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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

> governments have historically put to much faith in it

If we (US) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s and had instead merely key up the pace, our grid wouldn't be 20% nuclear like it is today, it would be 100% nuclear.

Instead, we made the choice to pump 20 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere while we waited for solar and wind to become viable. I'm glad they finally are -- they just broke into double digits, in a few years they will pass the nuclear buildout we stopped in the 80s -- but that was one helluva waiting cost.

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"If nuclear hadn't failed, it would have succeeded."

This is false dichotomy. The US government also had the option of investing in renewables as early as the 1970s. They simply didn’t. The success of Germany’s recent investment suggests that was a wrong choice.

In fairness solar efficiency was below 10% in the 1970s, while the world was already producing many gigawatts of nuclear energy at that time.

It's not as though Germany could have 'decided' in the 1970s to have 2022 technology. Sure, increased investment at the time may have sped up the development of renewables, but it still wouldn't be fast. Science doesn't quite work that way.

Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990, and we would not now be facing imminent, impending Climatic Catastrophe. Energy during ie past 30 years would have been radically cheaper. Coal plants and nuke plants alike would have been shuttered as unsustainable, not for their CO2 but just because they cost too damn much.

But here we are, instead. Thank Reagan. And Bush. And Bush, again.

US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.

So you're argument is that in an alternative timeline where we'd invested more money we would have invented technology in the 1980s that still doesn't exist in the 2020s?

Uhh, renewables are here today. The parent was refuting that "solar wasn't ready" by making the point that the progress in renewables is attributable to increased industrial activity and funding.

Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy. That regime lasted until the 90s and by then any memory of the oil crises in the 70s was long gone.

>Reagan took the solar panels off the White House for a reason, so his buddy James Watt could kill off any alternatives to fossil energy.

The panels installed on the White House were not photovoltaic solar panels - they were solar water heater panels. (After they damaged the roof, they weren't replaced after the repairs were done.) It wouldn't have been possible to run the economy on solar water heater panels.

And traditional solar hot water is today obsolete. It's cheaper to use PV and a heat pump water heater.

Not OP, but yes! I believe the argument is that in an alternative timeline where the US government invested in renewables, they would be both more technologically advanced and more commercially feasible today.

I’m not the biggest fan of arguing about alternate history, but this thread originally spun out after an ancestor poster claimed we would have a rosy present if only we had invested more in nuclear energy. I claim I find way more wishful then claiming the same about renewables.

So on the one hand we have a technology that existed since the 1960s and would have solved global warming if we'd merely spent money building it out.

On the other we have a technology that still doesn't exist in the 2020s and would also need to be build out.

Cockroach archeologists will be puzzled why we chose to go extinct.

> On the other we have a technology that still doesn't exist in the 2020s

You keep saying this, but I'm not sure where it's coming from. Reading upthread, my interpretation is that we are specifically talking about the technology that exists today, in 2022.

I think it's entirely reasonable that, if investments into renewables were made in the 70s and 80s at a level comparable to investments in fossil fuels or nuclear, we would have seen, in the 90s, renewables technology comparable to what we have today. No, it wouldn't be the same technology, but I could see efficiency numbers being similar, though perhaps at a bit higher cost.

> Solar efficiency and cost would have been where they are today by 1990

This seems to be implying that basically all the research was done between the 2000's and now, and that scientists had been twiddling their thumbs between 1970 and 2000. Actually, scientific advances between 1970 and 2000 were critical to enable the renewables boom that we experienced since 2000.

Could it have gone faster if more funds had been made available? Maybe. But claiming that we "lost" 30 years in research on that topic simply shows ignorance about the way research works.

> US spent $5T trashing Iraq and Afghanistan. That would have paid for completely switching over to renewables, several time over.

Yeah, and if the Romans hadn't spent so much time fighting with their neighbours, we would all be eating free lunches now.

Simply not subsidizing polluting fossil fuels would have been a major boon to solar, wind, nuclear, energy efficiency, economic growth.

There's reports around about what actually drove the price drops in renewable, and while research plays it's part, market support and scale are big factors, we definately squandered multiple opportunities to nip climate change in the bud.

German success? You mean the country headed into a winter where they will be shutting down their industry have people freeze to death at the whim of Putin?

I shudder to think what failure looks like to you.

Germany is today burning less coal than would have been necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of spending the money building out wind.

Operating the wind farms is much cheaper than operating the nukes and mining the extra coal would have been. That opex savings goes to more capex wind generation capacity, further reducing costs by each GW displaced.

So, yes, success. Not being off coal already is not failure. Replacing an entire country's energy infrastructure takes time, no matter what.

> Germany is today burning less coal than would have been necessary if they had refurbished their nukes instead of spending the money building out wind.

Looks at France

Sure.

France is, at the moment, importing power, because their nukes are largely turned off. So, sure, look at France.

And are a net exporter by around 10%. Meanwhile in Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-turns-electrici...

You are comparing emergency war response to energy policy. Desperate much?

You're the one comparing the worst heat wave in recorded history to business as usual.

You seem to imagine that heat waves are not now normal.

Yes, imagine thinking that the hottest day in record across Europe is not something that will happen daily.

Every couple of years we get a new "hottest on record". Maybe look up global climate disruption records?

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