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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Fri, 2 May 2025 18:04:20 +1000
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On 2/05/2025 9:38 am, Joe Gwinn wrote:
> On Thu, 1 May 2025 22:12:21 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2025-04-30 23:28, Joe Gwinn wrote:
>>> On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 23:33:17 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> The Wall Street Journal just published an analysis.  The authors are
>>> Spanish.
>>>
>>> How the Lights Went Out in Spain
>>> The country flew too close to the sun — which is to say it relied too
>>> heavily on unreliable solar power.
>>>
>>> The following link should not require a subscription.
>>>
>>> .<https://www.wsj.com/opinion/how-the-lights-went-out-in-spain-solar-power-electric-grid-0096bbc7?st=MbzSqb&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink>
>>
>> I believe that one to be biased against renewable power.
> 
> The WSJ is one of the main newspapers of the Finance world.  The UK
> equivalent is the Financial Times, although FT's politics are closer
> to the EU than the US.

The Wall Street Journal may be "one of the main newspapers of the 
Finance world" but it s still owned by Rupert Murdoch, and he used it to 
keep his fossil carbon advertisers happy by publishing a lot of climate 
change denial propaganda. The financial world doesn't know much about 
science and couldn't care less.

> Anyway, the Finance folk worry about profit and loss, and so are not
> against renewable power per se.

In fact they are in favour of it, because it is cheaper. The fact that 
it tends to be intermittent ought to worry them, but engineers are good 
at masking the intermittency with gear like quick-start gas-turbine 
power generators and - recently - grid scale batteries, so the financial 
world ignores what they know to be a soluble problem.

> What they are against is mandating and subsidizing:  If X is such a
> good idea, it will just take over naturally, without requiring
> mandates and subsidies. So they will question X, whatever it happens
> to be.  Just stop all government actions there, and let the market
> settle the issue.

Good new ideas don't just take over naturally. People have to invest 
loads of money into the new systems, and governments are good at doing 
that. The natural route is via niche markets, where the new idea is 
particularly advantageous, and you scale up manufacturing progressively 
to let you exploit economies of scale to make the product cheap enough 
to compete in markets that are closer to the main stream, but it does 
take a while. Anthropogenic global warming is moving fast enough to 
justify investing serious money now to slow it down and eventually 
reverse it.

> Circling back, basically, the engineering numbers don't work.  It's
> easy to show that decarbonizing cannot work, as the total CO2 content
> of the atmosphere is simply immense, and there is 50 times that much
> stored in the ocean deeps.  And China is building coal plants as fast
> as they can, so we (US+UK+EU) are a roundoff error compared to China
> et al.

China is investing a lot more in renewable generation that it is in 
replacing old and inefficient coal plants with modern, much more 
efficient coal plants, though it is still spending a lot on that.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/

https://dialogue.earth/en/energy/chinas-renewables-push-fuels-coal-power-investment/

China added 125GW of wind and solar generating capacity in 2022 compared 
with 146GW of new coal-fired capacity. In 2023 it only added 117GW of 
new coal fired capacity and was expected to add only 69GW in 2024.
It did retired some old, inefficient cola-fired plants, but not all that 
much geerating capacity.

They clearly aren't building new coal-fired plants "as fast as they can" 
though they are still building a lot of them.

The reports make it clear that they have the same problem as the west - 
once you have built a coal-fired plant you want to keep on running it to 
collect the money from the customers who buy the power.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney