In Finland defamation doesn't (always) require falsehood either and I think the same is true in Sweden as well. However, you are much more likely to get a conviction if the statement you made is a lie. And there has to be also the intent to insult or intent to make other people to despise the victim.
And even non-verbal acts can be defamation. For example showing middle finger to somebody can be defamation and I have heard that using gardening hose to make other person wet could also be defamation.
There is also one other crime in the Finnish law that can make it crime to tell true facts called "yksityiselämää loukkaava tiedon levittäminen" (which means basically spreading information in a way that it violates persons privacy). For example writing in a newspaper that "a woman was molested by her father and now has HIV" could lead to a conviction even if all the facts are true, if that woman has not wanted to make this information public and if readers are able to recognize who this woman is.
As a non-native English speaker I find this kind of efforts to outlaw some words in English language and replace them with others hostile to non-native English speakers. Speaking English is already hard enough and now I should also try to avoid this kind of woke minefield and perhaps I will be somehow punished because it is hard to remember what words should be avoided and how to express your thoughts without using the "wrong" words. And replacing single words with euphemistic multi word expression can make constructing sentences difficult.
How do the HR people even know that if some team members are LGBT? I am a gay and I think it is my private matter and not something I would be interested sharing with for example my employer. I prefer to separate work and my private life in many other issues as well.
It sounds very odd to ask about these kind of things during employment. How often do for example LGBT persons provide this kind information in their job application and is it even legal to ask it?
And on the other hand, is there anything that prevents you pretending to be a member of some minority? For example, if you can get more easily employed by saying that you are bisexual, is there anything that would prevent you lying? If there isn't, why even bother asking about these kind of things.
7 hours of storage might work in a country like Australia, but not necessarily in some other countries. For example, in Finland winter is several months long and during that time PV will produce almost no electricity. During winter there may also be relatively long periods with only a little wind.
As I understand it, Finland needs nuclear for the long midwinter spells where there is no wind to speak of and the sun is too low to generate much solar. It's a textbook case of gaps in renewables.
That being said, Finland has a wild excess of solar energy in the summer, and I'd like to see the gov't get serious about nationwide schemes to store up that energy for wintertime use. Air-water heat pumps, sand batteries, it's a start... capture that summer heat and squirrel it away.
Winter is when their wind turbines will be producing hardest.
Periods with low wind and low sun do happen but theyre rarer and shorter than people think. It's much more common that availability of wind and sun anticorrelate (even in winter), which is why the storage needed to get to 99% is normally measured in hours rather than days.
> For almost a decade, emission reductions have stagnated.
Weird that this phrase comes up so much in relation to German progress on renewables and climate change.
> Opportunities missed since 2008
> Indeed, the German government has stumbled in several attempts to put efficient heating on the agenda. In 2019, the interior ministry led by Horst Seehofer cancelled the buildings commission intended to identify ways to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint, while in 2017, the German government coalition failed in a first attempt to agree on a building energy law, which would have set new standards for efficiency in buildings. The NGO Environmental Action Germany has compiled a “chronology of failures” in the sector, starting from 2008.
> Past success, but still 28m tonnes off target
> After years of standstill, the energy used in Germany’s buildings has not fallen nearly as much as targeted. Instead of dropping by 20 percent between 2008 and 2020, final energy consumption had only gone down by 6.9 percent in 2017. Although greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector have fallen by about 44 percent since 1990, progress has largely stagnated since 2011 and studies show the need to significantly ramp up action.
The thing is that we build on wind energy that is not only unreliable as an energy source, but also adds CO₂ for producing/maintaining/rebuilding and usually also producing SF₆ while running (one if not the most efficient greenhouse gas).
I am actually under the impression we actually change just for the sake of change.
The production of CO2 from making a wind turbine depends mostly on how much fossil fuel is used in the rest of the economy. This is not a constant but varies as the rest of the economy is decarbonized. The current numbers are from when we're still using a lot of fossil fuels there. In that situation, displacing fossil fuel usage as quickly as possible is more important than eliminating residual inherent CO2 emission (in wind's case, the CO2 from calcination of limestone in cement manufacture.) Wind turbines can be installed more quickly than nuclear plants, so they win this racing game.
(Solar doesn't really require any cement at all, so in the ultimate non-fossil economy it will beat even nuclear on inherent CO2 production.)
We have enough misinformation as it is that we can do without comments like yours without some kind of citation. No-one thinks that any electricity generation is zero-carbon, the question is only about the relative advantages/disadvantages across many metrics like cost, complexity, security, consistency, scalability, land-use and many others.
