I'm from Switzerland. What you're describing all sounds very nice, but the reality is a very different one. In reality big solar projects are being rejected by the public here constantly. We also barely have any wind turbines, which we actually need because we do not have enough electricity in the winter time. We also have to keep in mind that in order to achieve carbon neutrality we need to double our electricity production. People just don't realise how far behind we are. The transition is going way too slowely and the average swiss person doesn't understand the energy transition or global warming. We're dealing with the same rejection of scientific findings that other countries are dealing with (climate science denial and the denial of the findings with regards to the energy transition).
I wouldn't agree with the statement the reality is very different. In my opinion, the reality is quite well described by Rosie. Especially I think the stated need on doubling the electricity production is a pessimistic view. Official number is a 50% increase needed to fully electrify building heating and individual transport. And these are quite well estimated and represent a vast majority of decarbonization.
@@jesan733 I think you are in denial. The UK has been dumping nuclear waste from Windscale in Cumbria in the UK for 70+ years. There is a cluster of Downes Syndrome children in Dundalk in Ireland born exactly 9 months after the Windscale fire in 1958. They have been dumping waste into the Irish Sea ever since with a so far unknown legacy. Spring tides bring this waste up onto the upper beach which is then dried and becomes air born. Check out Windscale the nuclear dustbin produced by Yorkshire Television in 1983.
I am in awe of your high-bandwidth information-dense delivery. Wider adoption of this technique could save a good few lifetimes of lectures and addresses to meetings, not to mention the energy consumption that goes with them. Great stuff!
One thing missed in the video is that Switzerland has quite a seasonal imbalance of energy production, in summer there is up to 10TWh surplus (around 17% of annual generation) which is exported but in winter there is up to 10TWh deficit and we rely on imports from neighboring countries. Depending which neighbor it comes from it has differing levels of emissions associated with it so is sometimes not as green as we would like. Any future plan will need to address this seasonal imbalance which provides an extra challenge in the transition to 100% renewables.
@4:46 Those built-in photovoltaics are beautiful! Please, please do a video on them! Cost, efficiency, design considerations - all the good engineering stuff!
@@EngineeringwithRosie Fantastic! I definitely think a lot can be done to make solar panels more attractive as they become prevalent in our communities.
I am glad that you mentioned energy conservation. Building insulation is often overlooked, not only for cold regions but also hot places. Our future is well insulated buildings tempered with heat pumps. High latitude PV is a developing technology.
@@bimblinghill Off take from "Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude." Just a reminder that snowy and high latitude places are developing adaptive PV technologies. Europe is the same latitude as Canada.
Also, pursuant to the nuclear comments, Switzerland is actually one of the few countries that had a (partial) core meltdown of a nuclear reactor, which might help explain some of the community opposition to the technology. It was a very small reactor (less than 30 MW) but it still caused a hell of a mess.
Even with such incidents nuclear remains the safest form of power, by far. Maintain the safety regulations and it’s easily the best option to rely on to rapidly decarbonise.
@@christianvanderstap6257 The Swiss public have a fair amount of ownership of these nuclear power stations through various public utility companies (Axpo in particular). Also they have benefited from a more stable electricity price over the last few (turbulent) years.
@@matster77 rapid? How long does it take to build a 1TW plant? How quickly can we scale that up (how many places can actually make those reactor vessels)? Where does the fuel come from? Is it ok for Iran and tge DPRK to have nuclear plants? And even if those accidents are rare, they for sure cost a lot of money to clean up. Money that you underwrite as a tax payer. Other than that, it is ok.
There are some other incentives. As a home buyer, you can get a cheaper loan if your to-be-purchased property has good energy rating, incentivizing all the new buildings to be very efficient. Switzerland also does not allow air conditioning in buildings, so you need to make 100% sure your office building has the best possible recuperation system available. There is also minimal necessary amount of solar required for each new building, etc. And the amount of roofs with solar panels is raising rapidly - the local solar companies are overloaded. The electricity is quite expensive, comparing to the rest of the Europe (at least the surrounding countries), but considering how clean it is, it's worth. Recently I've been visiting the nuclear power plant here, it's amazing what kind of details you can learn there - next time Rosie comes to CH, I'll volunteer to organize such visit - they do it for group of minimum 5 people, it's free of charge (real rarity in Switzerland) and it's totally worth it.
With all the information that you provided in this video, in my opinion the Swiss approach is the greenest, safest, and most practical approach to zero emission and energy production. Switching from nuclear to renewable is the best choice. I did not work as professional in nuclear engineer (by choice) but I am educated and trained in it, and I can tell you that abandoning nuclear fission energy is the best choice. It is cost effective choice. Nuclear fission waste and safety management is even worst than coal plant waste and safety management. Now regarding solar panels, roofs and balconies are the best places to put panels on. You are making these roofs multi-functional. You also have many more other options, such as vertical Finnish windmills that can be placed parallel to roads and train tracks like lamp post. Using Finnish sand battery to store energy next to power sources (windmills). Those windmills are made for hard weather and low noise. Regarding the industry, use carbon capture at the source. Consider using fungus for coffin and cement construction (see Netherland). How about bamboos to replace paper and for construction industry. Lots of useful option to solve zero emission problem. Swiss is doing alright.... I enjoyed watching this video. 😊
Yes, you can tell the NPP waste and safety management (where the industry captures, stores, monitors, and prevents waste from entering the biosphere - and where in the US at least, there have been 0 worker deaths as a result of operations), is much worse than the coal power plant waste and safety management (where the industry 'manages' the waste by pumping it directly into the biosphere, let alone the worker deaths).
if you really worked with nuclear and are higly educated in this area then you wouldn't say those things about, cost, nuclear waste dangers and the rest. I feel someone is lying here? how can you say that the waste from carbon is better managed than the one from nuclear when this is straight up lie? Also how can you say that nuclear waste is dangerous when no one died from it ? why is better to produce those panels, put them in an area where they produce less energy and are way more inneficient and then have to throw them out after 20 years because they will produce almost no energy at all while you can have a reliable, non polluting, continuously produced electricity from nuclear? Yes it is costly at first, but over time its cost drastically reduces and if you check the price over of its life time then it is comparable with renewable without taking into account storage or the cost of the energy used to compensate for periods with no wids or no sun. Also I am not talking about the cost of distribution networks and the cost of all the extra electronics(milions of invertors and wires and transformers etc) needed to implement those pannels on each balcony
@@danielstan2301 You admitted yourself. Nuclear fission..is costly at first. You also do not include cost of waste disposal and insurance in case of catastrophe; see Fukushima, Chernobyl, Windscale, Chalk River and St. Luis. Chernobyl and Fukushima is still under clean up with a growing bill to pay. People are dying from it not in spectacular way but in stealthy way and it is called cancer. Talk to troops of tank busters or atomic silos or Navajo people (th-cam.com/video/ETPogv1zq08/w-d-xo.html) Human only see danger when it is noisy, spectacular and big. But he does not see danger when he does not see or understand. If you want to see it or contribute positively to what you believe, I suggest you go to Chernobyl or Fukushima. It is very easy to sit at home with computer in front and appreciate convenient source of electricity but life is hard when one has to get hands dirty and risk life making electricity not for yourself but for others to use it and not to hear "thank you". There is a smart way and easy way. Smart way are panels, hydro dams and windmills because they are safe and easy to work with. As engineer I would like to work with that. Easy way is with uranium because it uses the same infrastructure like coal and oil. As engineer, I would stay away from it. Unfortunately, people choose an easy way out and usually ends with damage and regrets.
Thanks Rosie, brilliant whistle stop tour how the challenges and opportunities look like in a very wealthy and innovative country! I personally was very impressed when I drove through Switzerland 18 months ago in an EV and discovered that all parking along the motorway actually does have fast chargers! So they already killed charging anxiety! And one other positive in the experience of that journey: the average energ consumption on the trip was the same as travelling the same distance in NL!
Recently did some modelling work for a location in Switzerland in the Alps, they have an interesting market landscape when it comes to grid supplied connections. Without identifying the project, this was a very remote site that was still able to purchase power halfway up a mountain at the same commercial rate that a factory in the UK could negotiate. This made planning to add solar, wind or batteries pretty challenging as their best economic scenario was still just to expand the grid connection... up a mountain. TLDR Variable renewable generation was never as attractive economically compared to just connecting to the grid. Adding to the baseload generation and expanding the grid would be more in line with optimising system performance overall for Swiss projects, and it seems that they plan to try and maintain this landscape, using Hydro as the main power supply drawing from stored variable generation. Interesting to say the least, great video all round!
Switzerland is embedded in the continental European power grid. But almost all European countries expect higher electricity consumption in the future because it will replace combustion processes. The country with the largest supply of electricity in Europe can also achieve the best prices for electricity, either for its own consumption or for international sales.
lol - Last week I thought about finding some budget to invite her to discuss some wind projects in my canton. But then thought getting her over here would be too expensive and way too big of a carbon footprint. One week later I learned she practically drove by my house 😢
8:18 I was thinking about the environmental effects of dramatically increased water storage. E.g. some dams in California are being removed because keeping them causes more harm/expense than the value of electricity they can produce. Putting dams in places where glaciers used to hold water is a very interesting solution; actually mitigating harm from environmental changes.
Nuclear phase-out in Europe has little to do with the Fukushima accident. In Germany it was the trigger, but half of the then shut down plants where switched off before the accident happend, because of a combination of (expensive) technical issues and financial issues. Unlike France, the German government decided to stop subsidizing the industry, resulting in the scheduled phase-out. Nuclear powerstations are very complex plants, riddles with regulations. You can't simply move the operation and maintenance to a different company. Siemens and the German government needed to phase-out this unprofitable business in a synchronized and safe way. Germany had a few nuclear stations that where relatively new and did not have many problems, but even Germany is too small to maintain a whole nuclear industry for just the few remaining plants. The German government needed to decide between spending billions more to old ones back up and running or accept that the industry would end. The Fukushima accident made the decision simpler, but one of the reasons why that decision could be made so fast is because the government had been thinking about the answer for many years before the accident. Battery storage is getting very cheap and is expected to become many times cheaper again in the next 10 years, which is about the time needed to build new nuclear installations. There are no investors in nuclear because it makes no economic sense anymore, unless governments pay for everything and take all the financial risks.
