z
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@erinwhalen The links I used for my above post are mainly:- https://www.iea.org/countries/uruguay (for total energy)- https://lowcarbonpower.org/region/Uruguay (for electricity)Both a go to resources 🙂 I used wiki for looking up about their industrial sector, which is a strong indicator of energy use and general development. Besides extraction, they also have a plastic industry and some software. I haven't looked up their energy use. But industry in general needs steady energy, and that's a big task going green.
(DIR) Post #AbBjTyFb1lJ0a5yXjc by peterbrown@mastodon.scot
2023-10-27T07:08:12Z
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@ElTico @erinwhalen Costa Rica’s consumption of energy is more than covered by renewables. The fact that on the odd day fossil fuel generator has to be started up as a supplement is not statistically significanthttps://www.trade.gov/market-intelligence/costa-ricas-renewable-energy
(DIR) Post #AbBjTzFHKQe5fOpnsW by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-10-27T07:21:48.715812Z
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@peterbrownFrom the article you linked:> In 2018, 98% of its electrical energy was derived from renewable energy sources, about 72% of which came from hydroelectric power and 15% from geothermal. Currently, Costa Rica generates less than 1% of its energy production using solar power. You have to be a very lucky country to have geographic conditions to do both hydroelectric and geothermal power generation, and both happen to be dispatchable. As the "renewables" marketing in the EU and US today focuses mostly on solar and wind, Costa Rica is very much an exception rather than an example to follow, simply because nobody in EU or US wants new huge canyons flooded for new hydroelectric dams.@ElTico @erinwhalen
(DIR) Post #AbCUjJS1BP4cWRbSdM by peterbrown@mastodon.scot
2023-10-27T13:46:54Z
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@kravietz @ElTico @erinwhalen old mega hydro is pretty much out of favour. It is a far better use of Hydro resource to install pump storage to balance other renewable sources like wind.However, micro hydro on run of river is almost infinitely replicable and has a negligible environmental impact .
(DIR) Post #AbCUjKEwFWCmyAUWsy by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-10-27T16:11:14.187762Z
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@peterbrownPhysically, there's no difference between 1 MW hydro plant and 10 x 100 kW plants, except the latter have lower efficiency per 1 kWh. So no, they are not "infinitely replicable".@ElTico @erinwhalen
(DIR) Post #AbCvrDtARaxALoIZMm by ElTico@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T17:35:42Z
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@peterbrown @erinwhalen I know you have good intentions, I know you are just as concerned as I am about climate change. And I thank the appreciation for the efforts that we made so far. However, you can't just say Costa Rica is 100% renewables and imply that every country can do the same because neither is true. First, it's 98%, second, without that 2% of bunker and diesel there would be blackouts almost every day every dry seasons like we already had once in 2008.
(DIR) Post #AbCvrF9rizu8Ht7Q24 by ElTico@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T17:40:09Z
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@peterbrown @erinwhalen And third, the way we achieved that 98% is highly specific to the geography available here. I want my country to completely phaseout fossil fuels. But there is NO way that can be achieved with just more renewables, and especially not with your suggestion below that we breach our dams, and replace them with more wind that we just don't have and micro hydro that together just wouldn't generate the same energy that we generate today, and would be more expensive to maintain.
(DIR) Post #AbCvrFx8lnJskiAlpw by collectifission@greennuclear.online
2023-10-27T18:01:47Z
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@ElTico @peterbrown @erinwhalen May I add that the overall energy consumption is very low in Costa Rica? Per capita we're talking about just 11 MWh annually for total energy. Compare this to 28 MWh for the UK. The difference becomes obvious when we know that there's no real heavy industry in Costa Rica, GDP per capita is less than a third of the UK.Should CR develop itself, it needs vast amounts of clean energy, and I believe @ElTico made a case that the RE sources are all fully worn out.
(DIR) Post #AbCw3MnBAQaBRIHv4i by peterbrown@mastodon.scot
2023-10-27T19:51:46Z
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@kravietz @ElTico @erinwhalen well they are in the sense that you don’t need a large valley with no people living there to build several small run of river plants.
(DIR) Post #AbCw3P2qn8J4QTdSmO by kravietz@agora.echelon.pl
2023-10-27T21:17:25.404125Z
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@peterbrownNumbers do matter. Several small run hydro plants can only operate up to the altitude difference of the valley, and a single large dam will always have higher efficiency than several smaller ones.@ElTico @erinwhalen