matlag

Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!

Good Post overall, no need to attack my sanity though :-)

I was not targeting you, rather the idea itself. But it came out terrible and there are definitely better way to express an opinion. So my apologies for that one!

Any sources on any of that? That’s a lot of „you just know that“ information, and I do consider myself well informed. I am not from France though.

Hmm… sources, yes. In something that’s not in French is a tad more difficult, but I found these:

https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/france-mandates-edf-sell-100-twh-power-under-arenh-scheme-2023.html https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-regulator-idUSL8N1PR6H5

I found that one about EDF regaining customers, losing money in 2022. It includes an addendum: the quota it has to sell was set back to 100TWh. But sorry, you’ll have to use a translation service… https://www.leprogres.fr/economie/2022/10/27/pourquoi-edf-gagne-des-abonnes-mais-perd-des-milliards

neither of those points addresses the costs of energy production I quoted above. Those are, to the best of my knowledge, approximately correct. It may very well have been that nuclear was competitive in the past, it isn’t anymore.

I am all but convinced any of this will last. Pressure on solar panel has increased, it is deeply connected to the semiconductor’s industry. In the coming decades, it will raise questions on water usage, minerals, etc.

Wind farms occupy very large surfaces, and they already compete with other usage of the land. Dismantling them is problematic too: a large body of concrete is left behind in the ground.

getting scammed by some middle man seems to be a fate that all modern democracies share, though who the middle man is varies country by country :-)

Unfortunately, can’t but agree, though it’s infuriating every time.

I consider the marginal cost thing to be one of the best acts from the EU. Maybe not in France, but overall it rewards the most efficient energy producer massively, which currently is solar. Those companies can use the excess money to reinvest.

They don’t reinvest (in France, I mean). They just cash the money. Keeping EDF as a state-owned monopoly has been working great for France for decades. The same model works great in Québec. There was no need to change it. EDF being state-owned, you can require it to invest in whatever you want: give it target on renewables, etc. What we have here instead is parasitic companies. Crushing majority of the production investment still comes from EDF, and their investment capacity is fading as their finances are gutted in the name of an “open market” ideology.

I don’t know who, in his sane mind, can claim there will never be periods of time with no sun and no wind at the same time. https://notrickszone.com/2022/12/07/plunging-towards-darkness-germany-sees-week-long-wind-sun-lull-as-energy-supply-dwindles/

You need a pilotable generator matching renewables. You can’t do without it. The only question is how much of it you need to plan. Existing approaches are storage: batteries, hydro where it’s possible (you pump the water up a dam to store back energy) and backup generators: coal, gas, and in some future plans, hydrogen.

None of these is a perfect solution (well, nothing is a perfect solution).

• Hydro: that’s the ideal, but obviously, you need a very large body of water, and heavy construction. But it ends up being a very clean energy with long lifetime.
• Batteries: lifetime considerably reduced, requires very large amount of precious minerals (today, car industry assume they’ll get ~100% of lithium extracted, aeronautic assumes they’ll get as much as they need without counting, and then you have the energy sector counting on very large quantities as well ; there won’t be enough we can extract for everyone, and lithium mines are all but clean).
• Backup generators: no need to comment on fossil fuel, but hydrogen has a big issue: it is very inefficient, ~30%. So if you need it 10% of the time, you need to plan 30% more capacity of renewable, and that’s assuming you can pilot it all the way from total shutdown to 100% capacity, probably very optimistic. You will need to have it running at some minimum levels, that’s even more renewables you need to keep it running.

It is not completely true that nuclear needs to run at fixed level. Depending on their design, some plants are pilotable and some are not. But I don’t think (I’ll be happily corrected if needed) any had the flexibility you need to be used with renewable (quick large variations).

So the ideal mix is, IMHO, a baseline provided by nuclear, and a mix of renewable and complements to produce the difference.

Bonus: there is a “method” promoted by some (ignorant) politics they call “proliferation” (“foisonnement”, not sure I’m translating that the best). This is utter BS…

The idea is there will always be sun or wind somewhere in a super-grid spreading through Europe. If you think about it for 1 minute, that means that small part of Europe where there is wind will power, for a more or less short time, a large portion of the whole Europe?? Not only is that totally insane from the capacity point of view, but it also completely neglects the grid’s stability and electricity transportation issue. It is very difficult to transport electricity over very large distances without disturbing the grid. Ask Germany, they spend massively on infrastructures right now without counting on proliferation. That would raise the requirements further…

Ok, so obviously, you’re not well aware of how the new European open market works, and why France ended up paying part of consumer’s bills.

