Still much better than gas though…
The reason there is so little wind power: Probably the same reason the western, alpine parts of Austria have basically zero wind power - and why neighbouring Carinthia recently voted in a referendum to ban it completely.
People who live in the Alps generally don't like seeing the mountains altered. It is treated almost as sacrilege. And since these areas are heavily dependent on tourism, where the appeal rests on a romantic, Disney-fied fantasy of wild, untamed nature, locals worry that turbines would make the region less attractive to tourists. Of course, this "untouched" landscape is largely a fiction in the first place: most of it looks the way it does precisely because people have lived in it and shaped it for centuries.
The balance being: do you build a ton of those turbines, or one nuclear plant?
My clean dinner table is completely artificial, but that doesnt mean I should be neutral to someone placing a bowl of shit on it.
https://www.heidi.news/explorations/black-out-le-talon-d-ach...
Given how my grandmother said every ailment under the sun was due to the Föhn, putting a windmill up would probably be seen as tempting the fates. /s
I'm joking wrt to wind energy, but the cultural associations with wind are real.
I can understand people objecting to plastering the south facing unshaded Alps with panels, but .. it would certainly generate a lot.
I'm a lftr enthusiast, but everyone needs to keep in mind that fission is just fundamentally economically non-competitive compared to solar and wind.
And all those stories about fusion being right around the corner? Yeah, that won't be economically competitive either.
I personally am not in favor of closing down existing fission nuclear plants. By the construction of new fission plants is an economic boondoggle: big, long time, cost overruns, more expensive.
I had hopes for smrs to fundamentally change the economic game but they aren't. I just don't think that solid fuel rod nuclear can ever be economically competitive.
I think I'm back to my original lifter enthusiasm, where lifter is able to use 90% plus of the core nuclear fuel and breed more of it from ultra cheap thorium, and is safer and can be scaled by design....
I think nuclear industry should spend another 10 to 20 years engineering developing a fundamentally economically competitive nuclear plant that will also give time for the price improvement, curves of solar wind and storage to stabilize.
Because solar wind and storage still have a lot of runway for improvement between sodium ion batteries perovskites and just general improvements to wind rotors and general economies of scale
We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)
The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).
Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.
All year? And do you mean you "inject" more than you "pull", or do you mean that you can live without ever pulling anything from the grid?
Because "being a net producer overall" doesn't say that it would work in practice if everyone was doing the same, right?
As such, as of now, the EU can shut down Switzerland without warning if the grid is overloaded and they need to avoid a blackout.
We're talking about a world were oil is going away. Switzerland is already using as much hydro as it can. Nuclear is not about replacing hydro, it's about replacing as much as it can of oil.
Even with as much nuclear, hydro, wind and solar as they can, we as a society (not just Switzerland) won't be able to replace oil. We will have less energy, that's a fact. So I don't understand the debate: why not nuclear AND renewables?
Nuclear's probably still more expensive than that.
I'm not saying we give up on nuclear entirely. It should be at the well-funded research and prototyping phase for another 10 years.
In my opinion, at least for consumer energy, I think perovskite solar cells and sodium ion batteries for home storage will enable a very large oversupply or overcapacity start evening out the intermittent fears.
But admittedly I haven't not done the exact math