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Comment by cbmuser | Hacker News Reader

Why does this non-sense get constantly rehashed all the time?

You cannot compare the cost of an electricity generation system solely based on the cost of the plant technology itself, you always have to take the whole system costs into account.

Solar panels might be cheap, but they are unable to provide a reliable electricity source without backup or storage systems which is what drives the actual costs.

France has 70% nuclear and their kWh costs around 17 Euro cents and causes greenhouse gas emissions of 50 grams of CO2 on average.

Germany has 50% renewables with the kWh at over 31 Euro cents and 400 grams of CO2 on average.

The French energy sector is responsible for 50 million tons of CO2 each year while Germany’s energy sector causes over 350 million tons of CO2 each year.

So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.

View on HN

I can promise you the energy industry knows about both CapEx and OpEx and has incredibly in depth models on them for all relevant energy technologies.

And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.

And on the topic of France, their reactors oveheat the river they use for cooling and have to shutdown. And just as you claim you can't soley consider the cost of a plant, you can't solely consider the smokestack emissions of a plant without consider the mining, enrichment, handling, and disposal of nuclear.

Germany has a large CO2 output because they have a large manufacturing industry, and for policy reasons technically decoupled from their investment in solar, they also maintain production capacity of a dirty type of coal as power source because they have it in abundance within their own borders, its a security interest.

If you think your armchair analysis has outsmarted the energy industry then go ahead and invest in fossil and nuclear i guess.

It is likely that politicians know pretty well the difference between what they say to the public and the actually effect their policy have on the market. It is also very important for the public to call them out when reality and truth does not match the promises given in political speech.

When the Swedish government shut down a nuclear reaction the political promise were a greener power grid that polluted less. What we instead got was a oil power plant in the southern part of Sweden that previous only operated as a backup in case of harsh cold winters. Now it is operating all year because it suddenly became commercial viable to do so.

For long I have advocated that the solution to this disconnect between what is being said and what actually happens is laws. No new fossil fueled power plants, and no extended capacity by fossil fueled power plants. One do not need to be pro-nuclear, nor pro-solar or pro-wind. All that is needed is an expanding energy demand, a aging nuclear power plants, and a law that forbid people to use the easy but environmentally damaging alternative. Smart people in the energy industry can figure out what is the cheapest alternative that does not warm up the planet, and politician can stop trying to sell an untruth.

If we don’t switch to wind and solar we’re going to be hearing a lot about heat pollution in the coming decades.

They fought Clinton, Illinois’ nuclear plant for decades. The locals were uneasy because it’s on a recreational lake. The lobby for it dismissed the concerns of the uneducated rabble and built it anyway.

An amoeba that causes encephalitis grew in the heat from the cooling plant. Nobody was allowed to swim there anymore. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of the Plains States if you aren’t in a metropolitan area. Swimming and boating are two of your options.

Fusion, fission, geothermal all dump between one and two units of heat at the source for every two units they push down a power line (which is mostly turned into heat at the destination and a little along the way). In the big picture, all of them are bad pairings with global warming.

And hydro reservoirs boost methane emissions.

You're spreading misinformation, either intentional or not. The reservoir that the Clinton Power Station uses for cooling was created explicitly to cool the plant, the recreational opportunities it brought were just a bonus.

I can't find any references to cases of amebic encephalitis from that lake either, only a study stating that the amoeba was found in the lake both before and after the plant became operational. Their own website touts its swimming opportunities. Can you cite sources for any of your claims?

https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/Parks/Activity/Pages/ClintonLa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Lake_(Illinois)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Power_Station

https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/Parks/About/Pages/ClintonLake....

I'm glad they fixed that, but isn't this a case of Gell-Mann Amnesia? There's a lot of range between being so transparent you scare everyone and being the mayor from Jaws.

I got it from regional news, at the time. If building a lake is how you bribe people into doing something they don't want to do, and then you take the lake away, then from their perspective you've lied.

