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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

The competition is for cost. I don't mind more competition, I think it's great that there are alternatives. However, I don't see nuclear as particularly competitive on that front as it is currently, by far, the most expensive option. The only thing that comes close is natural gas. Which has seen pretty high price hikes of course.

Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.

Nuclear, not so much. A few deployments here and there. Usually at prices that are way over budget and years late as well. Maybe smaller nuclear plants will change that. They have a lot to prove. I wouldn't bet the future on that. It's a wild card at best.

Meanwhile, the future is now. Lots of countries are going carbon neutral in the next decade or so and mostly without the help of nuclear power. No need to wait for small reactors to work or not. If they do somehow work at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive, great! But not a problem if this is just the next chapter in nuclear power's long history of being too costly and complicated to be practical.

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Nuclear absolutely has to be part of that carbon neutral equation. Solar and wind are awesome, but they are not “dispatchable”. i.e. they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Without tons of batteries, natural gas and coal etc are always going to be used to fill the gaps. Nuclear is the perfect choice to replace those dispatchable sources.

Also, additional nuclear capacity can be used to do things like desalinate ocean water and help alleviate droughts in the future.

Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable. There are a few variable output reactors in France, but they are very expensive. Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component, but...

Nuclear is "firm" in that its always running. This is a good characteristic. I'm more optimistic about advanced geothermal that has been developed in recent years, using the advances in drilling developed for fracking.

If we can use the waste heat from nuclear for something productive, like desalination, then I think it has a much better chance. But coastal communities will also have access to offshore wind, which has really high capacity factors and will be far far cheaper than nuclear could be.

An array of SMRs is dispatchable even though a single SMR is not. It’s a scheduling problem.

Oh really, what's the ramp rate of this design? I haven't heard anybody claim that ability for SMRs.

What makes an array more dispatchable than a single SMR? I don't follow how that could be possible.

Elsewhere in the thread, credit_guy quotes 20% to 100% in 96 minutes[1].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32370392

Not sure 96 minutes will be sufficient in all load-following cases (bar a huge and therefore very expensive fleet of reactors). A gas turbine is way ahead here. Moreover in existing reactors the frequency of such adjustments is limited, for example "no more than twice a day, with a minimal 5-hours pause between modulations, and no more than 150 modulations per year". Approaching limits adds maintenance time (at shutdown state). I don't know if SMRs alleviate this, but given the causes I doubt so.

We will likely have sufficient battery storage where 1.5h would be acceptable though not quite ideal. It still requires quite a bit of storage, but its entirely doable for seasonal variations (the harder problem) and perhaps even daily cycles (the lesser problem).

> Traditionally, nuclear is not dispatchable either, it's baseload, and in particular these SMRs are not dispatchable.

Thermally, generally not. But one can design a system so that the steam is not sent to the turbines and so electrical power is not generated.

> Molten salt reactors could perhaps have a thermal storage component

If you can build one of those economically and deal with the caustic molten salt then you can build a concentrated solar thermal plant with molten salt for storage even more economically with no worries about a nuclear disaster.

While nuclear disasters are acutely catastrophic, they are also exceptionally rare. In the US, nuclear power has 1/100th the deaths per TWh compared to hydro electric, 1/500th oil, and 1/1000th coal.

I really hope the US can adopt a more aggressive approach to using more fuel, even if that means it may be closer to weapons grade at some point in its cycle. This would eliminate a significant amount of waste leaving catastrophic failure as the only real downside.

I would be very happy with a nuclear+solar future (which is currently my present as well).

The last nuclear meltdown was literally a trillion dollar disaster.

Wind and Solar don't have failure modes like that so you don't even have to think about it.

This is why Nuclear tends to get more expensive over time because nobody can accurately calculate the risk of any design decision, so engineers and managers tend to make them more complex over time.

The design we are talking about here has the capability to load follow:

  The unique features of a NuScale plant allow its modules to respond to meet the power generation demand in the evenings by increasing from 20% to 100% power in 96 minutes

[1] https://www.nuscalepower.com/newsletter/nucleus-winter-2019/...