FOr example, a wind turbine is an awful lot easier to remove and make good than an entire power station if we eventually build something much better.
> FOr example, a wind turbine is an awful lot easier to remove and make good than an entire power station if we eventually build something much better.
A wind turbine is not replacing a "power station". Do I really need a citation for this?
Also, the efficient way to do it doubles as air conditioning.
So Europe can ditch their weird mixture of pride in not using AC like the profligate Americans (congratulations on your climate, I'm sure you personally worked very hard for it) and sweltering in the summer as heat waves become normal.
Have you solved the problem of intermittent power production by solar and wind energy and included the costs of it to the calculation? It seems to me that the solar and wind energy are causing problem in the energy market with their unreliable production and not paying the cost of solving this problem.
At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.
Finland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables. This means that any industry using significant amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once fossil fuels are no longer used.
The viability of renewables depends more on population density than location. There are always some natural processes you can take advantage of to generate power. And if the density is low enough, like in Finland but probably not in the US, existing hydro should be enough to cover most energy storage needs.
Most of the electricity in Finland is not produced by using fossil fuels. For example during year 2020 14 % of the electricity in Finland was produced by fossil fuels.
I was talking about energy intensive industries, not electricity production. If Finland has to compete with other countries that have cheap renewables, it will lose these industries. As an example of something like that today, look at primary aluminum production.
> storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades
With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it won't work everywhere. So look to other tech.
I desperately hope Olkiluoto comes online soon, but it's also a pretty clear indication that nuclear is not a spectacular option for Finland either. But it may be your best option!
At least battery storage seems to be unrealistic solution. The needed amount of energy storage for several months is enormous and in addition to that problem, batteries tend to self-discharge.
Geothermal energy and hydro storage are not without problems either. I am not sure about ammonia storage, but it would be interesting to see some calculations about the feasibility of storing so much energy by using hydro or ammonia.
Thanks to the local green party we are behind schedule in nuclear energy. They have dragged the process by years and also in practice forced us to have a new reactor type. In reality much better solution would have been at least two smaller and more traditional reactors (which would provide also more redundancy) than more experimental reactor which is also uncomfortably large. However the older nuclear reactors we have, have worked pretty well and are still producing energy cheaply and reliably unlike renewal energy.
I don't understand how the Green Party could have influenced the choice of using France's EPR versus other tech. Areva designed the large EPR because larger reactors are supposed to be more cost effective than smaller reactors.
How has the Green Party dragged on the process of construction? What delays did they cause? I ask because I don't know the specific causes of all the delays, even the latest since it was first powered on. It's hard to get this info, which makes me suspicious that it's actually a third party causing the delay, because then those doing the building would be able to clearly state a great reason for the delay. Instead we are mostly left guessing st what is going on with construction.
Green party managed to stop the process of getting new reactors many times with different political tricks. And when they finally reluctantly agreed to build more nuclear energy, they demanded that only one (or was it two, I cannot remember the exact details anymore) reactor should be build. And because of this limitation on the number of new reactors, we then needed to have a higher power reactor instead of several lower power reactors.
And because of the foot dragging by greens the other new reactor project failed. They managed to slow the process long enough that the German reactor was of the table (thanks to the foolish politics of Merkel in Germany) and then only Russian reactor was available. And after Russia started war on Ukraine that Russian reactor project was canceled.
Perhaps in theory, although transmission losses would be large. But I wouldn't want to be on the mercy of distant countries, perhaps on different continent, for getting energy, especially during winter. And as there are other possibilities than solar energy, I don't see why to go for solar energy instead of the other alternatives.
I am not familiar with the winder conditions in Southern Europe. Is there enough sunlight during winter that it would be feasible to provide a lot of solar energy during wintertime - not just for local use, but to northern Europe as well? It might be that even there is too little sunlight and the solar power would have to come from different continent.
Indeed; though I thought EU had a lot of inter-country grid connections (perhaps more as backups). The distances don't seem outrageous compared to other grids.
Edit: looks like Finland does indeed have international grid connections and imports about 20% of its electricity
At least it is able to move almost all my e-mails to spam folder (where they are deleted after a month), without any way to disable this "feature" except by slowly whitelisting senders.
Another great "feature" is that if you have accounts on two different organizations, it seems to be impossible to logon to the other account even after signing out from the first account, unless you use private mode on the browser.
Mailbox/retention policies can be tweaked, as well as mail flow ones by your administrator. With that said, depending on the combination of other antimalware/antispam apps that your company uses and Microsoft being quite pushy about their antispam for some reason, even that may not be a perfect solution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2...