There are other ways to build a cooling plant for a nuclear power station, btw. Lots of places make them do that now, because dumping the heat back into the environment instead of into the sky causes far more mundane problems than this. And occasionally weirder ones. And since the thesis was about heat pollution, not regional nuclear politics, I'll thank you not to nitpick.

But the lake wasn't taken away from anyone, it's still safe to swim and boat in today.

No, it's not like Gell-Mann amnesia at all.

It really feels like you're pushing a particular narrative, facts be damned.

Isn't heat pollution a lost energy opportunity, where the heat could be reclaimed to generate electricity as well?

At some point it gets cool enough that it's hard to extract useful energy from it. Extracting energy from hot water is easier, but as a byproduct you end up with an enormous amount of lukewarm water that isn't useful for power generation.

Heat engines work with a large temperature gradient. In the same way heat pumps can’t drive a larger temperature gradient past a point (see AC in the Arizona summer). The 35 or 60% efficiency of the first phase can’t simply be stacked. If you don’t have an industry that uses heat directly, on site (cogeneration), that’s simply the cost of extraction.

Yes. This is one thing the USSR did well, they captured heat from almost all power stations to provide heat to the local city (that was probably built to house employees of the plant).

We have that in Germany as well, "Fernwärme" (="remote heat"). Apparently it's ubiquitous in Denmark and Sweden as well.

Apparently they started building this based on nuclear power plants as well in Russia (Woronesch, Nischni Nowgorod), but gave it up. That would've been a bit creepy, to have a pipe straight from the local reactor to your home...

How many square meters would you have to zero the albedo of to generate an equivalent amount of power with solar? Is or isn't solar-generated electricity magically exempt from the laws of thermodynamics that convert it to heat when you actually use it?

Comparing tradeoffs is what we should be doing, but it's really frustrating when people just pretend that their favorite technology doesn't have the tradeoffs.

40% of feed corn goes to making ethanol now. That's a huge amount of monoculture for a crop that requires a lot of fertilizer and a ton of water. You could use a fraction of that for solar, today. Less in the future.

That's not an assessment of the heat pollution tradeoffs.

As opposed to shadow pollution, and air obstruction.

A lake somewhere being unswimmable is a small price to pay for a livable world.

The recreational lake for a two county radius is not “some lake”.

And if lakes are or aren’t really local, rivers sure as hell are not.

It's not just one lake.

A world with unswimmable lakes, polluted seas and rivers, etc. is not "livable".

“livable” as defined by.. lack of shadow pollution?

> I can also promise you that they do in fact know

Of course they know, but I don't care about what they know, I care about what they say and if it's true or not!

Are the headline figures fudged by neglecting storage or including subsidies? Or is the headline legitimate, and solar can actually stand on its own now?

Curious to hear your take on the Democratic Party's recent reversal on their stance regarding nuclear[1].

It seems to me that if a group of people who were once so vehemently against nuclear for decades (few people were more vocal in opposition to it) finally realized that their fight against climate change simply isn't practical without nuclear, then why are some people still so against it?

You couldn't ask for a more powerful endorsement than the one from nuclear's (former) greatest critic.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...

>I can promise you the energy industry knows about both CapEx and OpEx and has incredibly in depth models on them for all relevant energy technologies. And on the topic, I can also promise you that they do in fact know about the concept of capacity factor and that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow.

Well, con-men also know that they sell BS, and what exactly is in the snake oil that they sell, but they still push it...

Don't spread misinformation.

Some nuclear reactor were shutdown to protect fish in the river in a summer during a heatwave because they had no cooling tower.

Nuclear reactor with cooling tower were fine. And current solar panels are less efficient when it's hot.

You dismiss CO2 per kWh because you say the whole lifecycle of the nuclear plant and it's fuel should be taken in account. Well it is already.

My guess is someone wrote "Solar is now the cheapest marginal source of new power", and someone else that doesn't understand calculus and (non-)fungibility fucked it up.

You’re messing with these stats a lot (I assume this is not malicious). The 50% renewables are not the cause of the extra 350g of CO2 in Germany.

The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad, when in reality Germany is burning a boat load of coal which is causing the extra emissions, while France’s emissions are offset because they have lots of Nuclear power.

Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.

> That ship sailed long ago.

That ship was sunk.

Germany had a lot of nuclear power, and decided shut it down. That is why Germany is producing so much CO₂.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German...

"Germany had a lot of nuclear power"

No, they really didn't. At its height it accounted for barely 20%. It was dwarfed by coal, lignite and natural gas. It was never anything like France that went all in with nuclear.

Since then, German consumption has exploded, yet the non-renewables have stayed about static while virtually all new demand is met with renewables.

It agree that we should have shut down coal power instead of nuclear power but fact is that this never happened. Deal with it.

Edit: „Deal with it“ might have been a snarky way to say it but on a serious note - nothing good comes from regretting missed opportunities forever. Get over them and make the best of the situation.

> Nuclear power takes 20-50 years to come online- it’s too late to rely on it and burn fossil fuels in the mean time. That ship sailed long ago.

South Korea builds nuclear plants in less than 5 years on average.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/2027347/south-korea-s...

"The way you word this it sounds like renewables == bad"

The point is that unfortunately renewables == good is not often true either despite the common perception. It all depends on how they integrate with the rest of the grid which is something rarely considered when I hear speeches about having more and more renewables in the future

Once you decided to stop nuclear and go wind/solar, what do you do when it's 8pm in winter and there is no wind? => You fire up your coal/gas plants

The answer could be "storage" but right now, as you can see from the stats, this option is not favored and I believe there are good reasons. As you can imagine, if storage was an easy solution today, Germany's emissions would be much smaller.

Hopefully it becomes a more viable solution in the near future but at the moment we're still far from it

The OP misrepresents every time there is a positive solar energy story, using the same Germany story as an example.

Wait, how are these numbers for Germany and France relevant? Germany's renewable energy was built in recent years, much of it during a time when it was significantly more expensive than now. Frances price is from mostly very old nuclear reactors, many of which are close to end-of-life.

And you seem to be attributing the CO2 emissions to the renewables, but that's in no way fair. Even if we had the solution to energy storage, you'd expect a country switching from coal to renewables to have high emissions even at the half-way point.

> So, no, large scale solar power is neither cheap nor clean.

It's more complex than headlines would lead you to believe. But that's ALWAYS the case. This conclusion is just as dumb as the headlines, if not even dumber.

You're right that storage and backup is a big factor, but it's a problem that's rapidly being solved.

Can you please expand on what makes you say that "storage (...) is a problem that's rapidly being solved" ?

Have you read articles with scenarios about % electricity stored compared to daily consumption for instance? Are we going to reach any significant number in the next decade?

From this IEA article [1] it is not clear that we're getting close to it fast enough

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-storage

You're comparing end-user energy cost with production costs.

These are not the same !

The cost you're comparing (0.17€/kWh) includes transmission costs (Enedis + EDF), taxes (CSPE, ...) AND the energy cost (~0.06€/kwh, market rate).

You cannot compare costs between countries like that, because taxes are different and transmission costs too.

You must compare market rate costs (from eex for example).

Except Germany is doing all sorts of accounting maneuvers to hide the high cost of renewables. They say they have a low wholesale price and the final price is high just because of taxes, but in the end you pay so many taxes that end up in the renewable subsidies in different forms.

A fair comparison would take a per population approach and compare similar environmental regions, and calculate the cost of supplying that region and population with the energy demand over the span of years.

It is however not that hard to do since the energy market basically operate already on this principle. Energy companies bid on supplying a specific demand in the future, and the bid that is lowest win. That bid also include if I understand it right the cost of transmission. The practical end result is that different companies win the bid depending on all the variations that makes energy production commercial viable. A solar plant that is not producing enough energy because of weather conditions is not going to put in a bid, and thus the fossil fueled power plant wins the bid and the outcome is pollution. The more times fossil fueled power plants win, the more economical incentives there are to build more fossil fueled power plants, and the more pollution we get in the air.

