Why? We subsidize solar and wind because we realize it'd be politically impossible to force internalization of the costs of goal and gas. Why put nuclear at an artificial disadvantage?
If we’re going to subsidize anything, it might as well be solar and wind. It’s fusion energy at a distance.
My utility can’t do anything about the power I generate with the solar on my roof. Your local community has very little input over for profit generators (versus shareholders).
That's looks more like a problem than anything positive, electricity grid planning is at a country level, not a local one. And personally I don't believe on private electricity generation, it should be public without shareholders for that reason.
> Centralization creates transmission losses and enables control over the resource by an entity you might not have input into.
How exactly? Every industry is like this. Factories came bigger and bigger, farms got bigger, trucks got bigger, cities became more dense, that's just economy of scale. Renewables are not immune to that, it's far cheaper to create a solar grid than spreading them randomly.
Then there's nothing for us to argue further. Sorry to hear you don't support energy independence and efforts to be self reliant. I do not want to be beholden to someone else for my energy needs, whenever possible, most especially shareholders of a for profit corporation.
> How exactly? Every industry is like this.
Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.
> Identifying a bug in a system isn't an argument for that bug to persist.
It's not a bug, concentration makes economy of scale possible, that's why everything is like this. Spread-out cities have traffic issues, small factories create more expensive products, small farms struggle to negotiate selling prices, small shops cannot afford to buy in bulk... Concentration is what makes everything cheaper.
I agree with you that concentration and scale does drive down costs; but it's myopic to look at only the raw cost alone (similar to how we don't price carbon into fossil generation costs). We subsidize food production in the US. Why? National security of our food supply, not being behold to other countries for our food.
We should never be enabling the creation of monopolies (to your point about the necessity of centralization), but the distribution of power with citizens. In scenarios where centralization is unavoidable, rigorous governance must be implemented (which does not occur with for profit natural monopolies).
Small, resilient, independent, diverse sources of energy are more robust against environmental changes, state violence, and monopolies-at-a-distance.
Additionally, the direct costs of centralization in the form of transmission loss and voltage conversion are non-trivial.
it has to run through an inverter, and likely be stepped up, to go anywhere else. and both of those things will tend to be higher efficiency when you've got more panels in the same place.
... says the guy commenting on a massively-distributed network that is the poster child for decentralized access to “industry”.
But yes, I'd take a dozen Chernobyls over a runaway greenhouse effect.
Nuclear power gives us far too much ability to borrow from tomorrow to pay for today, same as with coal. That's why it is, in practice even if not in theory, not an adequate solution to our energy demands.
Would any of us claim we could keep data safe for 100,000 years? In my book neither that - nor "dealing with nuclear waste" - are anywhere near solved problems.
> Xcel Resource Planning Executive: We Can Buy New Renewables Cheaper Than Existing Fossil Fuels
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/an-interview-wi...
When the Chernobyl plant was under construction a soviet newspaper claimed that "it will be so safe it could be built on the Red Square". When the disaster happened, the author of this claim was nowhere to be found.
People keep saying that, but it's been solved for years, we just haven't built the reactors that solve it. The new designs use the "waste" from the old ones as fuel.
> cheap renewables promotes decentralized energy production using inputs that’s can’t be controlled
Nobody is preventing you from putting solar panels on your roof. But the person who lives in a studio apartment in a fifty story building has a patch of sunlight exposure that would be lucky to run a hair drier from solar, much less climate control the apartment.
> If we’re going to subsidize anything, it might as well be solar and wind.
If we're going to subsidize anything, it should be nuclear and renewables. They actually work great together -- nuclear for baseload (at night) and solar during the day when the sun is out and the load is higher.