Thank you! I'm surprised that I've not heard this before, and I never noticed it the many times I've been to NuScale's site.

I'm clearly in left field when it comes to concerns about nuclear, in that I mostly am worried about wasted effort and capital on a tech that I do not foresee being able to keep up, rather than concerns about "safety" or belief that it is in anyway necessary for decarbonization. So I appreciate seeing some new information that make me more hopeful that SMRs will succeed.

Nuclear reactors aren't fundamentally incompatible with load following: you can stick some control rods in or out and get more or less heat energy distributed to your turbines.

Nuclear power plants are generally used for base load for economic reasons: they are really expensive to build and have close to fixed hourly costs to operate, compared to say natural gas plants which are cheap to build and have operating costs proportional to the amount of gas they burn. Consequently we only build nuclear where we expect it can be utilized pretty much all the time, and we don't optimize nuclear plants for quick scaling up and down.

You say "always", but the technological progress and price curves indicate that within the next 20 years wind and solar (with batteries) are going to outperform any other source of energy generation by such a large factor and become so cost efficient that it would be ridiculous not to use them exclusively.

You make it sound like nuclear is the only solution to this problem. It's not. It's merely a very expensive solution to this problem. There are all sorts of storage options being considered currently that each have their own cost profiles. Some of them are very cheap and simple too. And when solar is basically orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of GW/$, you can afford to have quite a lot more of it than you need to compensate for cheap but relatively inefficient storage options and still be cheaper overall.

As I said in my original post, cost is the key driver here and nuclear has a lot to prove.

> they turn off sometimes when the wind stops blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Spreading production at continental scale has a major beneficial impact, and such a huge grid is highly beneficial to any type of source (even nuclear).

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Are you including the cost of battery storage in solar & wind power generation for 24 / 7 power output? Otherwise Nuclear power is of higher quality since it can be sustained virtually at any time unlike solar & wind

French nuclear power is unavailable more often due to maintenance or lack of cooling water than British wind is.

British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.

Capacity factor is generally better for nuclear than any other energy source.

> British wind often generates less power than it can, but it very rarely drops to zero.

Sorry, I didn't realize French nuclear reactors weren't generating any energy at the moment.

Over half of French reactors are down. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/07/28/frances-nuclear-...

Let's note that part of them are down now for planned maintenance that had to be delayed because of the pandemic. Hopefully, this is not going to be a recurring event.

Water temperature is also a problem, but, again, is something that is going to resolve itself "at some point".

Finally, others are closed for potentially recurring corrosion issues, and _that_ is the really problematic stuff since most of our reactors were built around the same time.

I don't exactly understand why everyone is tiptoing around the fact that we're going to have electricity shutdowns this winter in Europe, when the gas that's supposed to full peaked plants is going to be missing.

Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it, at the moment, and at least a good old blackout and a few shortages at gas stations might make some people take energy issues seriously.

> Sadly there is not much we can do to prevent it ...

The people could demand a resolution to the politician's issues which are holding five turbines in Montreal that could be installed in a pipeline which supplies gas to parts of Europe. It is almost like some political segments don't want a resolution before winter.

Edit: I had read one was returned, five being repaired, and Germany restarting ten coal plants. https://globalnews.ca/news/9002839/canada-turbines-return-ru...

Those turbines were sent back to Germany a couple of weeks ago.

It is almost like the news is more interested in reporting on ongoing problems than solved ones.

At some point, "Breaking news : everything is pretty much ok" is going to be a thing.

I'm ready to bet that when all the turbines are back (some already are), if the geopolitical situation is still as complicated, Russia will find another good reason to limit the amount of gas sent to western Europe.

I think the Kremlin is expecting the German electorate to push pressure on their government to ask for a return to the "normal" flow of gas, Ukraine be damned.

That seems like a reasonable bet, but I'm not going to rule surprises out any more.

Nuclear plants may or may not be reliable, but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated.

Solar is corellated around time of day on a large scale and cloud cover on a more localized scale. Lack of wind sometimes happens to fairly large regions; interconnections to farther away wind farms helps though.

