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Comment by vectorjohn | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people keep saying this, but I really don't think it's true. Solar and wind work fine at scale. There is nothing un-scalable about them. What they don't do is work at night, and in that case nuclear is a fine option. Although batteries that can run a house overnight aren't that expensive.

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> Just keep repeating it, but it isn't true.

Please edit uncivil language like this out of your comments when posting here. Without that (well, that and the uppercase yelling), this comment would be a fine one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fixed. Didn't know a single word in caps was considered yelling.

Well, there were two ;) Thanks! That reads much much better.

Given nuclear's huge expense, huge lead times, and intense local political opposition, and comparing it to how battery&renewable is getting much cheaper with time, I don't doubt that battery&renewable will be cheaper at scale than nuclear power will be by the time that either could be built out.

The expense and lead times and nimby-ism which cripples nuclear are mostly regulatory.

If you apply the same constraints to wind generation (which is increasingly happening) it looks even worse than nuclear.

I've never seen convincing numbers that the expense is regulatory. And the nimby-ism is not regulatory in the least.

There are always grand claims of how cheap nuclear can be, but it has never been seen in practice. Sometimes people even claim that nuclear is cheap by only looking at the operating & maintenance costs, ignoring the true costs of nuclear, which are all upfront.

What type of nuclear constraints could be applied to wind generation? Validation of designs? There's very few turbine designs out there. I can't see how wind could be ever be made more expensive than nuclear, but am open to new data.

Where you can put wind power, how many approvals you must have, how long the lead times are.

If you can't see how regulatory process increase costs, use this thought experiment. You want to build a house. You buy some land for it, and submit the plans for approval. Now spend the next ten years paying an architect to complete forms and submitting them for review. You have to pay the carrying cost of the land and the architects salary. The cost of the building materials for house remains the same. Can you now afford the house?

If we went fully "renewable" how much industrial waste would these batteries that everyone needs create? Solar and Wind really doesnt work for everyone, where it is cost effective, available and reliable it makes sense to mix them in, but you cant tell me you fully expect every country to go 100% Solar and Wind?

I don't expect every country to do it this year, or this decade. I also don't expect every country to have nuclear power either, because it's expensive. You think uranium mining is clean? Constructing all that stuff is free? Of course not.

The amount of solar panels needed for a house (or their share, in some solar farm) is miniscule. It's 4-7 panels. If we want to store excess for night, maybe 10. The batteries fairly small (using lithium, a sufficient battery could hang on the wall. Maybe two tesla power walls would do it). The waste isn't that bad (nowhere near the amount of waste people create yearly in plastic or other landfill garbage).

It's totally doable in first world countries. And it would go a long way in developing countries too, for the same reason cell phones gained popularity faster than landlines, because they require less infrastructure.

Batteries are really not that bad for industrial waste. Lead-acid are terrible, but there are better options when it comes to daily storage of lots of energy.

Compared to coal, give me batteries any day! And we don't really yet know the full effects of all this cheap natural we're getting through fracking. Though I'm sure fracking is probably better than coal mining, we'll have to wait to see.

The industrial waste caused by solar/wind would pale in comparison to the existing waste being generated by electric cars and mobile phones.

And of course you can't expect every country to go fully solar/wind. What you need are integrated, continent wide power grids and alternative energy storage mechanisms like molten sands etc.

Global population is concentrated near the equator and near the coast, both great conditions for solar and wind.

Paris is a good example of that.

Denmark is a net power exporter, from renewables.

What is expensive is replacing all the current energy infrastructure. Even if you went out and just re-built coal power stations and oil refineries it would cost trillions. We sometimes forget in first world countries that a lot of the reason we are so wealthy is because we have an enormous stock of physical capital paid for over the centuries.

Wind works at night. :)

I agree. And the fact that you need to store the energy during night and winter is not a big deal for technology either. We have been dealing with a similar problem with food supply since agriculture. I think it looks so unfeasible, because today people don't even recognize when we have a winter - that's how well we have solved the problem.

Any idea what proportion of Western Europe would need to be covered in solar panels and wind farms to reliably give 90% of the required kWh per day? The other 10% could come from tidal. But you'd need much of the potential hydro capacity to act as energy storage. (Assuming battery/hydro back up on a daily basis).

Not that much, actually: http://www.techinsider.io/map-shows-solar-panels-to-power-th...

It certainly seems more feasible than some feeble attempt to cover the Earth with a reflective surface as a geoengineering measure to counteract global warming.

Promising. However naive extrapolation from that source would would be a significant underestimate of required capacity. Western Europe has significant seasonal deviations in sun. Our governments would not accept direct electrical imports from Africa. We also consume much more energy per capita that other regions.

There's a proposed roadmap for much of the world here:

http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/Count...

Making those shiny new batteries is an extremely dirty and polluting process. Again peopld ignore what they dont see.

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