So today, if a country has maxed out their hydroelectricity production the only proved way to reduce significantly the CO2 emissions is to add nuclear in their mix.
Wind and solar is great for individual or communal use if we accept to live with the intermittency.
But right now we don’t know how to compensate the intermittency without a lot of fossil fuel: gas, coal or oil. We can also use biomass but biomass also have a whole lot of issues and is not really free of carbon emissions either
The problem is that you can’t extrapolate from countries that already have nuclear power plants to those that would need to start building them now.
If you start planning one now, it will be maybe done in 15 years and billions over budget. And in the mean-time nothing changes and business continues as usual.
If you take the same money and start building wind, solar, geothermal and battery storage you get an immediate effect and the result is more sustainable as well.
There are a lot of countries in the data you have posted, that show you are wrong. Spain for example went from 275g/kWh in 2018 to 205g/kWh in 2022. Portugal and Greece did reduce even more in the same time. None have built more nuclear, but they added a lot of renewables. Just as some example and you can find even more. Here is a longer but annual map of carbon intensity were you can see my point a bit better.
The issue is that wind and solar have dropped in price a lot in the last decades. In the last one they have become cheaper then fossil fuels in many places, but they cost a lot to install. So grids with a lot of none hydro renewables are rarer.
Really important to say is that their are ways of dealing with intermittency. The two main ones are larger grids and electricity storage. In terms of grid size hvdc is falling in costs in recent years, this allows for intercontinental electricity connections with 3.5% power loss over 1000km. So you can built continent wide grids with relative ease and is always windy or sunny somewhere. Electricity storage is pretty obvious, but battery prices are falling fast and hydro power plants can be used for this as well.
I’m very favorable to nuclear energy.
The main reason is that today the only countries with a low CO2 per kWh ratio are country with either a lot of hydro, a lot of nuclear or both.
You can check my claim here and look at yearly production. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
So today, if a country has maxed out their hydroelectricity production the only proved way to reduce significantly the CO2 emissions is to add nuclear in their mix.
Wind and solar is great for individual or communal use if we accept to live with the intermittency.
But right now we don’t know how to compensate the intermittency without a lot of fossil fuel: gas, coal or oil. We can also use biomass but biomass also have a whole lot of issues and is not really free of carbon emissions either
The problem is that you can’t extrapolate from countries that already have nuclear power plants to those that would need to start building them now.
If you start planning one now, it will be maybe done in 15 years and billions over budget. And in the mean-time nothing changes and business continues as usual.
If you take the same money and start building wind, solar, geothermal and battery storage you get an immediate effect and the result is more sustainable as well.
I also have such an issue with just looking at carbon footprinting.
There are a lot of countries in the data you have posted, that show you are wrong. Spain for example went from 275g/kWh in 2018 to 205g/kWh in 2022. Portugal and Greece did reduce even more in the same time. None have built more nuclear, but they added a lot of renewables. Just as some example and you can find even more. Here is a longer but annual map of carbon intensity were you can see my point a bit better. The issue is that wind and solar have dropped in price a lot in the last decades. In the last one they have become cheaper then fossil fuels in many places, but they cost a lot to install. So grids with a lot of none hydro renewables are rarer. Really important to say is that their are ways of dealing with intermittency. The two main ones are larger grids and electricity storage. In terms of grid size hvdc is falling in costs in recent years, this allows for intercontinental electricity connections with 3.5% power loss over 1000km. So you can built continent wide grids with relative ease and is always windy or sunny somewhere. Electricity storage is pretty obvious, but battery prices are falling fast and hydro power plants can be used for this as well.