Weather extremes outside the design can result in outages for all kinds of plants though, so a relatively geographically small and isolated grid like Texas, that has many plants unprepared for cold will likely have outages at plants of all types during a bad cold snap; a particularly bad heat wave might cause issues as well.

On the other hand an advantage that solar and wind have is that they are predictable in the medium term. Weather forecasts are fairly reliable predictors of solar & wind output about a week or so out. They also ramp up and down smoothly.

So while grid operators have to be constantly adjusting for solar & wind output variations, they can do so without panic and without customers noticing.

Reactor shutdowns, while rare, are sometimes very unexpected and drop a lot of capacity from the grid very quickly.

This isn't really any more or less true of Nuclear than any other facility. A power outage which took out many of the railways in London a few years back was caused by one of the offshore wind fields tripping from the grid.

Lack of water to cool down is unfortunately correlated across the country.

Which country?

France

Every country. Lack of water in a river is usually correlated to lack of water in the other river close to it (a common cause could be very hot and dry season with no rain for instance)

> but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated

Unless you start mass manufacturing them and the identical reactors start failing in identical ways...

... and one has to mass-manufacture them in order to lower the total cost.

Outages at multiple nuclear plants can be correlated. Right now: https://www.theenergymix.com/2022/06/29/corrosion-problem-sh...

>> Nuclear plants may or may not be reliable, but outages at multiple nuclear plants are usually not corellated.

Japan has seen a decade-long shutdown of most plants following a single incident.

My understanding with the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia is that you could buy solar and batteries for cheaper and deploy sooner. You could throw in a subsidy for electric cars too which can feed back to the grid in an emergency. That said the small reactors of this article will hopefully have lower costs and faster deployment times.

Another advantage of wind and battery is that they aren’t national security targets in the way nuclear is.

I'd hate to be relying on cars feeding back into the grid when a natural disaster happens which encourages people to evacuate, or prepare to evacuate such that they want to ensure their batteries are charged.

I would hate to weather another large and close wildfire where in addition to the normal grid instability and power issues it's exacerbated by lack of expected car feedback resources because people have evacuated or are standing by to.

On the other hand. Nuclear is not immune to natural conditions either. Look at France, currently turning off reactors because of lack of cooling water due to the drought.

Right now the European grid is operational and demand is being met. When winter arrive it is expected that multiple countries will have to start to shut down part of society in order to save the grid.

Thankfully the cooling issue won't hopefully exist during winter, and given how much political outcry will occur if the grid do collapse, France might actually step up and fix their reactors given enough political pressure.

I'm glad the issues in France won't have too bad of an impact. But that's somewhat besides the point. The cause of the electricity shortage is the enormous overreliance on Russian gas and oil. It's not about renewables vs. Nuclear.

The comment I responded to argued nuclear is superior in a situation of crisis, and selects as an example a natural disaster. Wanted to point out that this seems to depend rather sensitively on the kind of crisis.

No, I didn't argue nuclear anything. I merely noted that I would be worried about relying on a resource which we might expect to get scarce during a time when energy instability is already high.

As long as the natural disaster isn't affecting a large part of the continent, the electric grid should be able to handle it.

Predicting future cost is really, really hard. Future cannot really be extrapolated from the current state of things.

Until 2022, a lot of Europeans counted on cheap Russian gas.

If any kind of cold war breaks out with China, will solar panels be as available as they are today?

Ceteris paribus, I would always keep at least some energy generating capability "at home", without the need to rely on potentially hostile powers or unstable regions. Even if it looked uneconomical at the very moment.

What do you think about the reliability of the global supply chain for uranium ore and fuel rod production? Canada has some high-grade ore but the United States and Europe don't seem to have much at all.

Canada is fine with me. Finer than China.

You can also stockpile rods easier than, say, gas. They don't take up as much space, given how energy dense they are.

Having a three year strategic reserve is thinkable, not so much with other means of electricity production.