With all due respect, that account was wildly misleading. All German civilian nuclear plants that has ever operated is a combined 26 GW. Of this capacity, this is the breakdown of closure times: 19% closed up until 1994, most of it as a result of reunification 4% closed between 1995 and 2010. (2 small reactors) 32% closed in 2011 due to immediate Fukushima scare. 46% closed in 2015-2023 due to delayed Fukushima scare. So German nuclear capacity held steady with very little change between reunification and Fukushima! We should remember that Russia, as an influence operation, long flooded Germany with artificially cheap natgas as preparation for war, and that Germany has on top of that has used hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies to flood itself with intermittent power. Had it used a fraction of these subsidies for nuclear construction, it would be rid of coal by now and have lower electricity prices. Germany's fleet of 9 huge reactors in the last tranche above was in no way too small to maintain. It's clearly larger than most active countries' fleets, e.g. my own Sweden's or our neighbor Finland's. There is currently 60 reactors under construction in the world, and so far this year, four new grid connections have been made in the US, India, China and UAE respectively. Nuclear still makes great economic sense and are cash cows for countries that have built them.
I found the bits about glacial retreat opening up new opportunities for hydro very interesting. It has no environmental impact either, because there isn't much living under the ice, and if there is it doesn't survive long once the ice retreats. I didn't see much discussion about wind power - do they plan on building much wind?
Lots of people here don't like wind energy. I've seen too many that try and stop it, then again, not all areas are best for wind. Personally I don't mind any form of renewable energy.
There is no mention of Geothermal generation of electricity. As a retired engineer, I firmly believe geothermal generation of electricity to be the most important part of a 100% energy supply from an all-renewable energy sources. Geothermal is variable, leave the hot water in the underground reservoir until more electricity is needed. Geothermal is a simple process and is well known. It can also be developed anywhere in the world.
It's a pity most deep geothermal projects tried to date have been unsuccessful corrosion, mud volcanoes and the like. However it does seem to work relatively well in volcanic precincts. That's good.
Pretty sure your fossil fuel oligarchs together with others are doing their best to undermine our efforts to shift. Politics isn't dragging its feet for no reason.
According to our world in data, Switzerland's energy inputs, are oil, hydro, nuclear, gas in that order. Other sources/inputs are insignificant. They need to offset their huge oil inputs, luckily it has a neighbour able to sell lots of nuclear power.
In Dominican Republic, we're still using re usable glass bottles, Something interesting is that ice making machine are fully integrated inside the builders. So all the heat stays inside and the only ice is produced. And don't get affected by very low outside temperatures outside.
I wish I knew you were coming here... I'm a Big fan. I have a Physics PhD and participating in local energy governance. Keep an eye on the results of the June 9th federal votation. It is about a new swiss renewable energy law that was voted in parlement in September last year, but that needs to be approved (voted on) by the entire population ( example of typical Swiss direct democracy). Mühleberg nuclear power plant was permanently shut down in December 2019 and is currently in the process of being decommissioned. As of now, Switzerland has only three active nuclear power plants: Beznau (with two reactors), Gösgen, and Leibstadt.
@@jesan733 Keeping existing nuclear running is a no brainer indeed. New nuclear plants - likely too costly as renewables keep getting cheaper and cheeper. A big nuclear plant is a single points of failure if for instance it needs to be shut down because a river can't produce enough cooling water in summer for instance. So a mix of energies is best. And one can create a lot of different renewable power sources within the budget of a single nuclear power station. I'm in favor of paying subsidies for individual house owners to add PV on their buildings. PV is not running at night, but with more and more electrical vehicles, car2grid or car2house should be expanded to provide that power at night. Many cars owners do not use their full battery capacity each day, especially with home office and good public transport. The problem is to legislate so that electric car owners that allow their batteries to be used on the grid are properly compensated for the eventual reduced lifespan of the batteries. Power companies will not encourage car2house though, as they won't make any money from it. PV is really the best option for house owners, because at the extreme they could become completely independent of the grid, and you wouldn't care about the electricity cost. And small modular reactors... First of all, it is not really 100% renewable. I think we lack experience, and it may not be needed if enough renewables are produced: hydrogen and newer battery chemistries could act as long term storage to complement pumped hydro. It is clear that nuclear is very predictable and makes energy management very easy compared to a mix of very unpredictable renewables. Nuclear is also what leads to energy monopolies that may reduce research spending on solar and storage technologies.
@@SwissPGO the reason a wide array of solutions to intermittency is often presented, like pumped hydro, batteries, V2G, super-long range grids and so on, is the fact that there's no good solution. If there was a good solution, that solution would be presented stand-alone. The array of solutions is effectively a gish gallop. I'm not saying this is a conscious tactic, of course, but rather a reasoning errror that's easy to make when we want something to work. Do think about whether many not-good-enough solutions really combines to something that is good enough. I think it doesn't. I doubt the car2house solution. I'm into my third Leaf EV now but it still has kindof small battery, 40 kWh, and I would like it to be fully charged when I start my day. Also I live in Sweden, so we basically have negligible solar for four months of the year, and wind varies hugely over 14-day timespans. The seemingly high cost of nuclear power plants is a function of dismantled and immature supply chains combined with too-high interest rates applied (strongly devaluing the nuclear reactors' long lifespans). Also it's usually compared to unbuffered intermittent RE costs. Nuclear as single point of failure, well, the solution is to have a larger fleet, typically, so that one plant going offline is a small part of the fleet. Comparing output of a ten-reactor fleet with a similar amount of intermittent RE shows an extreme advantage to nuclear. Regarding reduction in research, I think the solar market and the BEV market are strong enough to sustain lots of research. The problem is rather the opposite, that the allure of RE as a solution has reduced research into nuclear. And finally regarding subsidies to home solar: I think that in places like Sweden, France and Switzerland, this is actually reducing environmental performance of these countries' energy production.
@jesan773 We could have an interesting panel discussion. We both have experiences (I spend time at Euratom an CEA in france). I share some of ideas - but not 100%. I also think each region may need a different "mix" of solutions. France is a good example of the effects of a near monopoly of nuclear energy. Energy prices were low indeed in France (I lived there for several years), leading to less isolation of buildings, and lower adoption rates of heat pumps and solar. Independence of a centralized energy provider or grid comes at a cost indeed. As for car2home, I see your point if one lives in Sweden and if you need a full charge each day. If one can charge at the office during peak solar production, and comes home with still 85% capacity on the EV, car2house makes sense, especially when doing home office the next day.
@@SwissPGO agree that we could have an interesting discussion. Not sure it's a disadvantage that France has lower adoption of heat pumps and solar. I mean, Germany has spent extreme amounts of money on solar but in a way doesn't have much to show for it, and the environmental costs in the supply chain is probably substantial. Less isolation in buildings, that may be disadvantageous though, but should be achievable through regulatory means, perhaps. Also if RE advocates are right about costs (or governments simply decide to solve a lot of the intermittency issues by overbuilding) then RE may depress isolation and heat pumps as well. Of course in some situations car2house can make sense, perhaps it'll work better than I think. If some pioneer region or country has or will show the way and prove me wrong, I'm interested to hear about it.
I thought solar panel farms everywhere are oriented to maximise power output in winter rather than to maximise total power output over the year. It is surely a no-brainer. At high latitudes they even put them vertically for that reason. But if a predominantly solar and wind grid is economically feasible in a country such as Switzerland (high latitude, lack of space for onshore wind) then it becomes an absolute no-brainer for a low-latitude country that is spread out over a whole continent (ie Australia). A good point about the potential for emissions reduction through changed agricultural practice - it is something no-one is paying enough attention to.
International aviation isn't included in country emissions totals as per Paris. But it's huge for Switzerland, 10%. Compared to I think 2 or 3% global average. I made a short video on that which will be out in a few days if you're interested.
It's easier to go green when almost everyone works in a bank or other office jobs. It's a bit more challenging to go green when your country's economy is heavy industry. Of course countries like Switzerland still import thing made from heavy industry, but just don't get the statistical hit.
First time i hear about plans to replicate glaciers function of being water reservoirs for rivers in the summer. I would love to get more info in that.
Excellent work Rosie, I wondered how the Swiss were getting on with the transition. Some great progress being made and those buildings.. wonderful. The fact that Swiss engineering is now being directed to solve emissions is a great thing. Seems electricity production and transport is well underway to being de-carbonised in Switzerland. Unlike here in Australia a much easier job to get to net zero though as you point out there are still problems to be solved. Take care and kind regards from Newcastle NSW
I appreciate this channel a lot for its content, Rosie and her team are doing a great job here, but litterally flying to the other side of the globe for skiing vacation does not align well with action on climate change.
Even John Travolta doesn't affect climate to any measurable degree. If you want people to be safe from climate, then stop restricting their energy-freedom.
The world has gone mad. Another country neglecting nuclear in favour of higher shares of VRE. Integration costs go exponential the more you rely on VRE. Wind and solar are great to use at modest levels and lower. And nuclear (and hydro if you’re fortunate) are the way forward to get decarbonisation without ridiculous buildout of transmission, distribution, and 4hr batteries (which are still not good enough to be relied upon to keep the lights on). Focussing on ‘renewables’ instead of low/zero emissions is such an own goal.
Hey Rosie, I love your videos! I think it’s great that they are switching to all renewables. As a person who loves nature I have strong opinions on generating energy with hydropower. Dams are devastating to the health of rivers, we should be removing dams and letting nature recover from the damage the dams have done. Just my opinion but I think nuclear is a good source until we figure out the technology to fully move to renewables. Just my strong opinion:)
Excellent job Rosie!Switzerland is building dams while California and other states are removing them because they interfere with fish spawning. Not replacing nuclear is a bad example for other countries which don’t have Switzerland’s hydro power advantages. Ontario, Canada is setting a better example by refurbishing nuclear plants; building small modular reactors (SMRs); and experimenting with micro reactors. Nuclear will be essential to meeting CO2 reduction targets and anything that persuades the general public that nuclear isn’t essential will be counterproductive to the goal. GW
Too bad it takes far too long to build that many nuclear reactors, no matter what size. There is no industry left that could do that. I bet my a** that in Ontario a total number of zero SMRs will be build within the next 10 years. And who should then still be interested in powerplants that need fuel to operate?