The only way to have a non-polluting power grid is to either outlaw fossil fueled plants from bidding, or make sure that there is always an pollution free alternative that has an economical reason to make a lower bid. Nuclear, renewables, batteries, solar, wind, carbon taxes or what have you, as long as fossil fueled power plants can manage to make the lowest bid we have a problem.

    Total price: 30.43 ct/kWh*
    Supplier’s cost (23%)
    Grid charges (24%)
    Renewable energy surcharge (21%)
    Sales (value-added) tax (16 %)
    Electricity tax (7 %)
    Concession levy (5%)
    Offshore liability levy (1.3%)

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-house...

That's an odd bit if logic to get to your conclusion. You haven't demonstrated that renewables aren't clean, you've demonstrated that the non-renewable portion for Germany generates more C02 than the non-renewable (nuclear) portion for France.

It's also strange to talk about energy cleanliness in the context of nuclear energy yet only bring in C02 when the environmental factors with nuclear extend much beyond C02

IMO Germany is more set up to benefit from future developments than France and the numbers you cite may very well look a lot different in 10 years. What you are giving is a static snapshot in time where France has a mature technology that is declining and Germany is rapidly moving to the future.

Nuclear certainly has a place in baseload generation but new greenfield development is rare and costs skyrocket upon decommissioning. On the other hand Germany is well positioned to take advantage of cost declines in battery storage to solve the intermittency problem. It’s not clear what France does when all of their reactors age out.

> IMO Germany is more set up to benefit from future developments than France and the numbers you cite may very well look a lot different in 10 years

Within 10 years, Germany will already have to replace a good half of their renewable capacity so I doubt that assessment will change. That's the next issue which is not often taken into account, those renewables have a very low lifespan.

Do these numbers factor in pollution from uranium and coal mining and enrichment? For uranium there is also the burden of storing it for a few ten thousand years.

You also need to factor in that Germany is exporting more power than it imports within a year, primarily to Austria and Switzerland but also a bit to France.

The whole nuclear cycle from extraction to building the plant to dismantling it is, according to IPCC, 12gCO2eq/kWh. Solar is 55.

In order to be pro-nuclear power on a large scale, you pretty much have to not care about nuclear waste storage, as we don't have any good long term solutions for it. The favored argument nowadays seems to be that it's not that dangerous and what danger there is is easily outweighed by the climate benefits.

The current argument is that we know exactly what to do with nuclear waste. Put it deep geologic repositories like onkalo.

https://www.posiva.fi/en/

If we do end up building a few thousand large reactors, we will want to switch to waste recycling.

The whole 'no idea what to do with it' is what the antinuclear movement chose to say after stonewalling the permanent disposal work in the USA for years. Very cynical in my opinion especially if you consider existing waste to be imminently hazardous to the biosphere.

I think it's fair to characterize the antinuclear movement as cynical and disingenuous in general,they are a political movement that has never argued in good faith scientifically. In fairness the original governmental nuclear program withheld from the public that the designs behind power generation were actually being driven by weapons needs and the long term storage issues largely result from that dual use design.

> In fairness the original governmental nuclear program withheld from the public that the designs behind power generation were actually being driven by weapons needs

I have to challenge you on this statement. Certainly the 1940s Hanford reactor designs were for weapons production, and yes dual use (weapons & commercial power) was briefly considered in the early 1950s, but as early as 1953 it was rejected as an option by the US government, who had enough weapons material production coming from Hanford and projections from Savannah River that there was no justification for more.

Further, the Atomic Energy Commission actually worried that if nuclear power plants became very popular, they didn't want to be stuck with a fixed price contract requirement to buy any excess plutonium.

The Power Demonstration Reactor Program of 1958-1965 was run to find the best reactor for making economical power. It was very open and public. By 1965, light water reactors were offered at cost parity with coal plants and the fleets of today were kicked off.

So, brief mention of dual use was ended in the early 1950s, whereas the designs of today were commercialized in the 1960s.

The US built one dual use reactor at Hanford. The N Reactor generated weapons plutonium starting in 1963 and it also generated 800 MW of electricity from 1966 on. It shut down in 1987.

https://www.hanford.gov/page.cfm/NReactor

But as you say it was not the norm in the US.