The strategic reserve of sunlight and wind isn't susceptible to disruption due to war or economic collapse. It does take some work to collect that energy, i.e. a domestic PV and turbine and battery manufacturing capacity, but these are not consumables like oil, gas, coal or uranium - they're durable goods that should last for years to decades, and which can be recycled.

Manufacturing of PVs and batteries on a large enough scale (and that means much larger, at least volume- and weight-wise, than a fleet of SMRs) needs enormous amounts of minerals that are produced in either unstable or potentially hostile regions. The sheer energy density of uranium cannot really be downplayed here.

PV’s require minimal rare materials because the part that makes power is only ~1/5000th of a meter thick. It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.

The casing on the other hand can be made from an extremely wide range of materials. And of course long term you can recycle PV panels because they arn’t consuming the material.

> It works out to around 80 gigawatt hours per cubic meter and most of that material is silicon. By comparison a nuclear powerplant goes through around 240 kg of uranium to generate that much power.

Well, one cubic meter of uranium is ~19000 kg, so not sure what your point was.

The point was Silicon isn't rare, it’s 28% of earths crust.

If ~99.5% of the 1 cubic meter is silicon then, the rare bits assuming uranium density are ~95kg which is less than 240kg of uranium.

There is a gorilla in this room: the more we obtain uranium (prospecting, mining, milling...), the more we add to the associated carbon footprint.

Known reserves or uranium may provide for the current reactor fleet at best for the upcoming 200 years.

Therefore a sustained growth of installed nuclear capacity will lead us to exploit mines at always lowering ore grades => more emissions.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2051332

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222817608_Life_cycl...

And how much raw material needs to be mined and processed to manufacture those rare minerals that generate the power?

Have you accounted for the recycling of uranium? Only a minuscule amount of the energy in fission material goes to generate power and what is left can be recycled over and over again until it is fully "spent".

Exact numbers depend on panel technology, but if you really want to get into the recycling argument stuff that isn’t consumed to generate power is obviously a net win over nuclear fuel. Reprocessing doesn't let you create energy from nothing while solar does let you create energy from material inside the sun.

In term of mining, look at all the material needed to construct and maintain a nuclear powerplant. A significant portion of why nuclear is so expensive is all the stuff needed to build and maintain one.

There is not a single industrial adequate recycling reactor, after 70 years of intensive R&D. Can you name one?

“Will solar panels be as available as they are today”

Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China. In the steady state you need to replace around 3% per year to keep up with panel degradation, but a dependable solar grid has significant excess production so you have wiggle room to build up domestic manufacturing. And you can ramp up alternatives like wind.

Nuclear has more significant systemic risks, which are less obvious. Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance. If they where nearly as dependent on Nuclear as often reported they would be having real trouble right now.

> Already installed solar obviously has zero dependency on China

> Over half of Frances’s Nuclear powerplants are currently offline for deferred maintenance

There is more. Nuclear power requires continual availability of skilled technicians and engineers, replacement parts that need advanced manufacturing, water and other material, access to road and infrastructure.

And a stable socioeconomical and political and legal system. And military defense.

For some developed countries it can already difficult to provide all these things with 100% reliability. Today, before the bigger impact of climate change.

And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

And they do, what about plutonium and nuclear proliferation?

If Bulgaria and Ukraine can run their nuclear plants, why not Brazil or Argentina?

Ukraine has a poor history of running nuclear power plants.

They recently had one suffer a large scale military attack and are of course managing the aftermath of Chernobyl.

The Chernobyl explosion happened during Soviet times, 6 years before Ukrainian independence. So I wouldn't blame Ukraine as such for it.

The fact that an aggressor chose Ukrainian nuclear plant as a target and impromptu military dump isn't Ukrainian fault either. This could have happened to Finland or Sweden, too, in case of a Soviet/Russian attack. (Neither country was under NATO's protective umbrella.)

Actually attacking it is on Russia. However, placing troups inside the nuclear power station is on Ukraine. It’s for similar reasons that you don't station troups inside a school, which apparently Ruissa has been doing.

Sure, there have been these two incidents. But whats the real argument here? Do these indicents mean that Ukraine has an intolerably poor track record? I don’t see how it does—especially since one occurred when Ukraine was part of the USSR, which was actually the nation operating the plant, and the other was caused by a neighbor’s aggression.