I wouldn’t say Rosie did an excellent job here. Her run through of nuclear did not include any critical analysis as to the implications of moving away from nuclear. Making up for lost nuclear capacity might work with very large additions to Switzerland’s already extensive hydro network, but an unquestioning move away from nuclear without solid reasons other than public sentiment isn’t helpful. Especially when not all countries are as blessed with hydro.
@@matster77 yeah some nations, in some depending on geography will have to keep nuclear/build it, but in the majority of nations they have a surplus of either solar, wind, hydro or geothermal which can take a majority of the demand. Only place I can think that will continue to need it is Canada and maybe the UK depending on opposition to wind.
If you rely on wind & solar you need enough energy storage to cover the longest foreseeable period when sun & wind aren’t available, and that means a LOT of storage.
@@majortophat3083 But if you want to go to zero emissions in power sector, there's not many options that can back up solar and wind to keep energy available no matter what. i.e. a system needs to be able to deliver energy for even those outlier periods of little to no wind and minimal solar. Even in Australia, nuclear and/or biomass/gas with CCS is needed because hydro and geothermal is not sufficient. If you care about net zero, nuclear is the way. And don't even worry about next gen reactors or SMRs. The current gen of reactors are already awesomely capable at providing close to zero emissions, and safer than any other power source. Also cost competitive when you look at the alternative of very high VRE backed up by ludicrous amounts of idle battery capacity (that is only there to ensure reliability for those outlier low VRE generation periods) The sooner the world wakes up to the unequivocal benefits of nuclear, the sooner we can get to decarbonising the 'easiest' sector to decarbonise: power.
Can you make a cost comparison of energy sources like you did 2years ago onl, updated and if possible for different global regions. Thank you for your work
Hey Rosie, years ago, when I lived in Sydney, tractile was a thing as Tesla simply wasn't in the country. These guys did pretty attractive looking solar tiles in case you didn't know 🤷
Sustainable aviation fuel and offsets from negative emissions (e.g. DAC). I also generally do fun things like skiing when I am already travelling for work (as was the case this time), so I get double value from the emissions. But I also don't believe that no one should have any fun until the climate crisis is over, I don't believe that flight shaming or similar is an effective climate action.
Actually neither! I recall the exact name, it's translation was something like "crust". And I had potatoes from someone else's dish. A non traditional mish mash.
Yes, but pumped hydro wasn't planned and built for the energy transition. It was planned and built with shifting the nuclear excess production from the night when there isn't enough need to the day when there is a lot of need. The hard part for them now is to invert the business model.
It's actually fairly hard to find suitable geography. And I have no idea why we Swedes would go for that when we have a huge nuclear success story to build on.
@@jesan733 they are geting old and will need to be decommisioned sooner or later. New ones seems insanely expensive. The fuel to nuclear reactors is dominated by two players, France and Russia... this is problematic.
@@Aendavenau Sweden has built cheaply before. Why not do it again? It's not really correct that fuel is dominated by France and Russia. Russia has a considerable share of world enrichment capacity, yes. But others can build out enrichment capacity arguably faster than they can build reactors, so it's not really a hindrance to nuclear expansion.
@@jesan733 Right now we are doing neither, we are not investing in pumped/stored hydro and solar/wind nor nuclear. We have än aging population so Labour will be more expensive in the future. Climate change looks and globalization might be ending. This is the time for big investments
Learning from Germany is important. If the wind is low or the sun is shaded, they scavenge the market for energy and that means buying what they can from its neighbors at a premium price. Since Switzerland and the solar-dense Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are close, the clouds are mostly shared. And then, the winter is long and shady. I hope Switzerland cuts all lines to other countries and don't beg for energy when it's cold and dark if they follow suit with Germany and dumps nuclear.
DEAR ROSIE, (or anyone who knows.), There are 11 small glens in the west of Ireland, with drops of 1,000 metres+ to the sea. If we dammed the sea end of these valleys, and used pumped-seawater hydro, we could store 500-800 GWh. A company did look into the potential at one point. Not only would it be great for stabilising our own grid, but we could take excess power from Scotland, at zero, or negative prices, and sell it to England when prices were highest. I simply do not understand why this incredible resource is not being utilised. If it's NIMBY-ism, pay the F*ckers off.
I'm of the belief that one never says never. This should apply to nuclear in Switzerland. Specifically, nuclear and attitudes against it are changing. Many countries will use it as it is becoming safer and more efficient, especially in the form of small modular nuclear reactors.
I don't see this because the evidence of "safer" is greatly missing. Most of we are getting is the same statements that we got 50 years ago and we know by today these were off.
@@beatreuteler > I don't see this because the evidence of "safer" is greatly missing. Agreed. In the US, the number of people killed by civilian nuclear power is zero. It is hard to go from zero to less than zero in this regard. 'Safer' is not meaningful here, so the evidence will be missing. On the other hand, we can see the deaths from wind & solar (it turns out working at height is fairly dangerous), and of course the use of fossil fuels while we do not replace it with nuclear kills 10,000s each year, let alone the disease caused by the pollution.
Heya Rosie, I wonder if you could take a look at this video (th-cam.com/video/-bIlAkTDw8Q/w-d-xo.htmlsi=urOQ8nCae2mJFXcL) and tell me why we shouldn't be rolling out district heating in new development areas, the same way we deploy FTTP and grey water. I personally think there is too much focus on 'solving the storage problem' and not enough discussion of encouraging the shifting of usage to better suit demand. The concept in that video seems to kill both birds with a single stone - ramping up during excess and making use of waste heat while being able to store it and ramp down based on wholesale power prices.
12:12 Planning to use CCS is basically handwaving and assuming that a miracle will happen. Unless, perhaps, you can DRAMATICALLY increase your energy supply, perhaps through using nuclear power...? Likewise for other methods of decarbonizing (or at least reducing the carbon footprint of) heavy industrial processes (which could possibly be done using nuclear power for process heat or scads of electricity). The only realistic way that any country has found to reduce their industrial carbon footprint so far has been to export those heavy industries to other countries, where the carbon footprint is on someone else's tab. It doesn't solve the underlying problem though, if you think that generating too much CO2 is a problem.
This is an extremely misleading commentary. Firstly, Fukushima was not a nuclear incident. It was a tsunami which damaged a nuclear plant. Virtually nobody suffered or died from the nuclear incident. Most countries outside of Europe are expanding nuclear capacity. This includes Japan, who lived through Fukushima, but worse, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Solar panels are very inefficient in climates like Switzerland. They also lose their efficiency when they get too hot! Most solar panels and wind turbines are made in China. China gets 70% of their energy from burning coal. Building dams sounds nice unless you live in the way. I know someone whose grandfather’s house is now deep under a reservoir lake in Switzerland. Every week China is adding more CO2 production than Switzerland produces in a year. This whole commentary describes how to destroy Switzerland like Germany is doing to itself.
That was an excellent summary, as usual, but I'm afraid I feel the need to be 'that guy' as you didn't say any more than 'I'm in Schwietz to go sking'. I'm always surprised to see climate-aware people flying halfway round the planet to go skiing. Oz (or New Zealand) have ski resorts, don't they? Yeah Switzerland is lovely, and the skiing is probably better, but was it really worth 11 tonnes round-trip from where you live (atmosfair calc)? We should be leading by example if we expect other people to show a bit of restraint (Kevin Anderson does a much better job of this than most, for example). Hopefully you combined some work things, and other European visits for a few years, to make that carbon spend worthwhile. Maybe this is your first long-haul for 5 years. I don't know. But I think it needs to be addressed.
Switzerland will keep its nuclear energy, whether it’s own plants for which 2017´s referedum is completly considered as overulled by new energy security considerations after 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. whether its with France expanding nuclear plants footprint. which will benefit to entire continental Europe. Saying otherwise is incorrect or outdated. Saying that I am proud to say that in my area electricity and district heating systems are 99% from renewable as per public owned local Energy company annual report: hydro+solar+wood and waste industry. What I pay for is what I won’t pay in my tax bill as cherry on the cake. There is also masive projects to take advantage of noise walls and partially buried roads in order to cover them with solar panels, duplicating the benfits of those infrastructures originally made for good quality of life. Very little said about rated low level of corruption in Switzreland which I believe are absolutely key success factor to enable efficient and true transition in any country…
Rosie has anyone done a cost analysis of just using solar to pump water back up in external pipes. Snowy II has been an economic failure but even if Snowy II had have been on time and budget I would have thought using external pipes and solar would have been way cheaper, easier to maintain, faster to build out.
Interesting video but I have to say apart from the stunning scenery when I think of Switzerland I think of over priced boring food and really bad coffee.
that´s a good status of the situation. some things are already done, some are on going and some will be difficult and need some more work to have a suitable solution in the near future. Switzerland is lucky with its mountains and hydro potential, but also they are good at make good use of it. I notice that wind is not such a topic in switzerland as the geography is not that favorable.
@@thermitebanana In fairness, she highlighted CCS for point sources and there is a remote glimmer of hope these may some day actually work without creating their own problems...yeah, thinking about it a little longer, I think you are right - carbon capture fairies is a perfect description.
The Swiss bank’s and companies (Glencore) investment into Coal and dirtier Brown Coal is a disgrace and needs to be fixed. They don’t talk about that one much but their financing of it is by far their biggest issue.
As a Swiss I totally agree with you. We have some very questionable (corrupt I'd say some of the big ones are like the one you mention in brackets) companies here that abuse international law and are horrible, here they say that they do all required but in countries with less tough laws, bribes and kickbacks are the norm, disgraceful and outright wrong.
Be interesting to know what unnecessary transport is - they will encourage or maybe even write in to law working from home as an option (where applicable)? Sounds like they are years if not decades ahead of Australia.
Switzerland Nuclear supplies 35% 2 more large scale Plants are Planned also 60% Hydro Power and 5% from Wind Solar and Bio Mass (Burning Trees ) I also suggest you do more research on Renewables they are not as Clean or Green as promoted
I remember talking to an engineer for Von-Roll, a Swiss company that builds refuse incinerators. They built onw in Switzerland and the locals didn't like the plume of water vapour coming out of the flue stack because it looked too much like smoke. They had to add gas heaters to re-heat the flue gases before it came out of the stack so it didn't start to condense until it reached a higher altitude.
