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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

The state of California has built more battery capacity in the last six months than the entire nation has built of fission power plants in the last 25 years. It is extremely easy to build batteries for fixed service, and bulk semiconductor manufacturing is the #1 thing that humans are good at. These problems are absolutely solved, the whole industry thinks so, that's why the whole industry is behind pv+wind+storage, as demonstrated at that link I posted.

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As I said, order of magnitude error.

> has built

But enough?

Global battery manufacturers have invested so much that they can take total battery capacity to more than 5,500 GWh by by 2030. US would need something like 3000 Gwh of energy storage to replace the base load. (within days, then few weeks). It would would be insane misuse of resources.

In 2021 US power consumption was 3.93 PWh. 5500 GWh is a bit over 12 hours of consumption. Not gonna cut it. And that's assuming 100% of the batteries are used for grid storage, and there is no demand growth in the next 8 years.

With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it either.

Nuclear is needed for base load, not for all electricity needs.

Nuclear is the most cost effective way to achieve base load.

Neither of these statements is true.

You mathed wrong. You would need a little over 200, but no one is suggesting powering the whole grid with nuclear.

and no one suggested we run the entire grid on PV/batteries, except you.

Vogtle will be cancelled before completion. That many $billions for 2GW is nothing short of pathetic.

It cannot be cancelled soon enough.

I doubt that. It's too close to completion, sadly for the ratepayers in Georgia.

I guess they can mothball it afterward.

Why should they? The state utility regulators approved it, so it's going into the rate base. That's not a competitive electricity market down there in the Southeast.

They could disapprove it. Maybe elect better government, first?

A negligible fraction of utility-scale storage will be batteries, so battery capacity hardly matters.

> However, much of this proposed capacity will not ultimately be built. Among a subset of queues for which data are available, only 23% of the projects seeking connection from 2000 to 2016 have subsequently been built. Completion percentages appear to be declining, and are even lower for wind and solar than other resources.

Projects not being built indicate the massive success of falling costs. Projects that fail to reduce cost enough to compete get cancelled, and the capital goes to others instead.

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