I stand corrected. I think I am thinking of the Soviet program with regards to heavyweight dual use.

You also have to be in favor of breeder reactors, as the uranium runs out otherwise.

You can’t compare price and co2 and skip nuclear waste. Add in tons of nuclear waste generated to the above stats and it is maybe more fair.

(For the record I am very pro-nuclear, but it feels disingenuous to mention solar requires storage but totally ignore nuclear disposal)

Solar energy will not run out in the near future (at least 5 billion years, even earth will be destroyed way before the sun run out of fuel), fossil fuels will run out, it does not matter if it's 50, 100 or 1000 years from now, but it will run out. Period. (that's the same problem with current nuclear power technology beside other factors)

Yeah no. Look up Gen IV.

And the BN-800 reactor that’s online and in commercial service.

Also, SuperPhénix.

Nobody takes into consideration the cost of managing nuclear waste either. I understand there is not much anymore, but I believe its still dangerous and requires armed security effectively forever. (making the cost effectively infinite).

I guess those costs are for future generations and not our problem. (Kind of like CO2)

Wow, what an argument. Solar panels don’t last forever and have to be maintained and replace effectively forever making the cost infinite too by that argument.

The cost of solar often takes into account replacing the panels every few decades.

Most home solar panels have a 10 year warranty so you want to make sure your payback period is less than 10 years.

I believe we should be doing a better job of calculating how much it costs to dispose of those panels once they are no longer working.

Excellent point. It also assumes that society will be sufficiently organized to provide the security and maintenance for the entire half life of the waste. That seems like a fairly unrealistic assumption. And so we are basically guaranteed to ruin the area where waste is stored at some point in the future and easily explains why congress has been unable to designate a permanent storage location.

"It also assumes that society will be sufficiently organized to provide the security and maintenance for the entire half life of the waste."

Could you please provide a concrete example of a problem of security or maintenance on such facility and with such scenario, what makes you think that it is more likely to happen than any other threats with similar impact our societies face?

Currently the dry casks that we use to store nuclear waste get rusty, or leak the inert gas within them. This needs to be monitored and repaired.

They need to be security because they can be stolen and the waste within can be used as a weapon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage

Yes I am aware of those. My question is: what makes you think that this poses a superior threat than other issues we face?

When I think about the future and its risks I never think about nuclear waste. I think primarily about global warming and all its consequences: massive migrations, droughts, fires etc.

To me these are way more important because

1) the likelihood is MUCH higher 2) the impact is MUCH higher

We are not talking about risk of disaster, we are talking about economic costs. And are are not comparing the cost to other disasters, we are comparing the cost of generating power using nuclear to other methods.

You may want to re-read parent I was replying to:

"And so we are basically guaranteed to ruin the area where waste is stored at some point in the future"

> ...and requires armed security effectively forever. (making the cost effectively infinite).

That logic makes a lot of cheap things cost an effectively infinite amount, like shopping centre security.

A waste storage facility doesn't need armed guards if it isn't being used any more than a shopping centre would. If the facility isn't being used then it can be sealed with a big plug of concrete or something else that has a cost that is small vs. infinity.

Plus there is a decent chance that the dangerous stuff will be a valuable fuel source in 100 years.

Shopping centers no longer need securing when the shops are closed and torn down.

As far as I'm aware we are not currently sealing dry casks in concrete and forgetting about them. They need to be maintained and managed.

> As far as I'm aware we are not currently sealing dry casks in concrete and forgetting about them.

Then the facilities are probably still in use.

If the waste were sealed underground by a 100m long concrete plug in any access tunnel there isn't going to be a lot of call for guards.

Just on a technical note: With interest rate r, an infinite stream of annual payments P (aka a perpetuity) is worth P/r. So, with rates around 2%, the cost of security forever is the annual cost times 50.

(I guess what you're saying is that rates are effectively zero, and they are, and then the cost is infinite indeed...)