If I were Swiss, I'd prefer to say goodbye to the glaciers and low-elevation skiing (because they're going to disappear regardless of anything that Switzerland does) but keep the cows, the cheese, and the industrial competitiveness. Sure, save on home heating using geothermal + heat pumps, but increase electricity production with nuclear. Rooftop solar is fine, but otherwise the landscape is too valuable and beautiful to spoil with wind turbines and solar farms.
I think what Swiss need are more nuclear, either fission thorium or fusion, to fullfil INDUSTRY demand and hybrid ev for TRANSPORTATION transition to green energy demand. Solar panels are not only one options for housing energy demand. Wind has not big enough density even might suitable in Switzerland. Tidal do better in this particular high dense supply potential. Tidal also suitable for underwater application. Imagine tidal and hydro both maximizing water abundance potential into electricity!
At least they don't close nuclear power plants before they expire. This also gives time to evaluate how the strategy works. I believe that for most countries nuclear power generation is unavoidable but research needs state funding since it is just too risky for investors but we badly need a good solution.
Well, having the oldest nuclear power plant online does make me feel uneasy at times, that thing is so old...and the costs to justify the production seems to be highly questionable to me.
@@rjung_ch What causes you to believe that the plant is unsafe? How much does the electricity from the plant cost? How can we compare this to the cost/benefit of the Sihlsee, for instance?
@@mullergyula4174 There is always a cost-benefit tradeoff. With hydro there is danger of dam collapse. And I think rjung_ch has also expressed that the cost is too high.
If Switzerland is going down the same track as Australia, you should take into consideration that the Australian taxpayer must foot the bill for compounded inflation and cost of living pressures to fund the $1.2 trillion renewable program because of curtailment caused by congestion that comes with a budget blow out and requires farmland equivalent to 10 Tasmania’s.
Renewables have zero hope of meeting the net zero target because of their inability to meet firming requirements, but the real underlying reason why renewables, particularly wind and solar farms are being pushed so hard is because renewables qualify for carbon offsets which allows polluting industries to offset their pollution activities which is the driving force behind climate change but ironically there is also the expectation that the taxpayer will have a feel-good feeling believing that renewables are saving the planet. There is an alternative. Solar Hydrogen Energy Recovery Gas Turbine.
301Kwh (equal to 46/6.6Kw home solar installations) of solar energy collected from the sun’s nuclear fusion at atmospheric temperature is sufficient for electrolysis obtained from 1/3 of the water volume of an Olympic swimming pool that is recycled by steam reforming to produce 24 hours of Hydrogen gas contained within a 14 cubic meter space compressed between 350-700 bar to enable the start-up sequence of a hydrogen Gas turbine that in turn enables the synchronizing of its Variable Frequency Generator to maintain equilibrium of compressed hydrogen gas to continually fuel the turbine.
Oxygen produced from the electrolyzing process is also used as a fuel saving precooled engine catalyst to bring online the turbines energy recovery system and sustain a variably regulated base load power supply to service grid energy demand.
The operational variability of the turbine manages both grid inertia, and mis matched frequency while generating a capacity energy range between 86 - 330Mw with optional co-generated steam capacity up to 700Mw of electrical energy on a 24/7/365-day basis.
The power generating turbine has three operational parts, 3m in diameter 5.5m long and weighs 6 tons. Installation cost $36.5 -49.5 million, requires an operational footprint area the size of a football field, noise level is 60dbl at 60m, incorporates direct air capture of CO2 at 1,400 Kg/sec and includes a 14-year maintenance free, end of life decommissioning or optional refurbishment program. Sixty-five carbon and pollution free, shovel ready, off the shelf technology that combines solar nuclear fusion with modern aerospace propulsion and existing nuclear and coal fired steam technology to generate a total of 21,450 Mw can be retrofitting to any of the 120 Hydro-electric schemes and placed at grid conversion points would provide Australia's 26 million population its entire energy needs covering a combined operational area of 33 hectares for a 2023 total cost between $2.4-3.3 billion. Construction period is 3 to 5 years, meet net zero energy target twenty years earlier and makes wind and solar farms including hydro, gas and nuclear energy production redundant.
Rosie, has anyone yet peer-reviewed China's 16MW wind turbine? And what information have you got on China's new 140-meter length wind turbine blades - Are Europe's longest blades only 105 meters? So what would be the advantage or issue with such a large blade
Oh no 😱. Solar may sound nice, clean and cheap but in northern Europe only has around 10% capacity factor compared to 90% plus of nuclear and only lasts 20 to 30 years compared to the 60 to 80 years of a PWR, and unfortunately most PV is currently produced using a lot energy mainly from coal, which means with a 10 % capacity factor Energy return on energy invested could take 9 years. Also majority of PV uses forced labor in china. Nuclear provides multiple generations of high paying jobs to the local area.
You could swap the word Switzerland for Scotland who are on a similar journey and also finding it difficult. Scotland does have 20% of Europe's co2 storage capacity however!
The plans look nice at first glance, but they seem quite unrealistic to me. Increased electrification coupled with decommissioning nuclear and substituting with solar power will make it harder, not easier, for Switzerland to help Europe with dispatchable hydro. The rational thing to do would be to simply skip most of the Swiss plans in the electricity area and build a bit more nuclear capacity instead.
Let discard a perfectly usable form of power plant and replace it with unreliable, weather dependent and taking so much space in tiny country. Perfect After so many years of nuclear power plant operation, most of the bugs and unsafe feature has been fixed I think, like positive feedback loop or neutron absorber. The regulations and beurocracy make it costly, not the power plant itself
There have been a number of really significant victories achieved through the courts; unfortunately courts with such independence don't exist in most countries. The US has a bunch of fossil-fuel schills at the judicial helm, and let's face it, China isn't likely, to have a five year plan suddenly grind to a halt, because a judge told them it breached human rights. Ditto, India. Especially as in India, the poor will die first, which many rich Indians would see as a boon, like the English during the Irish potato famine.
Please slow down, your video is good and the information is important but you shove it in our ear far to fast for comfort. It is ok to let the video be 2 minutes longer and to pause between sentences, it would make it far more pleasant to watch your videos.
@@EngineeringwithRosie obviously you are all excited being in the Swiss mountains and skiing! …and of course your natural enthusiasm which we all love. It is less the speed, more you need slight pauses.
As ruminants and industry keep emitting the same amount of methane every year, it keeps the earth's temperature higher than it would be otherwise. So these emissions need to go.
Nice to hear they are doing good things. Compare 3 GW solar with 3GW nuclear is not 1:1 with much lesser operating time pr. year (GWh) so they will need a lot more incl. energy optimization, but they are smart people with means so they will get there.
The concern is climate change not a particular form of electricity generation. Emissions would be lower if Switzerland kept its existing nuclear (37% of production on your graph) as long as possible and also did the solar and hydro schemes you mention. If it is too much electricity being produced, it could do what France does and export electricity to Germany and Italy. You need to be clear if your concern is climate change or nuclear power. If it is the former, closing or not extending nuclear makes no scientific or economic sense.
Yes and yet when I looked up the electricity mix that day, solar was cranking across the country! The mountains cause localised clouds pretty often I imagine.
Thanks Engineering with Rosie. I know Switzerland well. Like much of the EU there's an awful smell of artificial manure when one cycles around the country, and maybe fertiliser; could it be the pungent smell of excess nitrogen dox or perhaps methane mixed with farm smells like ammonia? Great news about the Grannies, older women taking on the Swiss State over climate. I had noticed that too. I really can't imagine my own fair land, Aotearoa, going as far as the Suisse in anything to do to combat climate change and the environmental crisis. Especially with the new tripartite regime where profit overules life itself it would seem. Fast Tracking our way to armageddon.
I'm from Switzerland. What you're describing all sounds very nice, but the reality is a very different one. In reality big solar projects are being rejected by the public here constantly. We also barely have any wind turbines, which we actually need because we do not have enough electricity in the winter time.
We also have to keep in mind that in order to achieve carbon neutrality we need to double our electricity production. People just don't realise how far behind we are. The transition is going way too slowely and the average swiss person doesn't understand the energy transition or global warming.
We're dealing with the same rejection of scientific findings that other countries are dealing with (climate science denial and the denial of the findings with regards to the energy transition).
I wouldn't agree with the statement the reality is very different. In my opinion, the reality is quite well described by Rosie. Especially I think the stated need on doubling the electricity production is a pessimistic view. Official number is a 50% increase needed to fully electrify building heating and individual transport. And these are quite well estimated and represent a vast majority of decarbonization.
The most detrimental and ingrained science rejection, I would say, is the insistance that nuclear power is too dangerous to work with.
@@jesan733 written by nuclear Lobbyist or someone who beleives he knows the Truth...
@@FJStraußinger is it somehow strange to believe one knows the truth? Had you been humble yourself, you wouldn't have written that.
@@jesan733 I think you are in denial. The UK has been dumping nuclear waste from Windscale in Cumbria in the UK for 70+ years.
There is a cluster of Downes Syndrome children in Dundalk in Ireland born exactly 9 months after the Windscale fire in 1958.
They have been dumping waste into the Irish Sea ever since with a so far unknown legacy.
Spring tides bring this waste up onto the upper beach which is then dried and becomes air born. Check out Windscale the nuclear dustbin produced by Yorkshire Television in 1983.
I am in awe of your high-bandwidth information-dense delivery. Wider adoption of this technique could save a good few lifetimes of lectures and addresses to meetings, not to mention the energy consumption that goes with them. Great stuff!
One thing missed in the video is that Switzerland has quite a seasonal imbalance of energy production, in summer there is up to 10TWh surplus (around 17% of annual generation) which is exported but in winter there is up to 10TWh deficit and we rely on imports from neighboring countries. Depending which neighbor it comes from it has differing levels of emissions associated with it so is sometimes not as green as we would like. Any future plan will need to address this seasonal imbalance which provides an extra challenge in the transition to 100% renewables.
Some pumped hydro will probably freeze but... sand tower Finns to the rescue?
@4:46 Those built-in photovoltaics are beautiful! Please, please do a video on them! Cost, efficiency, design considerations - all the good engineering stuff!
I've been promised a factory tour next time I'm in Switzerland! So stay tuned for that about this time next year I hope.
@@EngineeringwithRosie Fantastic! I definitely think a lot can be done to make solar panels more attractive as they become prevalent in our communities.
I am glad that you mentioned energy conservation. Building insulation is often overlooked, not only for cold regions but also hot places. Our future is well insulated buildings tempered with heat pumps. High latitude PV is a developing technology.
