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Comment by aperrien | Hacker News Reader

Have fun with global warming then. I think that humanity needs to come to terms with renewables and nuclear power (with fusion being the best case scenario) for the future of everyone on this planet.

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Fortunately renewables are now becoming cheaper than either coal or nuclear. If we had our act together we could have reached the current point a decade ago.

If we had our act together, we could have worked out the problems with nuclear power fifty years ago. We don't, and I don't see why you think we suddenly will get it together for "renewables."

Because renewables are getting it together with a fraction of the government involvement and subsidies that nuclear takes. In my country they're succeeding despite the government trying to stack the playing field against them.

So what percentage of "renewables" does hydroelectricity account for? And why does Wikipedia's discussion of energy subsidies counter your claim, with hydroelectric alone receiving more than nuclear? By the way, renewables is in quotes as you could consider some forms of nuclear power renewable, yet you clearly don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies#United_States

Unfortunately renewables provide little in terms of base load alternatives that could replace coal and nuclear.

That's where storage can improve things. Also, wind is near enough to baseload if it's spread over a large geographical area. It works down to wind speeds of 5-10 Km/h, which is constant enough that humans don't even feel it at those speeds.

Wind power is nowhere near baseload, it's around 0.45 average capacity factor. Baseload means a capacity factor of >= 0.9. That and the fact thay you need 1400 windmills of 1 MW each (eg. Nordic N1000) to replace a single 700 MWe nuclear reactor (eg. CANDU6).

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source is a replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

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