Hacker News Reader

Comment by dflock | Hacker News Reader

> Nigeria isn't going to wait decades to build a solar plant when they can build several coal power plants right now.

Solar is cheaper & quicker to build & run than coal plants. And it can be built incrementally and start generating power and profits very quickly, compared to traditional power plants, which are large construction projects that don't generate power or profit until after they're completed.

View on HN

Nigeria prefers coal because it involves lots of heavy construction, which means lots of kickbacks for the political elite.

Acemoglu and Robinson's concept of "extractive elites" is useful here.[1]

1. http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2012/5/1/who-are-the-extracti...

Maybe in California, where everyone here seems to be from.

Source tell me that the weather in Nigeria is not completely unsuitable for solar energy, either.

And without grid scale storage, which doesn't exist, solar at noon is about as useful as coal in the middle of Australia. Renewable only is a pipe dream and is distracting from the fact that we need to build nuclear plants if we want to have a planet by the end of the century.

With solar+hydrogen you have a higher stability than nuclear. When solar process fall by additional 50%, this setup will be even cheaper than coal.

So on the one hand we have a technology that works, on the other we have a pipe dream.

I sure know which one I want to bet the future of the planet on.

Neither one's really a pipe dream anymore. Solar+wind+hydrogen is at the point where it can replace all fossil fuels.

This doesn't mean you can't have nuclear, but it's no longer necessarily.

You can do 50% renewables without any storage. The world is pretty far away from that.

Germany, Australia and California say otherwise.

I don't understand what you want to say. Germany is relatively close to 50% renewable electricity without a lot of grid scale storage.

Germany is hovering around 41% renewable electricity, but its primary energy supply is still 78% fossil fuels.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/germanys-energie...

41% is "fairly close" to 50%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com