At mid-40s latitude with an average altitude of 1350m, Switzerland is more high altitude than high latitude
@@bimblinghill
"Changes in Latitude, changes in Altitude in Margaritaville."
@@chrisconklin2981 huh?
@@bimblinghill Off take from "Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude." Just a reminder that snowy and high latitude places are developing adaptive PV technologies. Europe is the same latitude as Canada.
Also, pursuant to the nuclear comments, Switzerland is actually one of the few countries that had a (partial) core meltdown of a nuclear reactor, which might help explain some of the community opposition to the technology. It was a very small reactor (less than 30 MW) but it still caused a hell of a mess.
A few months after the Lucens meltdown (INES level 5) the Beznau reactor 1 started up, and is still going.
More reactors, more messes. Also, try and look up who underwrites (insurance) nuclear powerplants. (Hint: its you)
Even with such incidents nuclear remains the safest form of power, by far. Maintain the safety regulations and it’s easily the best option to rely on to rapidly decarbonise.
@@christianvanderstap6257 The Swiss public have a fair amount of ownership of these nuclear power stations through various public utility companies (Axpo in particular). Also they have benefited from a more stable electricity price over the last few (turbulent) years.
@@matster77 rapid? How long does it take to build a 1TW plant? How quickly can we scale that up (how many places can actually make those reactor vessels)? Where does the fuel come from? Is it ok for Iran and tge DPRK to have nuclear plants?
And even if those accidents are rare, they for sure cost a lot of money to clean up. Money that you underwrite as a tax payer.
Other than that, it is ok.
There are some other incentives. As a home buyer, you can get a cheaper loan if your to-be-purchased property has good energy rating, incentivizing all the new buildings to be very efficient. Switzerland also does not allow air conditioning in buildings, so you need to make 100% sure your office building has the best possible recuperation system available.
There is also minimal necessary amount of solar required for each new building, etc.
And the amount of roofs with solar panels is raising rapidly - the local solar companies are overloaded.
The electricity is quite expensive, comparing to the rest of the Europe (at least the surrounding countries), but considering how clean it is, it's worth.
Recently I've been visiting the nuclear power plant here, it's amazing what kind of details you can learn there - next time Rosie comes to CH, I'll volunteer to organize such visit - they do it for group of minimum 5 people, it's free of charge (real rarity in Switzerland) and it's totally worth it.
With all the information that you provided in this video, in my opinion the Swiss approach is the greenest, safest, and most practical approach to zero emission and energy production. Switching from nuclear to renewable is the best choice. I did not work as professional in nuclear engineer (by choice) but I am educated and trained in it, and I can tell you that abandoning nuclear fission energy is the best choice. It is cost effective choice. Nuclear fission waste and safety management is even worst than coal plant waste and safety management. Now regarding solar panels, roofs and balconies are the best places to put panels on. You are making these roofs multi-functional. You also have many more other options, such as vertical Finnish windmills that can be placed parallel to roads and train tracks like lamp post. Using Finnish sand battery to store energy next to power sources (windmills). Those windmills are made for hard weather and low noise. Regarding the industry, use carbon capture at the source. Consider using fungus for coffin and cement construction (see Netherland). How about bamboos to replace paper and for construction industry. Lots of useful option to solve zero emission problem. Swiss is doing alright.... I enjoyed watching this video. 😊
Yes, you can tell the NPP waste and safety management (where the industry captures, stores, monitors, and prevents waste from entering the biosphere - and where in the US at least, there have been 0 worker deaths as a result of operations), is much worse than the coal power plant waste and safety management (where the industry 'manages' the waste by pumping it directly into the biosphere, let alone the worker deaths).
if you really worked with nuclear and are higly educated in this area then you wouldn't say those things about, cost, nuclear waste dangers and the rest. I feel someone is lying here? how can you say that the waste from carbon is better managed than the one from nuclear when this is straight up lie? Also how can you say that nuclear waste is dangerous when no one died from it ? why is better to produce those panels, put them in an area where they produce less energy and are way more inneficient and then have to throw them out after 20 years because they will produce almost no energy at all while you can have a reliable, non polluting, continuously produced electricity from nuclear? Yes it is costly at first, but over time its cost drastically reduces and if you check the price over of its life time then it is comparable with renewable without taking into account storage or the cost of the energy used to compensate for periods with no wids or no sun. Also I am not talking about the cost of distribution networks and the cost of all the extra electronics(milions of invertors and wires and transformers etc) needed to implement those pannels on each balcony
@@danielstan2301 You admitted yourself. Nuclear fission..is costly at first. You also do not include cost of waste disposal and insurance in case of catastrophe; see Fukushima, Chernobyl, Windscale, Chalk River and St. Luis. Chernobyl and Fukushima is still under clean up with a growing bill to pay. People are dying from it not in spectacular way but in stealthy way and it is called cancer. Talk to troops of tank busters or atomic silos or Navajo people (th-cam.com/video/ETPogv1zq08/w-d-xo.html) Human only see danger when it is noisy, spectacular and big. But he does not see danger when he does not see or understand. If you want to see it or contribute positively to what you believe, I suggest you go to Chernobyl or Fukushima. It is very easy to sit at home with computer in front and appreciate convenient source of electricity but life is hard when one has to get hands dirty and risk life making electricity not for yourself but for others to use it and not to hear "thank you". There is a smart way and easy way. Smart way are panels, hydro dams and windmills because they are safe and easy to work with. As engineer I would like to work with that. Easy way is with uranium because it uses the same infrastructure like coal and oil. As engineer, I would stay away from it. Unfortunately, people choose an easy way out and usually ends with damage and regrets.
Thanks Rosie, brilliant whistle stop tour how the challenges and opportunities look like in a very wealthy and innovative country!
I personally was very impressed when I drove through Switzerland 18 months ago in an EV and discovered that all parking along the motorway actually does have fast chargers! So they already killed charging anxiety! And one other positive in the experience of that journey: the average energ consumption on the trip was the same as travelling the same distance in NL!
Nuclear actually emits less co2 than wind/solar, even more if you add storage
😂😂😂😂😂😂 you are looking at edfs fake numbers!!!
Recently did some modelling work for a location in Switzerland in the Alps, they have an interesting market landscape when it comes to grid supplied connections. Without identifying the project, this was a very remote site that was still able to purchase power halfway up a mountain at the same commercial rate that a factory in the UK could negotiate. This made planning to add solar, wind or batteries pretty challenging as their best economic scenario was still just to expand the grid connection... up a mountain. TLDR Variable renewable generation was never as attractive economically compared to just connecting to the grid.
Adding to the baseload generation and expanding the grid would be more in line with optimising system performance overall for Swiss projects, and it seems that they plan to try and maintain this landscape, using Hydro as the main power supply drawing from stored variable generation. Interesting to say the least, great video all round!
Switzerland is embedded in the continental European power grid. But almost all European countries expect higher electricity consumption in the future because it will replace combustion processes. The country with the largest supply of electricity in Europe can also achieve the best prices for electricity, either for its own consumption or for international sales.
Alternate video title: Rosie writes off a ski vacation as a business expense 🤪 jk great video!
😂😂😂
lol - Last week I thought about finding some budget to invite her to discuss some wind projects in my canton. But then thought getting her over here would be too expensive and way too big of a carbon footprint.
One week later I learned she practically drove by my house 😢
8:18 I was thinking about the environmental effects of dramatically increased water storage. E.g. some dams in California are being removed because keeping them causes more harm/expense than the value of electricity they can produce. Putting dams in places where glaciers used to hold water is a very interesting solution; actually mitigating harm from environmental changes.
Nuclear phase-out in Europe has little to do with the Fukushima accident. In Germany it was the trigger, but half of the then shut down plants where switched off before the accident happend, because of a combination of (expensive) technical issues and financial issues. Unlike France, the German government decided to stop subsidizing the industry, resulting in the scheduled phase-out. Nuclear powerstations are very complex plants, riddles with regulations. You can't simply move the operation and maintenance to a different company. Siemens and the German government needed to phase-out this unprofitable business in a synchronized and safe way. Germany had a few nuclear stations that where relatively new and did not have many problems, but even Germany is too small to maintain a whole nuclear industry for just the few remaining plants. The German government needed to decide between spending billions more to old ones back up and running or accept that the industry would end. The Fukushima accident made the decision simpler, but one of the reasons why that decision could be made so fast is because the government had been thinking about the answer for many years before the accident. Battery storage is getting very cheap and is expected to become many times cheaper again in the next 10 years, which is about the time needed to build new nuclear installations. There are no investors in nuclear because it makes no economic sense anymore, unless governments pay for everything and take all the financial risks.
With all due respect, that account was wildly misleading. All German civilian nuclear plants that has ever operated is a combined 26 GW. Of this capacity, this is the breakdown of closure times:
19% closed up until 1994, most of it as a result of reunification
4% closed between 1995 and 2010. (2 small reactors)
32% closed in 2011 due to immediate Fukushima scare.
46% closed in 2015-2023 due to delayed Fukushima scare.
So German nuclear capacity held steady with very little change between reunification and Fukushima!
We should remember that Russia, as an influence operation, long flooded Germany with artificially cheap natgas as preparation for war, and that Germany has on top of that has used hundreds of billions of euros in subsidies to flood itself with intermittent power. Had it used a fraction of these subsidies for nuclear construction, it would be rid of coal by now and have lower electricity prices.
Germany's fleet of 9 huge reactors in the last tranche above was in no way too small to maintain. It's clearly larger than most active countries' fleets, e.g. my own Sweden's or our neighbor Finland's.
There is currently 60 reactors under construction in the world, and so far this year, four new grid connections have been made in the US, India, China and UAE respectively. Nuclear still makes great economic sense and are cash cows for countries that have built them.
I found the bits about glacial retreat opening up new opportunities for hydro very interesting. It has no environmental impact either, because there isn't much living under the ice, and if there is it doesn't survive long once the ice retreats. I didn't see much discussion about wind power - do they plan on building much wind?
Lots of people here don't like wind energy. I've seen too many that try and stop it, then again, not all areas are best for wind. Personally I don't mind any form of renewable energy.