France uses to have a state-owned company, EDF, producing and distributing electricity in France. EDF had a monopole. France had the cheapest electricity of Europe, and EDF was profitable. Sink that in, when you say nuclear is expensive:

EDF was delivering the cheapest electricity of Europe and was profitable.

A decision from the European Union was taken to force all members to switch to an open market. French government at the time was conservative, so they happily went along with it. Everyone “knows” that private sector always does better than whatever has “public” or “state” in its description.

But how would you introduce competition when virtually no one else produces any electricity? How to kickstart it? That’s where bright people went very very creative.

Production and distribution of electricity was split as separate activities. EDF spinned off the distribution part of its work. In parallel, a quota of nuclear production was allocated to new companies, “electricity suppliers”, so that they got something to sell at an affordable price.

That’s where it starts to be interesting: to guarantee a margin to electricity suppliers, so that they would make enough money to invest in production, the daily price of electricity on the market is set to the marginal cost of the most expensive power plant that’s turned on. Do you follow me? If today, 99% of electricity is coming from a nuclear power plant, but you need to start a coal power plant to provide the last 1%, all 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the coal power plant! I am not kidding, I am not making that shit up!

Why prices exploded since last year? Well, you’ve heard about gas prices, right? Every day a gas power plan is turned on with gas prices through the roof, 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the gas power plant. That’s why France started subsidizing the consumers bills, because most of them could not afford a x6, 7, 10 on their electricity bills.

But at least, we do have competition now, don’t we? Well… not on the production side…

No condition on investment was given to the electricity supplier. Read that again. Guess what happened. Electricity suppliers were buying most of their electricity at a cheap regulated cost from EDF and selling it with a big profit to consumers, all while producing nothing themselves. Why would they?? Money is trickling down to them for free!

Even better: as they were more competitive than EDF, thanks to having 0 maintenance and 0 investment to make, and cheap electricity to resell, their customers base grew. Then they found out that they were not getting enough cheap electricity, and they faced a dilemma: buy a larger share of electricity from other real producers, that would have increased their cost, or cap their customers base (or of course, invest in production, but who wants to do that, right?).

They did neither of these. They pleaded to the current government to get MORE cheap electricity from EDF. And the government did that: forced EDF to allocate more of its cheap nuclear electricity to them, increasing the quota. Needless to say that if EDF needed more electricity for their own customers, they were answered that they could buy the more expensive electricity from outside, or invest in more capacity. Makes sense, right? The exact opposite of what the system was supposed to do.

Now, the very best part: when gas price exploded, even the small fraction of electricity bought by the electricity suppliers impacted their cost. It was unacceptable to them. So they raised their rate to be above EDF, or even outright cancelled contracts with their customers, so that customers would go back to EDF (EDF cannot refuse contracts, and is not allowed to adjust its own rates). But… electricity suppliers do not have to give up on their quota from EDF… so…

EDF had to buy back the electricity EDF produces, to companies producing nothing, at the rate of the market, of course, not the rate at which EDF is forced to sell that electricity to these companies. So it’s even better now. EDF sells them electricity (which is a virtual sale, electricity still goes from EDF plants to households like it did before). These companies sell it back to EDF with a big margin. Dream business, isn’t it?

So France does not subsidize bills because nuclear is too expensive.

France literally subsidizes a scam scheme, in which most of the money going to parasitic companies producing nothing.

Actually, in a nuclear power plan, except the tank itself (not sure I’m translating “cuve” properly, every part can be upgraded.

“Lifetime exceeded” in a nuclear reactor is a misleading statement. The truth is we don’t know how long they can last. We know some minimum lifetimes only, by being cautious.

Example: you build the first plants, and you “slap” them with a 40 years lifetime. Why 40 years? Because we have enough records and historical data to back the structure and materials with enough confidence they will last 40 years at least. Beyond 40 years, we start venturing in uncertainty. That doesn’t mean we even trust the 40 years. Every 10 years, a power plant is getting fully audited to get an authorization to run for the next 10 years (and there are less deep regular audits as well).

Later, with more data, and more reference, you can establish that the structure and material have proven to have an even longer lifetime, and you can extend it (50, 60 years). It may come with extra-conditions, though. But there is a certain confidence that with the proper funding, France could keep its plants up and running for a lot longer than the initial 40 years.