And the actual point here was about Latin America. Ukraine was just an example. Is it really so implausible to think that, for example, Brazil and Argentina could not safely operate nuclear plants?

The point is if you want to consider how successful a major infrastructure project then you should base things on similar countries. Brazil has multiple nuclear reactors though South America has very few.

If the history of nuclear incidents should tell us anything it’s the importantance of understanding failure modes. To use a Brazil example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

Massive complex infrastructure projects in poor countries often fail to finish or suffer from substandard construction etc.

The sad part is that the power grid is exceptional vulnerable to military operations and the single most vulnerable source that caused the loss of more lives than any other energy source during war is hydro power. A single hydroelectric dam has the potential energy of multiple nuclear bombs just waiting for a single fuse to go off, and as demonstrated during the second world war, even a mostly failed attempt to set it off can cause a massive amount of death and destruction.

Attacking hydroelectric dams during war is a major war crime for a big and deadly reason.

If WWII is anything to go by, Dams are a surprisingly difficult target.

Operation Chastise cost 53 RAF killed, 3 captured, and the loss of 8 aircraft. Net result 2 hydroelectric dams destroyed, several damaged, and ~1,600 civilian casualties. And it was only that successful do to high water levels at the dams in question.

The difficulty back then was mostly caused by the technology of the day when targeting was done by hand and sight, and where the pilot flew the plane by looking out from a window and using eye sight and memory to figure out where they were.

Those technical issues of bomber planes are long gone, but the vulnerability of damns are just as they were 80 years ago. A bunker buster would go through the concrete as a knife through butter, and the targeting would be done with laser precision. The navigation and execution would today be done by computers.

A cruise missile and a lancaster has very little in shared technology, and depending on definition isn't even in the same category. The construction of a 1940 hydroelectric damn and a hydroelectric damn in 2022 is basically indistinguishable. Concrete holding up water is concrete holding up water.

The technical issues are still significant because you need to detonate underwater next to the dam making current smart bombs useless. Individual, Bunker busters fail because the hole is too small, it’s easy to patch and doesn't let enough water out to be destructive. Multiple bunker busters used together can work, but it’s still challenging.

If look at the actual dams from WWII you notice they all got damaged about half way up and only blew out a section of the dam. This is because thickness increases dramatically with depth and bombs only have so much energy. They needed the pressure of a dam at near maximum capacity to work, which is why several other dams services just fine.

While I agree there would be issues to solve, bombs like the massive ordnance penetrator seem like it could do some damage with its 30,000-pound load (the dam busters used 9,000-pound loads).

But even if we went with the same 80 year old designs of bombs as in world war 2, the biggest challenges with Operation Chastise has been solved today by the user of precision-guided munition, drones and cruise missiles. The pilots of Operation Chastise had a major challenge flying so low, with such a heavy payload, with a very narrow target window, using technology that was neither precise nor easy to use. They could also not avoid flak from anti-air, and the explosion from the bomb was a major threat to the plane forcing the pilot to balance their own and crewmen life with that of the mission. Misty weather also prevented one plane from even find their target. It was a very risky mission.

The issue with current penetrators is they aren't designed for the mission. Reusing old designs but now with better guidance systems is really designing a new weapon system based on older principles which means a full R&D cycle and hoping people haven't built defenses for such an old approach.

There are three basic angles of attack, from the front, top, and water. Anything that comes in from the front or top and then detonates has a large hole to let energy back out without damaging the structure. The same issue also applies to a water entry with current perpetrators as these things are designed for high speed impacts which creates a large void behind the bomb.

Ideally you want something that lands in exactly the right spot and then slowly sinks to the right depth. And of course no netting to be around the dam to make the mission that much more difficult. Which gets back to my previous point, it’s clearly possible, just technically difficult.

Because if they do some other country up north might get skittish and stage a coup or a little war.

> And what about the remaining 50% of human population? Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

This is hard to read charitably. It seems like a racist remark, not least because there are nuclear power plants in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist? The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?