That is a good point in favor of batteries over nuclear. If we made fossil fueled power plants illegal, the external costs of nuclear waste should be considered.

As long as fossil fuels are used however the risk of runaway climate change is a much bigger issue than nuclear waste. The risk of runaway nuclear waste is unlikely.

Why do we price a barrel of oil without the military costs to protect the shipping channels. Or the short term and long term storage. While you have a point. It’s hard to deny the extreme drop in cost of solar over time. And that drop runs counter to a lot of predictions from people that said moving away from fossil fuel is impossible.

Barrels of oil are a very poor comparison, as the price is based on limited supply (which is even artificially controlled by the OPEC), where with solar and nuclear the price is much closer (and based) on manufacturing costs.

Uh, what about the yearly production of nuclear waste by the French energy sector? Do they have a long term solution for that? And what about decommissioning old power plants? They’re currently deciding whether to run them another 10 years beyond their 40 years design lifetime. (Great way to postpone a problem, by the way)

Yes, it’s called CIGEO.

For the record, the whole of France’s nuclear fuel waste since the 50’s is a 15mx15mx15m cube.

Also, that 40 years numbers is a financial one, not a technical or design one. Some reactors based on the same designs have been validated for 60 years in the US.

Well, minus what they purified to make weapons.

That’s the problem with spent fuel: you either toss it, but it’s still recyclable and burnable again or you recycle it, and you’re inevitably left with some bomb grade material that flies in the face of all international agreements of non-proliferation.

Anyhow, CIGEO build still needs to start and how many years of future capacity does it allow for?

Many reactors were designed to run 40-50 years and they’ve been lengthened to procrastinate costly dismantling and maintain production without new builds (which are, at this point, highly uneconomical)

>France has 70% nuclear

Not for long sadly :( Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035.

Look at my comment history for a previous discussion but these studies also include theoretical costs for non-renewable energy called 'carbon pricing'. It's flat-out dishonest.

If solar power were the cheapest energy source, it would be unilaterally adopted until it's no longer the cheapest option--it's trivial to hook up to the grid, private individuals do it today. Unless of course there is a global conspiracy with the entire energy utility, semiconductor, and financial industry; private individuals; and municipalities to avoid profit seeking behavior.

I think it is slowly adopted everywhere, and we are facing resistance from the traditional energy industry as they try to protect their current investments.

Profit seeking behavior from the fossil fuel industry is to resist change at all costs. Profit seeking behavior from our politicians here in Australia is to not upset the fossil fuel industry as they are a large source of donations.

Indeed that is the conspiracy theory where they have undue influence on the profit seeking behaviors of utility companies, financial entities, municipalities, and otherwise private individuals with sufficient capital.

However, what most don't know is that the big money (in terms of EBITDA) in the fossil fuel industry is in downstream services, plastics and other carbon products derived from oil. This accounts for around 80.1% of Exxon's Revenue[1] and even more in profit. The goal for Exxon is to reduce reliance of energy from oil to reduce the cost of crude oil and maintain the sticky margins of plastics.

It's for this reason that Exxon has always been in the forefront in carbon economies and taxes [2].

Energy is instead one of the worst businesses to be in, a low-margin commodity, with ever-decreasing margins.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/04/16/how-exxonmobil-str... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/09/exxon-mobil-pledges-1-millio...

Why is this a problem? Slippers are cheaper than hiking boots, but I am not expecting that slippers can satisfy all my footwear needs.

Not to mention the large amount of real-estate that a solar farm requires. Which isn't always convenient either given that it only works in sunny places.

Solar will only ever be a part of the picture, not the whole thing.

> Not to mention the large amount of real-estate that a solar farm requires.

In a recent 400 MW solar farm installed in Texas, I looked at the cost of land in that area, vs. the cost of the solar field. Land was about 1% of the cost. Land is cheap. We have lots of land. We have so much land, we use it for low value things like farming. And land that isn't suitable for farming is even cheaper than that.

Land is not cheap in many places

It's cheap in most places.

Of all the things people complain about with solar, this is by far the strangest. Perform any calculations you like and you'll find that the area required to power the entire world with solar would be quite small; the only issue it has (but don't get me wrong, it is a big one) is the need for storage.

