The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

You really need to ease up on the Koolaid, tastes nice, but short term benefit.

Just how long do you think the battery farms will last under constant charge / discharge cycling, and how much will it cost to replace them ? Complete fools errand, but i''m sure the salesman must have been quite persuasive :-).

Chris

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, Jeroen Belleman wrote: "Fission works fine, although admittedly it's getting bogged down by regulations and its reputation has suffered from some extensively publicized accidents."

Dear Jeroen Belleman:

Accidents happen!

Some global-warming denialists seem to have come around to the idea of "Well it's happening, but it doesn't matter" but how fresh water resources will go _up_ with less and less snowfall and less and less snowpack every year is anyone's guess.

It works "fine" if one buys the BS that other than the lil waste problem it's earth-friendly low-impact technology. It isn't it's hugely water-hungry, and uranium mining only gets dirtier the more of it you extract.

Some global-warming denialists seem to have come around to the idea of "Well it's happening, but it doesn't matter" but how fresh water resources will go _up_ with less and less snowfall and less and less snowpack every year is anyone's guess.

It works "fine" if one buys the BS that other than the lil waste problem it's earth-friendly low-impact technology. It isn't it's hugely water-hungry, and uranium mining only gets dirtier the more of it you extract.

If it were otherwise an exceptionally good value I don't think the accidents so far could've dissuaded much more substantial investment.

But it's finicky and expensive tech with other challenging implementation issues besides the well-publicized ones, that I think would be more apparent to the general public with wider adoption.

I don't take a strictly market perspective on everything but with respect to fission nuclear I think it tells the story well enough. it sucks. If it didn't there would be more of them.

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, John Larkin wrote: "France will happily sell power to Germany and Spain"

EDP (an electricity company in Portugal) buys nuclear electricity from a Spanish power plant. Portugal luckily has no nuclear-electricity plant! Unluckily Portugal has nuclear electricity.

On Mon, 9 Jun 2025, Joe Gwinn wrote: "[. . .]

I learned about the financial world by marrying into it - my wife was a Muni bond portfolio manager. I read some of her tutorials, and was stunned to learn that while the stock market got all the news media attention, the Muni market was in fact ten times larger."

Dear Joe Gwinn:

Thanks for this remarkable example that media attention is not correlated with correctness or importance. Cf. "Type-I errors are correlated with citations."

Paul Colin de Gloucester (2013): "Referees Often Miss Obvious Errors in Computer and Electronic Publications", "Accountability in Research: Policies and Quality Assurance", 20:3, 143-166,

The best power source by far is natural gas. It's cheap and clean and easy to transport and store, and works reliably all day every day. And we keep finding more.

The CO2 is a benefit too. It's greening the Earth.

Maybe, maybe not, but no matter - inertia and conservation of energy are not. And the finance world doesn't want to bet on the wrong horse.

It's true that there are many possible technical remedies, but none of them are in place. If they were, we would not be having this discussion.

It will be many years and billions for anything of the kind to be implemented at sufficient scale, and to mature enough to depend on.

I quite agree, but holding off for a year or two is a form of unilateral political disarmament. Politicians are rarely saints. Neither are news reporters.

Joe

Right. People shouldn't just be allowed to cook or do their laundry or heat their houses whenever they feel like.

Not needed.

Remedies, for what exactly? We still do not know what was the problem. And will not know for several months.

You can not put a solution to a problem that nobody knows what it is. What are you going to do? You do something so that the public is happy, and when a year passes, we find out that the problem is totally different, and the effort and money was wasted on a useless mistaken solution!

Not over here, it isn't.

Where are you on this map?

In the same way that burning lots of fossil carbon is a short term solution to the problem of supplying electric power

Like everything else. batteries wear out under constant use, just like the coal-fired generators that used to power our grid.

This does get figured into the economics, at least if they are worked out by people with more sense than you seem to have.

They aren't all that flexible as a generating service, so France mostly sell power to its neighbours when it's consumers are using less and the neighbouring consumers are using more.

Yes we've experienced a "propane outage" on at least one occasion as there had been interpersonal communications issues as to what "running low" meant precisely, and then the scheduled delivery was delayed for a couple days, no explanation why.

Probably just got backed up near the holidays with employees taking off early.

The propane delivery companies always charge for an emergency delivery and reprime, even if they were delayed. You're free to complain by finding another company (who does the same thing.)

The financial aspect that the WSJ is focussed on when it publishes climate change denial junk from propagandists like Bjorn Lomborg, is the adverstising it can sell to the fossil carbon extraction industry.

And they can be persuaded to believe in lots of nonsense because they don't understand the technical details.

Size doesn't guarantee plausibility - look at Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, or pretty much any other Ponzi scheme.

But ten times less interesting. Municipal bonds are boring.

But not more expensive than burning fossil carbon, even if you ignore the collateral damage to climate.