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Comment by CogentHedgehog | Hacker News Reader

Even if they can reduce costs a bit, the economics are still not in favor of nuclear energy, and renewable energy has become incredibly cheap. Between 2010 to 2019 wind energy become 70% cheaper and solar became 89% cheaper[1] -- and they're still getting cheaper. We are now in a situation where we can build 3x as much renewables for the same price as nuclear[2] - nuclear has a serious cost problem. I'm very skeptical of any claimed nuclear energy cost reductions because time and again the industry has promised lower costs and failed to deliver; for example the new AP1000 and EPR reactors in the US and Europe have all vastly overrun their budgets and run years behind schedule.

1. https://www.lazard.com/media/451082/lcoe-8.png 2. https://www.lazard.com/media/451081/lcoe-2.png

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I am very hopeful about renewable but I am also aware of their intrinsic weakness: They can't be provide base power (unless we build battery farms able to cover our needs).

Renewables are exciting. Jumping too fast into it like Germany did (and is now polluting as much as 8X France with 450g CO2 / kWh) is much less exciting.

I wish there was a bit more expert involvement in the way we choose our energy policies (and much less tribalism and populism).

source: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

Wind is a pretty solid source of baseload actually, as long as you build enough. The supplementary materials from Caldeira's Geophysical Constraints paper (usually used to argue AGAINST renewable energy) show that with 50/50 wind/solar mixes (figure S4) you can achieve:

* 1x capacity, 0 storage: 74% of electricity demand

* 1.5x capacity, 0 storage: 86% of electricity demand

* 1x capacity, 12h storage: 90% of electricity demand

* 1.5x capacity, 12h storage: 99.6% of electricity demand

Citation: http://www.rsc.org/suppdata/c7/ee/c7ee03029k/c7ee03029k1.pdf

> ElectricityMap

Nobody who follows the energy sector closely thinks ElectricityMap has any credibility for country-to-country comparisons. The datasets are extremely fragmentary and have huge yawning gaps with no data available, which should be the first red flag for anybody citing it. It might be useful for trends within a given country, but not the way you're citing it.

Also: accounts popping up out of the woodwork to argue passionately for an out-of-favor technology reeks of a dying industry trying to revive itself with public relations. 3/4 of those accounts seem to cite ElectricityMap, oddly enough...

The reason renewables are the cheapest source of energy today is at least in part because Germany made a big investment early on.

Ensuring that there is demand allows investment to be made in production, which allows competition and learning, and acceleration of the decrease in cost.

Batteries are halving in cost every handful of years because there is a guaranteed market that allows construction of more production facilities.

Batteries are currently being deployed very cost-effective for replacement of gas peaker plants and for frequency regulation. They are also being deployed on the grid as "non-wires-alternatives" to transmission upgrades. As we transition to a carbon-free grid, they will find even more use.

A huge fraction of planned solar farms in the US have storage built in, because of the efficiency of reusing the same DC to AC inverters, and because for quite a while now, panels have been cheap enough that some panel generation capacity is thrown away in order to get more output at other times of the day.

It is a mistake to think of batteries as needing some sort of technological leap to serve our needs. If we had to, we could deploy them at current prices and build a renewable, carbon-free grid more cheaply than we could with nuclear. But we are only installing them as necessary as we replace aging infrastructure, rather than shutting down existing infrastructure that hasn't worn down.

As the cost of storage+solar drops below the fuel+operations expense of natural gas, we will start shutting down natural gas plants before their natural end of life, resulting in wasted costs. I have a feeling that any naturals gas turbine installed today will be considered a boondoggle within 5-10 years.

The future is now, when it comes to storage, we just haven't had time for reporting to catch up.

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