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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make any sense. Wind and Solar PV have to be financed for probably 99% of the upfront cost. All power generation is like that - very capital intensive.

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Wind and solar can be built MW project by MW project, and turned up in weeks or months. You'll take years just to get a nuclear reactor approved.

EDIT: What's that Bezos quote? "Your margin is my opportunity?" Same for renewables. Your delays are my opportunity.

I'm unfamiliar with the term "MW project", could you please clarify?

Nameplate capacity is the number registered with authorities for classifying the power output of a power station usually expressed in megawatts (MW). Power plants with an output consistently near their nameplate capacity have a high capacity factor.

If you can raise $1B/year for 10 years for an energy project, to build nuclear, you'd have to wait roughly 5 years to accumulate enough capital to start construction and then it'd be at very least 5 more years before you got a dime in revenue. If you wanted to deploy solar, you could buy $1B/year off a manufacturing line, start earning revenue from day 1, and start making payments to your investors.

> If you wanted to deploy solar, you could buy $1B/year off a manufacturing line, start earning revenue from day 1, and start making payments to your investors.

IE What SolarCity is doing with their SolarBonds and the solar panel factory they bought in upstate NY.

Understand your point - but you can split nuclear into smaller phases too and phase them in.

Solar and wind aren't immune to this either. You don't want to generally build things say 10MW at a time - that would require 100 rounds of planning, regulator approval, engineering design and the like for a big utlity scale solar and wind plant. You generally do it in big chunks too. And there have been big holdups especially in getting grid interconnect.

Of course that does make sense. To build a wind mill and to distribute the costs is a totally different kind of economic endeavor than to build and finance a nuclear power plant, which can only be profitable with state subventions anyway.

Which grid-scale wind or solar projects are profitable without being subsidized by the government?

I'm not aware of any.

Neither is the person who modded this down, apparently. :-)

Wanted to make the point that you don't have to have grid-scale projects if you distribute it. One windmill at a time, each with its own financement, investors and profitability. I admit that was not clear.

Virtually all solar and wind projects of any significant size are heavily subsidized by the federal, state, or local government. I am unaware of any exceptions to this.

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