There is no mention of Geothermal generation of electricity. As a retired engineer, I firmly believe geothermal generation of electricity to be the most important part of a 100% energy supply from an all-renewable energy sources. Geothermal is variable, leave the hot water in the underground reservoir until more electricity is needed. Geothermal is a simple process and is well known. It can also be developed anywhere in the world.
It's a pity most deep geothermal projects tried to date have been unsuccessful corrosion, mud volcanoes and the like. However it does seem to work relatively well in volcanic precincts. That's good.
We had an earthquake in Switzerland because of a test facility. But it is still an interesting source for heating.
I hadn’t realised Switzerland was so vulnerable to tsunami…
To the countries making promises and then dragging their feet... Thanks for buying our oil and gas, at least. Regards from Norway.
nirwegischer troll
Pretty sure your fossil fuel oligarchs together with others are doing their best to undermine our efforts to shift. Politics isn't dragging its feet for no reason.
Fantastic data dump Rosie, loved it. Very informative. 👍
How much nuclear power do they buy from France?
Hello Rosie, nice that you visited my country, thanks for popping over 🙂
Best wishes to you, wherever you are.
👍💪✌
Thank you for this video - very informative
Thanks for this excellent review Rosie.
According to our world in data, Switzerland's energy inputs, are oil, hydro, nuclear, gas in that order. Other sources/inputs are insignificant.
They need to offset their huge oil inputs, luckily it has a neighbour able to sell lots of nuclear power.
In Dominican Republic, we're still using re usable glass bottles, Something interesting is that ice making machine are fully integrated inside the builders. So all the heat stays inside and the only ice is produced. And don't get affected by very low outside temperatures outside.
I wish I knew you were coming here... I'm a Big fan. I have a Physics PhD and participating in local energy governance. Keep an eye on the results of the June 9th federal votation. It is about a new swiss renewable energy law that was voted in parlement in September last year, but that needs to be approved (voted on) by the entire population ( example of typical Swiss direct democracy).
Mühleberg nuclear power plant was permanently shut down in December 2019 and is currently in the process of being decommissioned. As of now, Switzerland has only three active nuclear power plants: Beznau (with two reactors), Gösgen, and Leibstadt.
As a Physics PhD, wouldn't you say more nuclear would be a far better option?
@@jesan733 Keeping existing nuclear running is a no brainer indeed. New nuclear plants - likely too costly as renewables keep getting cheaper and cheeper. A big nuclear plant is a single points of failure if for instance it needs to be shut down because a river can't produce enough cooling water in summer for instance. So a mix of energies is best. And one can create a lot of different renewable power sources within the budget of a single nuclear power station. I'm in favor of paying subsidies for individual house owners to add PV on their buildings.
PV is not running at night, but with more and more electrical vehicles, car2grid or car2house should be expanded to provide that power at night. Many cars owners do not use their full battery capacity each day, especially with home office and good public transport. The problem is to legislate so that electric car owners that allow their batteries to be used on the grid are properly compensated for the eventual reduced lifespan of the batteries.
Power companies will not encourage car2house though, as they won't make any money from it.
PV is really the best option for house owners, because at the extreme they could become completely independent of the grid, and you wouldn't care about the electricity cost.
And small modular reactors... First of all, it is not really 100% renewable. I think we lack experience, and it may not be needed if enough renewables are produced: hydrogen and newer battery chemistries could act as long term storage to complement pumped hydro.
It is clear that nuclear is very predictable and makes energy management very easy compared to a mix of very unpredictable renewables. Nuclear is also what leads to energy monopolies that may reduce research spending on solar and storage technologies.
@@SwissPGO the reason a wide array of solutions to intermittency is often presented, like pumped hydro, batteries, V2G, super-long range grids and so on, is the fact that there's no good solution. If there was a good solution, that solution would be presented stand-alone. The array of solutions is effectively a gish gallop. I'm not saying this is a conscious tactic, of course, but rather a reasoning errror that's easy to make when we want something to work. Do think about whether many not-good-enough solutions really combines to something that is good enough. I think it doesn't.
I doubt the car2house solution. I'm into my third Leaf EV now but it still has kindof small battery, 40 kWh, and I would like it to be fully charged when I start my day. Also I live in Sweden, so we basically have negligible solar for four months of the year, and wind varies hugely over 14-day timespans.
The seemingly high cost of nuclear power plants is a function of dismantled and immature supply chains combined with too-high interest rates applied (strongly devaluing the nuclear reactors' long lifespans). Also it's usually compared to unbuffered intermittent RE costs. Nuclear as single point of failure, well, the solution is to have a larger fleet, typically, so that one plant going offline is a small part of the fleet. Comparing output of a ten-reactor fleet with a similar amount of intermittent RE shows an extreme advantage to nuclear.
Regarding reduction in research, I think the solar market and the BEV market are strong enough to sustain lots of research. The problem is rather the opposite, that the allure of RE as a solution has reduced research into nuclear. And finally regarding subsidies to home solar: I think that in places like Sweden, France and Switzerland, this is actually reducing environmental performance of these countries' energy production.
@jesan773 We could have an interesting panel discussion. We both have experiences (I spend time at Euratom an CEA in france).
I share some of ideas - but not 100%. I also think each region may need a different "mix" of solutions. France is a good example of the effects of a near monopoly of nuclear energy. Energy prices were low indeed in France (I lived there for several years), leading to less isolation of buildings, and lower adoption rates of heat pumps and solar.
Independence of a centralized energy provider or grid comes at a cost indeed.
As for car2home, I see your point if one lives in Sweden and if you need a full charge each day. If one can charge at the office during peak solar production, and comes home with still 85% capacity on the EV, car2house makes sense, especially when doing home office the next day.
@@SwissPGO agree that we could have an interesting discussion. Not sure it's a disadvantage that France has lower adoption of heat pumps and solar. I mean, Germany has spent extreme amounts of money on solar but in a way doesn't have much to show for it, and the environmental costs in the supply chain is probably substantial. Less isolation in buildings, that may be disadvantageous though, but should be achievable through regulatory means, perhaps. Also if RE advocates are right about costs (or governments simply decide to solve a lot of the intermittency issues by overbuilding) then RE may depress isolation and heat pumps as well.
Of course in some situations car2house can make sense, perhaps it'll work better than I think. If some pioneer region or country has or will show the way and prove me wrong, I'm interested to hear about it.
The energy and efficiency in Rosie's delivery needs to be matched by our upgraded distribution networks
I thought solar panel farms everywhere are oriented to maximise power output in winter rather than to maximise total power output over the year. It is surely a no-brainer. At high latitudes they even put them vertically for that reason.
But if a predominantly solar and wind grid is economically feasible in a country such as Switzerland (high latitude, lack of space for onshore wind) then it becomes an absolute no-brainer for a low-latitude country that is spread out over a whole continent (ie Australia).
A good point about the potential for emissions reduction through changed agricultural practice - it is something no-one is paying enough attention to.
No mention of aviation - all those tourists flying there?
International aviation isn't included in country emissions totals as per Paris. But it's huge for Switzerland, 10%. Compared to I think 2 or 3% global average. I made a short video on that which will be out in a few days if you're interested.
It's easier to go green when almost everyone works in a bank or other office jobs. It's a bit more challenging to go green when your country's economy is heavy industry.
Of course countries like Switzerland still import thing made from heavy industry, but just don't get the statistical hit.
I like the photovoltaic roofs. Switzerland is so beautiful ❤❤❤❤
Missing emission source: carbon embedded in imported goods
First time i hear about plans to replicate glaciers function of being water reservoirs for rivers in the summer. I would love to get more info in that.
Excellent !!!
Excellent work Rosie, I wondered how the Swiss were getting on with the transition. Some great progress being made and those buildings.. wonderful. The fact that Swiss engineering is now being directed to solve emissions is a great thing. Seems electricity production and transport is well underway to being de-carbonised in Switzerland. Unlike here in Australia a much easier job to get to net zero though as you point out there are still problems to be solved. Take care and kind regards from Newcastle NSW
Switzerland has in winter 2023/2024 produced more electric power then used and could Export like in summer
I appreciate this channel a lot for its content, Rosie and her team are doing a great job here, but litterally flying to the other side of the globe for skiing vacation does not align well with action on climate change.
Even John Travolta doesn't affect climate to any measurable degree. If you want people to be safe from climate, then stop restricting their energy-freedom.
I take it you walk everywhere and never fart… because you know… methane
The world has gone mad. Another country neglecting nuclear in favour of higher shares of VRE.
Integration costs go exponential the more you rely on VRE. Wind and solar are great to use at modest levels and lower. And nuclear (and hydro if you’re fortunate) are the way forward to get decarbonisation without ridiculous buildout of transmission, distribution, and 4hr batteries (which are still not good enough to be relied upon to keep the lights on).
Focussing on ‘renewables’ instead of low/zero emissions is such an own goal.
EXCELLENT video. Thank you.
Hey Rosie, I love your videos! I think it’s great that they are switching to all renewables. As a person who loves nature I have strong opinions on generating energy with hydropower. Dams are devastating to the health of rivers, we should be removing dams and letting nature recover from the damage the dams have done. Just my opinion but I think nuclear is a good source until we figure out the technology to fully move to renewables. Just my strong opinion:)
Excellent job Rosie!Switzerland is building dams while California and other states are removing them because they interfere with fish spawning. Not replacing nuclear is a bad example for other countries which don’t have Switzerland’s hydro power advantages. Ontario, Canada is setting a better example by refurbishing nuclear plants; building small modular reactors (SMRs); and experimenting with micro reactors. Nuclear will be essential to meeting CO2 reduction targets and anything that persuades the general public that nuclear isn’t essential will be counterproductive to the goal. GW
Too bad it takes far too long to build that many nuclear reactors, no matter what size. There is no industry left that could do that. I bet my a** that in Ontario a total number of zero SMRs will be build within the next 10 years. And who should then still be interested in powerplants that need fuel to operate?
I wouldn’t say Rosie did an excellent job here. Her run through of nuclear did not include any critical analysis as to the implications of moving away from nuclear.
Making up for lost nuclear capacity might work with very large additions to Switzerland’s already extensive hydro network, but an unquestioning move away from nuclear without solid reasons other than public sentiment isn’t helpful. Especially when not all countries are as blessed with hydro.
@@matster77 yeah some nations, in some depending on geography will have to keep nuclear/build it, but in the majority of nations they have a surplus of either solar, wind, hydro or geothermal which can take a majority of the demand. Only place I can think that will continue to need it is Canada and maybe the UK depending on opposition to wind.