In the US in particular, corn is subsidized and turned into ethanol at an alarming rate. Subsidizing solar seems like it would be a better use of land. Especially if you can combine it at all with buffer zones to control runoff.

That's nonsense, you can't just centralize it, or just build it far away from cities. Transmission loss over distance is by far one of the biggest hurdles for delivering electricity.

So what if you can find one ideal area in North America with enough sunlight to theoretically power the whole world, it's not the point. Can you find a large enough spot of space with consistent enough sunlight in, say, Maine, to power even a single city there?

Maine has far more than enough space to power the whole state, not just a single city. I promise you that finding open space for solar is not an issue in any but the most densely populated areas--there's a huge amount of unused land in the world. The issue with places like Maine is not getting enough power on average, but the fact that it's very intermittent, which requires tremendous amounts of storage to make a majority-solar grid viable.

The problem isn't just with the area but also location. Would it be okay if it were about the size and location of a rainforest? That's what we're doing here in Florida. Drive down I-10 and you'll see large previously-forested areas now covered by several large solar plants. Really, really dumb. I've no problem with putting solar over parking lots or open desert. But forests? My state is so moronic sometimes.

Most of Florida will be underwater by 2100 so preserving that forest doesn't sound all that to valuable to me

There were plans to build huge solar plants in the Sahara desert but all got scrapped partly because of energy storage and transport, and partly because few countries want to depend on energy production in countries with either (looming) civil war or semi-regular terrorist attacks.

I would not call Europe not wanting to be beholden to African countries the way they are beholden to Europe a problem with solar power, personally.

The costs of disposing of nuclear waste don't come out of the energy bill, they come directly out of taxes. This needs to be factored in, because this cost continues long after the plant is decommissioned.

That's a much lesser concern in France, where reprocessing or different reactor types have significantly less waste. Not zero though.

How is this nonsense the top comment? Who upvotes this tripe?

To counter the calculations of the IEA (who are a world more informed than cbmuser, I'm fairly sure), this guy conflates the entire historic mix of two very different countries, one with a long history of coal, natural gas and lignite (those decreasing as renewables enter the mix).

Because it highlights the failure of the solar/wind (intermittent renewables) argument.

Can you point me to a grid that runs mainly on solar and wind that’s les than 150gCO2eq/kWh?

France is around 50-60.

>Why does this non-sense get constantly rehashed all the time?

Because journalists are not engineers: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

The author of the linked piece has the following background:

“He holds a PhD in biochemistry from Bristol University and previously studied chemistry at Oxford University.”

From the Carbon Brief “about” page. (Click his byline on the linked article and you’ll see he works for Carbon Brief.) https://www.carbonbrief.org/about-us

So he’s a scientist.

Given that you disagree strongly with a well credentialed chemist, are you sure the profession of journalism or the credentials of its practitioners are the issue here?

Also, it’s interesting you linked an article that leans heavily on the authority of Michael Crichton, himself a noted climate change denialist — and a former physician.

It would seem to me poor information and sloppy work crosses many fields. I think anyone who has, say, used very much software in their life would probably agree.

>So he’s a scientist.

Yes, not an engineer.

Michael Crichton wasn't a denialist of climate change, he doubted that humans were the leading cause of climate change. He was also a physician (a medical doctor), not a physicist.

I think people have been hoodwinked, same as with UBI.

Nuclear is the only way fwd, sooner we come to realization better it will be for us.

Solar and wind do lot of eco damage due to low density output.

+ there is no mention of batteries etc. Batteries are most important component and I doubt it has improved so much.

Yea I don't understand these non-sense which doesn't includes whole system costs.

Because one cannot compute that in a generally applicable way. It depends on details of ststems that vary from place to place. Levelized cost of energy is more constant, although not entirely so.

This.

As cool as PV is, there is a big difference between always-on, modular power source and one that has a variable and intermittent production.

It would be like saying one doesn't need heating in the winter since heat is cheap in the summer.

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