I don't like this.

Suggetsing countries like Afghanistan that have had difficulty maintaining basic infrastructure would have more difficulty safely maintaining more difficult infrastructure like nuclear power plants seems reasonable.

There is nothing racist about suggesting South Africa which is the only Africa country with nuclear power might have better odds than Sudan. Similarly Brazil has safely operated nuclear power plants for decades, but nuclear has faced real logistical issues in South America.

> seems like a racist remark

It is the very opposite. I'm stating that the global south is being exploited and denied access to technology (and more).

If anything, it is racist to NOT acknowledge the problems that the global south is facing.

Besides, I clearly wrote "countries" obviously referring to the political entities, not the population.

> Maybe you aren't racist yourself, but you presume nuclear power proponents to be racist?

Now you flipped 180?

> The ends justify the means, so you can play into the racial biases of those you oppose?

What does this even mean?

> Do you see South American, African and middle-eastern countries being able to run nuclear plants?

South American here. We do have a couple of nuclear plants, and they run fine.

Russia and its allies are major providers of uranium. This impacts even the US: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exclusive-us-utiliti...

Kazakhstan is the main uranium provider of France.

For your renewable vs nuclear cost, is the cost advantage that obvious?

When price is comparison is done, does it account for lifespan difference, a nuclear reactor last 60 year vs 20 for wind and solar. That can already triple price of the renewable.

Does it account, that you should build extra capacity of many time what you need because not all the same regions have the same wind and sun exposition at the same time? You can look how oversize is the installed capacity of Germany [1] compared to France.

Also, I'm not sure for the US but the EU got its solar panel production wiped out by the heavily subsided Chinese industry. So the rather lower apparent cost of solar by might be partially driven by the Chinese attempt to pump money in to gain market share.

[1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

Solar panels can last 50 years. The main reason they don't is that they improve so much every decade that the opportunity cost of doubling power output per square meter makes it worth replacing them.

So you're left with 2 theses:

1: solar panels will stop improving, so you should amortize over 50 years. 2: solar panels will keep improving, so cost / kWh will be less than a 50 year amortization.

> Low carbon energy generation is basically happening with or without nuclear. At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.

A lot of these calculations are based on straight line production cost against average power output. They often omit one of the most valuable aspects of nuclear: grid stability. Redundancy is expensive but EXTREMELY important. I see few papers accurately imputing this cost when they conclude that we should all switch to renewables immediately. Here in Europe we can have swings in wind power production in excess of 50% in the span of a day. This is ENORMOUS volatility, and requires some kind of stable power production to offset the slow wind days.

Grids need to be diversified. Solar, wind, tide, geothermal, hydro, and definitely nuclear. If not nuclear, we are stuck with coal and LNG for the foreseeable future.

This will just mean that even more renewables will be built up the point where it is economically feasible to store such energy in batteries, heat, hydrogen, synfuels etc. Yes, many of these processes are inefficient, but if you consider wind already being the cheapest mode of electricity generation then after another 50% price decline due to progress in technology we might have electricity for lots of inefficient storage mechanisms.

Storage is of course the way to overcome grid volatility but so far there are few economical options. As I mentioned, few studies have been conducted on this volatility component and cost, but my understanding is that current storage options are uneconomical relative to nuclear, and especially relative to coal and LNG. Hydro storage is ~70% efficient but it's obviously only feasible in mountainous regions. It's actually cheaper to significantly overshoot renewable capacity to compensate for slow days, but if we're now building 2-3x peak capacity then the cost equation shifts considerably.

>At this point, we're past the point where people need to study the cost of wind or solar. They have proven much cheaper than anything else and they are being mass deployed all over the world as a result of that.

If the costs are so settled, why are countries like China still installing more thermal plants than solar or wind?

You think they would favor the cheaper proven options?

Is China installing more thermal than renewables? I thought it was roughly balanced between fossils and hydro+wind+solar.

I think you are right if you add it all up.

> The competition is for cost

Ideally there would be competition for end user low costs as well as investment costs. Electricity should be cheaper than tap water.

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