If you rely on wind & solar you need enough energy storage to cover the longest foreseeable period when sun & wind aren’t available, and that means a LOT of storage.
@@majortophat3083 But if you want to go to zero emissions in power sector, there's not many options that can back up solar and wind to keep energy available no matter what. i.e. a system needs to be able to deliver energy for even those outlier periods of little to no wind and minimal solar.
Even in Australia, nuclear and/or biomass/gas with CCS is needed because hydro and geothermal is not sufficient.
If you care about net zero, nuclear is the way. And don't even worry about next gen reactors or SMRs. The current gen of reactors are already awesomely capable at providing close to zero emissions, and safer than any other power source. Also cost competitive when you look at the alternative of very high VRE backed up by ludicrous amounts of idle battery capacity (that is only there to ensure reliability for those outlier low VRE generation periods)
The sooner the world wakes up to the unequivocal benefits of nuclear, the sooner we can get to decarbonising the 'easiest' sector to decarbonise: power.
Can you make a cost comparison of energy sources like you did 2years ago onl, updated and if possible for different global regions.
Thank you for your work
Hey Rosie, years ago, when I lived in Sydney, tractile was a thing as Tesla simply wasn't in the country. These guys did pretty attractive looking solar tiles in case you didn't know 🤷
Switzerland? CHOCOLATE!
The Swiss approach to solar was surprising but makes total sense. Maximize the output for when you need it.
Will not happen
Jarring was that ice flow before and after. Only a little less striking was the profusion of skiers on that little snowy hillside!
Great video very informative thanks
Rosie, how will you get from Australia to Switzerland for skiing without carbon emissions in the future?
Sustainable aviation fuel and offsets from negative emissions (e.g. DAC). I also generally do fun things like skiing when I am already travelling for work (as was the case this time), so I get double value from the emissions. But I also don't believe that no one should have any fun until the climate crisis is over, I don't believe that flight shaming or similar is an effective climate action.
Great to match solar with pumped hydro and Swiss engineering. However DAC is the least efficient CCS method.
Shutting down nuclear is stunningly stupid!
Let’s get those dam upgrades!!
Thank you for sharing your insights..
Most enjoyable video Rosie.
Somebody was very inspired during the intro
Could they have floating solar parks they have some big lakes lol
Dear Rosie: @ 0:09 you talk about Fondue but the video shows Raclette.
Actually neither! I recall the exact name, it's translation was something like "crust". And I had potatoes from someone else's dish. A non traditional mish mash.
Pumped hydro and bigger dams seems like such a brilliant idea. Wish my country, Sweden, had some plans like these.
Yes, but pumped hydro wasn't planned and built for the energy transition. It was planned and built with shifting the nuclear excess production from the night when there isn't enough need to the day when there is a lot of need. The hard part for them now is to invert the business model.
It's actually fairly hard to find suitable geography. And I have no idea why we Swedes would go for that when we have a huge nuclear success story to build on.
@@jesan733 they are geting old and will need to be decommisioned sooner or later. New ones seems insanely expensive.
The fuel to nuclear reactors is dominated by two players, France and Russia... this is problematic.
@@Aendavenau Sweden has built cheaply before. Why not do it again? It's not really correct that fuel is dominated by France and Russia. Russia has a considerable share of world enrichment capacity, yes. But others can build out enrichment capacity arguably faster than they can build reactors, so it's not really a hindrance to nuclear expansion.
@@jesan733 Right now we are doing neither, we are not investing in pumped/stored hydro and solar/wind nor nuclear. We have än aging population so Labour will be more expensive in the future. Climate change looks and globalization might be ending. This is the time for big investments
Learning from Germany is important. If the wind is low or the sun is shaded, they scavenge the market for energy and that means buying what they can from its neighbors at a premium price. Since Switzerland and the solar-dense Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are close, the clouds are mostly shared. And then, the winter is long and shady. I hope Switzerland cuts all lines to other countries and don't beg for energy when it's cold and dark if they follow suit with Germany and dumps nuclear.
We don’t have enough dam storage!
Doesn't matter, let's just pretend we do, or could get it, to delay any thoughts about new nuclear.
DEAR ROSIE, (or anyone who knows.), There are 11 small glens in the west of Ireland, with drops of 1,000 metres+ to the sea. If we dammed the sea end of these valleys, and used pumped-seawater hydro, we could store 500-800 GWh. A company did look into the potential at one point. Not only would it be great for stabilising our own grid, but we could take excess power from Scotland, at zero, or negative prices, and sell it to England when prices were highest. I simply do not understand why this incredible resource is not being utilised. If it's NIMBY-ism, pay the F*ckers off.
I'm of the belief that one never says never. This should apply to nuclear in Switzerland. Specifically, nuclear and attitudes against it are changing. Many countries will use it as it is becoming safer and more efficient, especially in the form of small modular nuclear reactors.
I don't see this because the evidence of "safer" is greatly missing. Most of we are getting is the same statements that we got 50 years ago and we know by today these were off.
@@beatreuteler > I don't see this because the evidence of "safer" is greatly missing.
Agreed.
In the US, the number of people killed by civilian nuclear power is zero. It is hard to go from zero to less than zero in this regard. 'Safer' is not meaningful here, so the evidence will be missing.
On the other hand, we can see the deaths from wind & solar (it turns out working at height is fairly dangerous), and of course the use of fossil fuels while we do not replace it with nuclear kills 10,000s each year, let alone the disease caused by the pollution.
@@factnotfiction5915the numbers if nuclear are not trustable you pr troll
@@FJStraußinger given you can't debate without ad hominem attacks, I'll just ignore you
@@factnotfiction5915 absoluteley better for you! you have not truth and arguments Rosneft/edf or westinghouse kazatomprom are your money boys
Yes nkrway is on track... Why??? The want to sell their läßt drop of oil!
Heya Rosie,
I wonder if you could take a look at this video (th-cam.com/video/-bIlAkTDw8Q/w-d-xo.htmlsi=urOQ8nCae2mJFXcL) and tell me why we shouldn't be rolling out district heating in new development areas, the same way we deploy FTTP and grey water.
I personally think there is too much focus on 'solving the storage problem' and not enough discussion of encouraging the shifting of usage to better suit demand. The concept in that video seems to kill both birds with a single stone - ramping up during excess and making use of waste heat while being able to store it and ramp down based on wholesale power prices.
12:12 Planning to use CCS is basically handwaving and assuming that a miracle will happen. Unless, perhaps, you can DRAMATICALLY increase your energy supply, perhaps through using nuclear power...? Likewise for other methods of decarbonizing (or at least reducing the carbon footprint of) heavy industrial processes (which could possibly be done using nuclear power for process heat or scads of electricity). The only realistic way that any country has found to reduce their industrial carbon footprint so far has been to export those heavy industries to other countries, where the carbon footprint is on someone else's tab. It doesn't solve the underlying problem though, if you think that generating too much CO2 is a problem.
Are increasing methane emissions from sedimentation behind dams less of an issue for swiss dams?
This is an extremely misleading commentary. Firstly, Fukushima was not a nuclear incident. It was a tsunami which damaged a nuclear plant. Virtually nobody suffered or died from the nuclear incident. Most countries outside of Europe are expanding nuclear capacity. This includes Japan, who lived through Fukushima, but worse, through Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Solar panels are very inefficient in climates like Switzerland. They also lose their efficiency when they get too hot! Most solar panels and wind turbines are made in China. China gets 70% of their energy from burning coal. Building dams sounds nice unless you live in the way. I know someone whose grandfather’s house is now deep under a reservoir lake in Switzerland. Every week China is adding more CO2 production than Switzerland produces in a year. This whole commentary describes how to destroy Switzerland like Germany is doing to itself.
That was an excellent summary, as usual, but I'm afraid I feel the need to be 'that guy' as you didn't say any more than 'I'm in Schwietz to go sking'. I'm always surprised to see climate-aware people flying halfway round the planet to go skiing. Oz (or New Zealand) have ski resorts, don't they? Yeah Switzerland is lovely, and the skiing is probably better, but was it really worth 11 tonnes round-trip from where you live (atmosfair calc)? We should be leading by example if we expect other people to show a bit of restraint (Kevin Anderson does a much better job of this than most, for example). Hopefully you combined some work things, and other European visits for a few years, to make that carbon spend worthwhile. Maybe this is your first long-haul for 5 years. I don't know. But I think it needs to be addressed.
You've replaced my therapist Ms Rosie. You're a bit of light in the murk.
Switzerland will keep its nuclear energy, whether it’s own plants for which 2017´s referedum is completly considered as overulled by new energy security considerations after 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. whether its with France expanding nuclear plants footprint. which will benefit to entire continental Europe. Saying otherwise is incorrect or outdated.
Saying that I am proud to say that in my area electricity and district heating systems are 99% from renewable as per public owned local Energy company annual report: hydro+solar+wood and waste industry. What I pay for is what I won’t pay in my tax bill as cherry on the cake.
There is also masive projects to take advantage of noise walls and partially buried roads in order to cover them with solar panels, duplicating the benfits of those infrastructures originally made for good quality of life.
Very little said about rated low level of corruption in Switzreland which I believe are absolutely key success factor to enable efficient and true transition in any country…
Rosie has anyone done a cost analysis of just using solar to pump water back up in external pipes. Snowy II has been an economic failure but even if Snowy II had have been on time and budget I would have thought using external pipes and solar would have been way cheaper, easier to maintain, faster to build out.
If it's the Swiss, you can bet they did a full financial analysis. It's what they're known for, and nearly so
Sure, for a state with 2 million rich inhabitants,is easy .
Try now Germany,Italy or even Greece...
Interesting video but I have to say apart from the stunning scenery when I think of Switzerland I think of over priced boring food and really bad coffee.
that´s a good status of the situation. some things are already done, some are on going and some will be difficult and need some more work to have a suitable solution in the near future.
Switzerland is lucky with its mountains and hydro potential, but also they are good at make good use of it. I notice that wind is not such a topic in switzerland as the geography is not that favorable.
What a wonderful glimmer of hope and sanity - thanks Rosie.
Except for the bit about believing in the carbon capture fairies
@@thermitebanana In fairness, she highlighted CCS for point sources and there is a remote glimmer of hope these may some day actually work without creating their own problems...yeah, thinking about it a little longer, I think you are right - carbon capture fairies is a perfect description.
