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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does ESG feel like a giant virtue signal from companies and investors?

Taking this specific issue of nuclear. Nuclear Energy is objectively cleaner than other forms of energy generation and is objectively safe if you operate it properly. With that said, it seems like Nuclear Energy would be embraced by the ESG crowd, but that simply wasn't the case.

Now that the rubber met the road, the sentiment has changed. So was nuclear actually bad? Or was it just "bad". Almost seems that everyone was so obsessed with going green and getting rid of "big bad nuclear" that they forgot that they depend on it. Much like a kid quitting his job to pursue the arts and then realizing, he can't make rent without the job they just quit...

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ESG is a tool that certain political parties can use to "give to their friends" and "take from their enemies". Anyone who doesn't toe the line will find their ESG rating dropping (see Tesla: https://theconversation.com/how-a-sustainability-index-can-k...)

Been criticizing Tesla for years. But once Elon openly confronted cancel culture's twitterized grip on democracy all of a sudden those criticisms became newsworthy and a concern for regulators.

Same with crypto: The scammy-ness and un-pleasentness (ie of funding terrorists and organized crime) was always there, but news-worthy it got only once Canadian Truckers made use of it.

Agreed.

I'm not opposed to identifying situations where companies are getting away with something for free that they should be paying for, and then correcting that. For example, dumping chemicals into a river, or emitting toxic fumes into the air.

Somehow this turned into: "only solar, wind, and thermal are good, so everything other than those are bad. We need to shut down nuclear."

It would have been better if it was: "wow, these decades old designs did really well. We've learned a lot over the years, let's build newer, better, cleaner, safer nuclear plants and then shut down the old ones."

This is always what happens when the most militant positions are allowed or even encouraged to control discourse: we end up in an extremist situation.

Nuclear was never "bad".

It is just the most expensive power, discounting externalities like CO2, disaster liability, decommissioning, and waste management. Include the latter, and it gets worse. Include CO2, and coal is worse.

The cheapest power, with or without externalities, is solar followed by wind. A dollar spent on those produces several times as many kWh as anything else.

They are of course intermittent, but that doesn't matter much because their share of total generation is low. As their contribution comes to dominate, we will need to add storage. Until then, money is overwhelmingly more usefully spent adding generating capacity, as is being done. But a hell of a lot more should have been and needs to be spent on that.

I'd be curious to hear your take on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cm7HOAqZY (California's Renewable Energy Problem by the Youtube channel Real Engineering)

Walks through the numbers on what it would take to run California on renewables + storage alone.

Because of the intermittency, it seems like the costs of storage (even though it gets better/cheaper each year) maker it not possible.

I feel like the "wind and solar only!" crowd love to point out externalities of other forms of power generation but not wind and solar. It's not magic; we don't just conjure up windmills and solar panels from thin air and magically suck electricity from them. There are real costs, risks, and suboptimal function of all these systems.

> real costs

Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast.

Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.

It costs less... in California or adjacent states with both massive insolation and good infrastructure. It doesn't cost less in Germany or Poland which is north of the 50th latitude and has about a third of the insolation per year.

And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.

In fact storage has no physical limits on scaling up. Costs are low and falling faster than solar and wind ever did, and there is no reason to doubt it will continue. The overwhelming majority of storage is not batteries, and will not be batteries.

If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?

California is very well placed to take advantage of cheap solar energy.

I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative.

Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon.

Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening.

So when do the problems start?

Any analysis that uses lithium batteries as the reference storage technology gives at best an upper bound on cost. More often it signals incompetence or bad faith.

Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing.

Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.

After renewables become a large enough fraction of the generating capacity, then it becomes necessary to start adding storage.

It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper.

California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.

Due to forward looking regulations, California (like China) is just about to have a dramatic storage boom over the next few years. They have 40GWh of EV batteries and are likely to quadruple that in a few years, but I'm not even counting that in the boom, basically every planned grid solar deployment includes a big chunk of batteries.

I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism.

Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone.

Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it.

Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true.

Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible.

Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.

We're going to see more interconnected grids, the sun is usually shining somewhere and the wind is blowing somewhere. And when it isn't, we're going to see higher prices.

Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.

It would certainly help if the water reservoirs weren't so empty because they could serve as giant batteries. But maybe a water source or desalination could help.

The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat.

And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.

The lower a reservoir is, the more water you can pump up to it.

> we will have to add storage

This is the problem: with current technology, if you include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.

Replacing storage with load-following (hydro, Geothermal, modern nuclear) is necessary unless we find ways of storage that beat current theoretical limitations

> include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.

Absolutely false. Most storage used today (95%+) is pumped hydro, which is very cheap. Costs for all kinds of storage are falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.

There are no theoretical limitations on storage. Most storage is just E = Fx, understood and applied for centuries.

If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell readers about your case?

My bad if it was unclear, "theoretical limitations" obviously concerned chemical means of storage.

Hydro is ideal, but the problem is it needs mountains and huge amounts of water, which aren't accessible everywhere

You also didn't address the main point: storage drives up costs and externalities which most people advocating for intermittent sources seem to completely sweep under the rug

Yes. It's not only virtue signaling, but a deceitful way to control policies and investments. It's not for the environment, but for power and profit.

> Is it just me or does ESG feel like a giant virtue signal from companies and investors?

Well yeah, it is explicitly intended as a signal that investors can use to select virtuous companies.

ESG is one of the best examples of good intention paving the way to hell. It is fundamentally undemocratic to the greatest extends aside from creating large factious industries with a parasitic behavior and randomly sanction investments positively or negatively. It enables corruption and companies that can invest into legal departments specialized in compliance towards ESG requirements will win here. It is one of the worst mechanism our financial "experts" came up with. The last present of boomers to finally destroy the world for everyone if I want to exaggerate, but I think it isn't much less.

> objectively safe if you operate it properly

You are commenting this on a thread in which people are praising France's 60 year old reactors and suggesting Germany keeps their 40 year old reactors running, which were built to last 40 years. "Running them properly" is easier said than done, and frankly, the naive and misinformed opinions spewed constantly about the topic by proponents are a strong argument against nuclear energy. Not that it matters anyway, no one in a position of responsibility is going to build them, regardless of how much Isaac Asimov fans on the internet are crying foul about it.

Enjoy freezing to death this winter (assuming you're German).

While this is definitely hyperbolic, it's becoming less so every day this insanity with energy continues.

> no one in a position of responsibility is going to build them

a bit of an exaggeration? today: "Sizewell C: New nuclear power station granted development consent by the government ... French energy company EDF, which will partly fund the project, has said the plant will generate electricity for at least 60 years and will employ 900 people."

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