Ironically, France shutdown the oldest reactors that just had received the very latest upgrade, making it also the most modern reactors in service.

This is a complex issue, not just because storing radioactive material is complex, but because the “waste” are not a uniform single material. Some have a decaying process of 300 years (90% of the waste, actually), some have a much longer one.

In the beginning of the nuclear era, some wastes were… dumped in the ocean (it’s as bad as it sounds). This is fortunately no longer the normal practice. Some dedicated storage sites are used to store them depending on their lifetime.

The latest solution is geologic storage (some caves were found with waste from naturally occurring fission, eons ago, radioactivity never escaped, so let’s just… do that?). A site was identified in Finland with a hope it can store them for 100,000 years (of course, we don’t have any reference that would last that long…). And the good thing is the storage is “reversible” for the first 100 years (if we change our mind/find better, we can still retrieve the waste during the first 100 years).

Finally, and that will resonate with @Waryle@lemmy.world comment: France had a 4th generation prototype reactor called SuperPhenix. Particularity of a 4th gen reactor is it can use some wastes to produce more energy. SuperPhenix being a prototype, it suffered from many issues through its lifetime. But at the end, it had a 90% uptime, and though it wasn’t generating a lot of power (that was never the goal, remember: development…), some reports were recommending to keep it up so that it could have processed part of the existing nuclear waste.

To appeal to the ecologists party allied to the socialist Prime Minister at that time, SuperPhenix was definitely shutdown in 1997. And now, the same ecologists use the nuclear wastes issue as a big reason to push back any plan on nuclear power.

There is pretty much nothing done in Matrix that couldn’t be done with XMPP. But XMPP suffers from multiple issues:

• The protocol is very well controlled, but the downside is it takes forever to have any extension approved, leaving sometimes features you would want fast in limbo for months, years, and clients/servers dev waiting for the extension to be finalized. The worst example is probably when Google dropped a group video implementation for XMPP in 2005 on the table, (at the time, Google messenging system was using XMPP) with source code, free license and everything. They would just have to take it and use it. Version 1.0 of the protocol extension was released… in 2009! Meanwhile, many clients were just “waiting” for the protocol before starting implementing anything. When the protocol was finalized, XMPP’s world could congratulate itself for being 3-4 years late on every other communication system. This story repeated recently with an encryption extension.
• There are many clients project, most of them are carried by 1 or 2 devs, each of them almost single platform.
• As XMPP is “older”, it doesn’t benefit from any buzz effect, and some of the “waiting for features” have worn out many adopters.

As it was said in another comment, there is a company and some investors behind Matrix, and with that:

• Protocol can change as fast as they need to implement a new feature. Worst case it is updated again later
• Having much more resources, they could develop a true multi-platform client with a quite consistent interface. That eases a lot the adoption by non-technical users.
• Being the new thing and with a bit of marketing, they had a buzz, and that leaded to more servers and more clients developed, though they all have to follow the company’s train.

Now, from a self-hosting point of view, Matrix has a huge flaw: rooms are entirely copied and synced on all servers from which a user participates. It takes only 1.

For example: if any of your users join a room with 10k users exchanging thousands of messages per day, your humble server will synchronize the whole flow in a local copy. There is not a chance a small server can take that kind of load. Last time I checked where they were for solutions (it was years ago, might be different today), the proposals were:

• Option for admins to prevent users from joining room bigger than xxx ?
• Wait for a new server implementation that’s lighter than the mainstream one? (still not released in prod to date, and won’t really solve the problem)

And for some positive points about XMPP:

• It proved its scalability. Whatsapp started as an XMPP server/client with no federation (don’t know how far they drifted from the base protocol now, though)
• It is extremely versatile. Right now, there are 2 leading project that include blogging/microblogging features and more

https://movim.eu/

https://libervia.org/

The last has microblogging, events, forum, ticket management, file sharing features, etc… Still needs a lot of love but it shows the potential of the protocol.

There are other projects using XMPP for whole different things (IoT, …)

It IS literally a Linux distribution, based on Debian with a layer on top of it for easy admin and managing applications. So you don’t install it on Linux, you just install it.

So, if you don’t know yet what you’re doing, I wouldn’t host anything critical yet, but I’m using:

https://yunohost.org/

And so far, very few troubles. It’s a layer on top of Debian to ease self-hosting. Comes by default with email and XMPP server. You can add Nextcloud and many other services as you wish.