The Swiss bank’s and companies (Glencore) investment into Coal and dirtier Brown Coal is a disgrace and needs to be fixed. They don’t talk about that one much but their financing of it is by far their biggest issue.
As a Swiss I totally agree with you. We have some very questionable (corrupt I'd say some of the big ones are like the one you mention in brackets) companies here that abuse international law and are horrible, here they say that they do all required but in countries with less tough laws, bribes and kickbacks are the norm, disgraceful and outright wrong.
Be interesting to know what unnecessary transport is - they will encourage or maybe even write in to law working from home as an option (where applicable)?
Sounds like they are years if not decades ahead of Australia.
Switzerland Nuclear supplies 35% 2 more large scale Plants are Planned also 60% Hydro Power and 5% from Wind Solar and Bio Mass (Burning Trees ) I also suggest you do more research on Renewables they are not as Clean or Green as promoted
Rosie, if you look/hear what Tony Seba says about agriculture, especially the dairy industry. It could be gone by 2030 due to precision fermentation.
I remember talking to an engineer for Von-Roll, a Swiss company that builds refuse incinerators. They built onw in Switzerland and the locals didn't like the plume of water vapour coming out of the flue stack because it looked too much like smoke. They had to add gas heaters to re-heat the flue gases before it came out of the stack so it didn't start to condense until it reached a higher altitude.
Yeah, they should have left the water vapour in to hide the SOx, NOx, particulates and heavy metals that burning refuse creates.
tl;dr: Storage is a problem with a huge dam solution.
If I were Swiss, I'd prefer to say goodbye to the glaciers and low-elevation skiing (because they're going to disappear regardless of anything that Switzerland does) but keep the cows, the cheese, and the industrial competitiveness. Sure, save on home heating using geothermal + heat pumps, but increase electricity production with nuclear. Rooftop solar is fine, but otherwise the landscape is too valuable and beautiful to spoil with wind turbines and solar farms.
I think what Swiss need are more nuclear, either fission thorium or fusion, to fullfil INDUSTRY demand and hybrid ev for TRANSPORTATION transition to green energy demand.
Solar panels are not only one options for housing energy demand. Wind has not big enough density even might suitable in Switzerland.
Tidal do better in this particular high dense supply potential. Tidal also suitable for underwater application. Imagine tidal and hydro both maximizing water abundance potential into electricity!
At least they don't close nuclear power plants before they expire. This also gives time to evaluate how the strategy works.
I believe that for most countries nuclear power generation is unavoidable but research needs state funding since it is just too risky for investors but we badly need a good solution.
Only outside 50degrees latitudes. Luckily most of us live within those bounds.
Well, having the oldest nuclear power plant online does make me feel uneasy at times, that thing is so old...and the costs to justify the production seems to be highly questionable to me.
@@rjung_ch I can understand your concerns. Safety is the most important.
@@rjung_ch What causes you to believe that the plant is unsafe? How much does the electricity from the plant cost? How can we compare this to the cost/benefit of the Sihlsee, for instance?
@@mullergyula4174 There is always a cost-benefit tradeoff. With hydro there is danger of dam collapse. And I think rjung_ch has also expressed that the cost is too high.
If Switzerland is going down the same track as Australia, you should take into consideration that the Australian taxpayer must foot the bill for compounded inflation and cost of living pressures to fund the $1.2 trillion renewable program because of curtailment caused by congestion that comes with a budget blow out and requires farmland equivalent to 10 Tasmania’s.
Renewables have zero hope of meeting the net zero target because of their inability to meet firming requirements, but the real underlying reason why renewables, particularly wind and solar farms are being pushed so hard is because renewables qualify for carbon offsets which allows polluting industries to offset their pollution activities which is the driving force behind climate change but ironically there is also the expectation that the taxpayer will have a feel-good feeling believing that renewables are saving the planet.
There is an alternative.
Solar Hydrogen Energy Recovery Gas Turbine.
301Kwh (equal to 46/6.6Kw home solar installations) of solar energy collected from the sun’s nuclear fusion at atmospheric temperature is sufficient for electrolysis obtained from 1/3 of the water volume of an Olympic swimming pool that is recycled by steam reforming to produce 24 hours of Hydrogen gas contained within a 14 cubic meter space compressed between 350-700 bar to enable the start-up sequence of a hydrogen Gas turbine that in turn enables the synchronizing of its Variable Frequency Generator to maintain equilibrium of compressed hydrogen gas to continually fuel the turbine.
Oxygen produced from the electrolyzing process is also used as a fuel saving precooled engine catalyst to bring online the turbines energy recovery system and sustain a variably regulated base load power supply to service grid energy demand.
The operational variability of the turbine manages both grid inertia, and mis matched frequency while generating a capacity energy range between 86 - 330Mw with optional co-generated steam capacity up to 700Mw of electrical energy on a 24/7/365-day basis.
The power generating turbine has three operational parts, 3m in diameter 5.5m long and weighs 6 tons. Installation cost $36.5 -49.5 million, requires an operational footprint area the size of a football field, noise level is 60dbl at 60m, incorporates direct air capture of CO2 at 1,400 Kg/sec and includes a 14-year maintenance free, end of life decommissioning or optional refurbishment program.
Sixty-five carbon and pollution free, shovel ready, off the shelf technology that combines solar nuclear fusion with modern aerospace propulsion and existing nuclear and coal fired steam technology to generate a total of 21,450 Mw can be retrofitting to any of the 120 Hydro-electric schemes and placed at grid conversion points would provide Australia's 26 million population its entire energy needs covering a combined operational area of 33 hectares for a 2023 total cost between $2.4-3.3 billion. Construction period is 3 to 5 years, meet net zero energy target twenty years earlier and makes wind and solar farms including hydro, gas and nuclear energy production redundant.
Rosie, has anyone yet peer-reviewed China's 16MW wind turbine? And what information have you got on China's new 140-meter length wind turbine blades - Are Europe's longest blades only 105 meters? So what would be the advantage or issue with such a large blade
Simple math is the advantage. IDK about the rest
Oh no 😱. Solar may sound nice, clean and cheap but in northern Europe only has around 10% capacity factor compared to 90% plus of nuclear and only lasts 20 to 30 years compared to the 60 to 80 years of a PWR, and unfortunately most PV is currently produced using a lot energy mainly from coal, which means with a 10 % capacity factor Energy return on energy invested could take 9 years. Also majority of PV uses forced labor in china. Nuclear provides multiple generations of high paying jobs to the local area.
You could swap the word Switzerland for Scotland who are on a similar journey and also finding it difficult. Scotland does have 20% of Europe's co2 storage capacity however!
Scotland has huge potential wind ressources though! And less rough winters, making air source heat pumps much more viable
Nagra just gave Transmutex a friendly wave, so... we'll see if they reconsider the 2017 referendum at some point down the line.
The plans look nice at first glance, but they seem quite unrealistic to me. Increased electrification coupled with decommissioning nuclear and substituting with solar power will make it harder, not easier, for Switzerland to help Europe with dispatchable hydro. The rational thing to do would be to simply skip most of the Swiss plans in the electricity area and build a bit more nuclear capacity instead.
Let discard a perfectly usable form of power plant and replace it with unreliable, weather dependent and taking so much space in tiny country. Perfect
After so many years of nuclear power plant operation, most of the bugs and unsafe feature has been fixed I think, like positive feedback loop or neutron absorber. The regulations and beurocracy make it costly, not the power plant itself
There have been a number of really significant victories achieved through the courts; unfortunately courts with such independence don't exist in most countries. The US has a bunch of fossil-fuel schills at the judicial helm, and let's face it, China isn't likely, to have a five year plan suddenly grind to a halt, because a judge told them it breached human rights. Ditto, India. Especially as in India, the poor will die first, which many rich Indians would see as a boon, like the English during the Irish potato famine.
Please slow down, your video is good and the information is important but you shove it in our ear far to fast for comfort. It is ok to let the video be 2 minutes longer and to pause between sentences, it would make it far more pleasant to watch your videos.
Agreed, I was about to make same comment.
ps, that said Rosie is my second favourite engineer (1st…my daughter)
I try! This is considerably slower than my normal speaking pace if you'd believe it 😬
@@EngineeringwithRosie obviously you are all excited being in the Swiss mountains and skiing!
…and of course your natural enthusiasm which we all love.
It is less the speed, more you need slight pauses.
I can see where you're coming from, I had to play this at 1.5x speed compared to the normal 2x I use for videos like these.
Technology has already solved this problem. Play the video at .75 or .5 speed.
Looking at it, an Italian might say “That’s-a weak-a. Damn.”
Methane's half life in an oxygen atmosphere with moisture and sunlight is 7 years.
The question is fossil carbon vs non-fossil carbon.
As ruminants and industry keep emitting the same amount of methane every year, it keeps the earth's temperature higher than it would be otherwise. So these emissions need to go.
Nice to hear they are doing good things. Compare 3 GW solar with 3GW nuclear is not 1:1 with much lesser operating time pr. year (GWh) so they will need a lot more incl. energy optimization, but they are smart people with means so they will get there.
The power of the atom is the future. Too bad Switzerland.
#putintroll
The concern is climate change not a particular form of electricity generation. Emissions would be lower if Switzerland kept its existing nuclear (37% of production on your graph) as long as possible and also did the solar and hydro schemes you mention. If it is too much electricity being produced, it could do what France does and export electricity to Germany and Italy. You need to be clear if your concern is climate change or nuclear power. If it is the former, closing or not extending nuclear makes no scientific or economic sense.
Doesn’t look very sunny.
Yes and yet when I looked up the electricity mix that day, solar was cranking across the country! The mountains cause localised clouds pretty often I imagine.
Thanks Engineering with Rosie. I know Switzerland well. Like much of the EU there's an awful smell of artificial manure when one cycles around the country, and maybe fertiliser; could it be the pungent smell of excess nitrogen dox or perhaps methane mixed with farm smells like ammonia? Great news about the Grannies, older women taking on the Swiss State over climate. I had noticed that too. I really can't imagine my own fair land, Aotearoa, going as far as the Suisse in anything to do to combat climate change and the environmental crisis. Especially with the new tripartite regime where profit overules life itself it would seem. Fast Tracking our way to armageddon.