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Comment by jcrben | Hacker News Reader

But are they cheaper when you add the batteries? Doubtful. I hear maybe by 2030.

https://www.reuters.com/world/india/exclusive-india-may-buil...

So run easily-tunable gas turbines when needed, nuclear if you need it, and renewables for the bulk of your energy. Perfect is the enemy of good here.

That's not a particularly good solution, since it doesn't halt climate change. We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production in several states. We're reaching the point where those peaker gas plants are the main source of emissions that we're trying to eliminate.

Renewables are better on a raw $/KW measure. But that's a naive way of assessing intermittent sources. Once you start saturating the market during peak production, only part of the newly installed capacity actually displaces fossil fuels. Non-intermittent sources of energy like hydroelectricity and nuclear power aren't subject to this constraint

If nuclear can handle what we currently use gas for, all the better, and I'd be totally down with that.

> We're already starting to hit during peak renewable production

What do you mean by that?

Solar panels produce energy in a sine wave. Once the peak of the sine wave exceeds energy demand, you start hitting diminishing returns. The fluctuations in wind production are more complicated, but it's subject to the same problem. You can over-produce to make up for the troughs in energy demand, but the nature of overproduction means that a portion of generated energy goes to waste. This is already happening in California: daytime energy production is saturated.

This is why most renewable plans assume that there will be some silver bullet that makes energy storage effectively free. Without some way to turn an intermittent source into a consistent source, it'll be very difficult to decarbonize with wind and solar.

That’s the real problem today - there is no ability to compromise. Everything is a zero sum game :(

Nuclear can replace fossil fuels today. If we finally get other renewables to a place where they can address issues like predictability and reliability, then we look at de-commissioning nuclear.

But preemptively removing a very viable tool from your toolset is just bananas.

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