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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

>The wind not blowing is a local effect. It's more rare offshore. It's very rare for it to be continent wide.

It also tends to line up with sunny weather when solar is pumping out energy. Today is very much one of those days. Solar is producing as much as nuclear in the UK right now for a fraction of the cost.

Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.

Today the sun is out so it's all about how little the wind is blowing.

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Northern Europe tends to have a few weeks in the winter where both wind and solar are problematic for a few weeks on end. Southern Europe is fine around that time and off shore wind is fine too.

That's why interconnecting grids is so important. We can have Norwegian hydro and Moroccan solar picking up the slack. Plugin all those nice new EVs with vehicle to grid capability built in (Ford, Kia, and a few other manufacturers produce these already) and we're talking a few GWH of standby battery capacity ready to balance the grids as well.

That 5% base load is what we need to secure long term. But given that we essentially have that right now, there's no urgency for that. Maybe it's 10%.

Before anyone asks, I'm basing my numbers on what Michael Liebreich cited in his podcast a while back. Interesting person. He's a british conservative with a technical and economic background. Not your usually hippy environmentalist. Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance; generally seems to be extremely solid on his numbers. The economics in this area are quite fascinating. If you have better numbers and sources, please share. Base load without numbers is just people waffling.

I've never actually seen numbers which take into account pumped storage, grid interconnects, actual weather, low-hanging-fruit demand shaping and the anticorrelation of wind and solar but I wish somebody would produce some.

There's a lot of very shallow analysis out there though that cheerleads some approach with some very trivially refuted assumptions.

My sense is that the price of all of those things combined is currently about 90% of the cost of nuclear power official and about 60-75% of the cost of nuclear power that pays for its own disaster insurance.

While my own model is most assuredly flawed, I havent really seen a good alternative.

It's been a while since I read it to know if the specifics you're after are in there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a directionally-correct reading from https://www.withouthotair.com/. Provisos obviously include changes in costs since it was published, but it would give you a starting point.

> Every winter I see the same post about how little energy solar panels are producing today and why this means we need more nuclear plants.

The low-wind periods last December had a peak of 1.2 GW solar.

Combined wind and solar right now are producing only very slightly more than a tech that has had zero real investment in thirty years. I wouldn't brag about that.

Is the eye watering cost that inhibited investment for 20 years supposed to be bragworthy? It's not like they were ever banned. They just need ridiculously high subsidies to exist at all.

Unlike wind, solar and pumped storage.

No, it isn't. It's a colossal example of both complacency at big engineering firms, and wider myopia about climate change.

Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver. I have provided ample, repeated evidence of that. They failed and fossils came to the rescue. Repeatedly.

Why should they get even half the subsidy nukes get (which is what they do get), when their output is simply useless.

I've posted numbers. Please, you want to show me storage can be economically done, today, do so. Or admit you can't because it can't. We no longer have time for utopianism.

Subsidizing renewables produces permanent reductions in costs, resulting in net public savings. Nukes have been subsidized forever, and costs have gone only upward.

There's no savings if there's NO POWER.

150 MW currently.

>Nevertheless, the >30-year old nukes still delivered what every single technology you have listed categorically failed to deliver.

This is simply, provably false. They have delivered cheap and green electricity and weaned us off fossil fuels gradually.

Theyre growing very very fast because theyre economic and a good investment. Nuclear is not because it is not.

Throw $4 billion of subsidies at solar, wind and pumped storage and youll get more power when you need it than if you did the same for a nuclear power station.

> They have delivered cheap and green electricity and weaned us off fossil fuels gradually.

I'm sorry we're just living in fantasy land now.

We're not weaned off fossils. Not even close. That's just a lie.

In the UK solar and wind went from < 5% to 30% in the last 7 years because it's cheap to build. Nuclear's growth has been zero because it's ridiculously expensive.

180 MW today.

https://grid.iamkate.com/ says 4.5 GW or 13% today.

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