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Comment by jamesknelson | Hacker News Reader

> But what else can us developing countries do? Stop developing and stay poor forever?

This is sad to see, because many of the environmentalists that I've talked to seem to expect that this is the path that the developing countries will actually take.

It's totally unfair that the developed world was able to bootstrap themselves into their current state using dirty power sources, continue to generate a lot of dirty power themselves, and now expect the developing world to somehow leap-frog them and build clean generating capacity from the start. But it just seems to be human nature – just like how the social safety net in the developed world is being pulled out from under the younger generations, now that the older generations no longer need it.

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Solar panels weren't commercially viable until the mid 20th century. Nuclear power the same. Lithium-ion batteries came even later. None of this stuff even existed when first world countries were industrializing.

Now it's cheaper than coal. Look at the map and notice how many new coal plants are being built in Europe or even the US -- none. The only reason it still even exists is the existing installed base of power plants that have already sunk their capital costs, and half of those are still getting shut down because they can't compete even then. Coal is garbage. Building new coal fired power plants is nonsense even before the environmental impact is considered.

Pretending that first world countries burned coal because it was in some way better is revisionist. It was because the better alternatives we have now didn't exist yet. The path to modern power generation doesn't inherently require building a bunch of coal fired power plants and then knocking them down to replace them with something actually good. They can just skip to the end -- there isn't even any good reason not to do that.

They can't skip to the end, as solar, wind + storage is still not economically viable compared to burning things.

This a) clearly isn't true, b) goes against parent's claims, and most importantly c) is contraindicated by the fact (as per parent) that 'first world nation states' are not currently building power plants that, as you put it, burn things. This is because it's economically more viable to go solar, wind, storage - than coal now (and perhaps, if not today, then clearly within a year or two, gas).

> This is because it's economically more viable to go solar, wind, storage

Sorry, but this is just ridiculous. If you need power all year long and only have say 250 sunny days and even less predictable winds, you are really looking at an order of magnitude higher price here than burning fossils. If you only use a little bit of that power able to directly satisfy a little bit of demand without storage, then it's not as expensive, but still overall significantly more expensive than burning fossils. The only reason it can even be deployed is if governments promise massive returns of investments and let investors get rich, which of course ends up hurting consumers with huge electricity prices. The rest of the non first world simply cannot afford that.

If it was economically viable, investors would just invest into solar and wind farms everywhere in the world on their own to undercut all those fossil competitors.

You're assuming that countries with no existing infrastructure would build it the same way we did.

If you're a small African village, having a couple of solar panels is way better than a coal power plant. You don't need roads and trains to continuously ship in coal or the lights go out. You can get more buildings electrified before you have a stable power grid because you have decentralized generation. You can have small/cheap storage batteries because you build infrastructure to begin with that demand shifts to during the day -- pressurize a water tank during sunlight hours so that you have running water through the night with no nighttime power consumption. Use high efficiency LED lighting to minimize how much battery you need. And so on. All of which is cheaper when you design for it from the start.

Whereas if you're at the stage of India or China with a real power grid where you have to start worrying about baseload, that's when you build nuclear. Assuming that declining storage costs don't eventually make even that unnecessary.

About the only thing fossil fuels are still good for is as an emergency battery for long periods of low generation from renewables. But then you're not building them as baseload power generation and they only get run one week out of the year. And even then it's still not coal, because you can do that with natural gas, which is currently cheaper (and cleaner and emits less carbon).

Ground up infrastructure can only recoup some of the energy storage costs and mostly for home use. It's not going to help a steel factory, for example, or help with industrial use in general which ultimately has to compete on cost globally.

When you're at early stages of development you don't have steel factories. When you reach later stages you build nuclear. To the extent that an intermediate stage even exists, it's very short, because once you have roads and ports and a stable government you get foreign investment.

To get the first aluminum smelter the first world had to invent it. To get one now you just have to build it -- or have someone else build it for you. Then you power it with a ton of cheap solar panels and only run it during daylight hours.

So why would waste money building a bunch of coal fired power plants that you won't even need in a couple of years?

And why would it be uncompetitive on cost globally if everyone else stops burning coal too?

How else can solar wind and batteries have been invented? Charcoal, coal, oil, gas were all necessary economic fuels for the past 200 years. Without those we couldn't have ever had the energy to create cleaner options. Now they're available, those cleaner options should be being deployed hugely everywhere. However, it comes down to fossil fuels not paying for climate costs and air pollution costs, thus they have seemed cheaper on the surface.

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