I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
I mean im guessing its because it may not be as profitable, or atleast at first, boycotts or directly just capitalism fucking everything up? i legit always imagine aliens seeing us still use coal while having DISCOVERED IN 1932
In terms of engineering, it takes renewables + shitload of storage in order to have equivalent power generation characteristics to nuclear.
The recent portugal/spain power outage was due to the system being insufficiently damped (insufficient storage/inertia to buffer (the loss of) a high proportion of unpredictable power generation).
Yes, storage is complicated - but it can be done. Pumped hydro and other technologies exist to make storage cheaper than it would be in batteries, and sodium-ion options become cheaper and cheaper to serve as buffers.
As far as I know, the power outage in Portugal and Spain did not start with renewables, those were disconnected to protect the equipment later, when the voltage already dropped, along with other power stations. Moreover, they were the first to recover, and they handled some of the load during the blackout: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/04/29/did-renewable-energy-cause-spain-and-portugals-mass-blackout-experts-weigh-in
Grids are best modelled as a system, jointly operating. Insufficient damping is the cause as per the grid operator (1).
Can be solved in multiple ways such as make it a france problem (stronger interconnects to a system with more turbines), storage, improved DC-AC transformers for small (<1MW) solar plants. (*)
Pumped storage is indeed one of the best known technologies for grid stability, as it provides both storage, and turbines with inertia. Hard to build though, finding funding and appropriate locations. Then solar suddenly isn’t as cheap if one takes into accou t the cost to make it a reliable source of energy.
(*) the report mentions an estimated 700MW of production auto-shutting down as grid frequency dropped. Most likely these are the inverters of small scale solar installations, which are frequency following (measure then adjust) rather than synchronizing, and simply shut off when out of bound. To quote: