Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these claims decisively.

First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them. The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through single taxes. For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong. And I think that the history of carbon taxes has shown them to be this obvious and unfortunately wrong solution.

Similarly, baseload, or more properly firm energy supply, can come from all sorts of carbon free sources. From storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades. We have a rich portfolio of solutions, and most of them are reducing in cost quickly. However nuclear is not reducing in cost, and it's not clear that it will ever be able to compete again. Attach 12 hours of storage to a solar array and you'll get a "baseload" source, and it will be cheaper than new nuclear.

> carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective

You're arguing that fuel use is inelastic. This is obviously false, and there's plenty of evidence of that. When gas is cheap, people buy gas guzzlers. When gas is expensive, they buy gas sippers. The latest evidence is the news stories about people cutting back when gas prices spiked a couple months ago.

If the carbon tax had no effect, then the tax wasn't large enough. There is most definitely a tax level where you are going to reduce your driving, a tax level where you will buy a more efficient car, and a tax level where you will get an EV.

> can come ... who knows what will be developed

Refuting today's reality with "who knows what will be developed" is not a compelling argument.

Let's take hydro:

1. no more hydro dams will be built because they ruin the rivers

2. there aren't many good sites for hydro dams anyway

3. current hydro dams are always being targeted for destruction by environmentalists. In Washington State, a hydro dam was demolished recently for that reason.

4. droughts are drying up the hydro power in the American west and even in Norway.

The cost of nuclear is the cost of endless lawsuits. Government can clear that away with the legislative wand.

> Attach 12 hours of storage to a solar array

I encourage you to do that for your house. Let us know how it works out.

At least in countries like here in Finland, you get almost no energy from solar panels during winter months. 12 hours of storage to a solar array is not going to work at least here.

Finland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables. This means that any industry using significant amounts of energy is going to move away from Finland, once fossil fuels are no longer used.

Most of the electricity in Finland is not produced by using fossil fuels. For example during year 2020 14 % of the electricity in Finland was produced by fossil fuels.

I was talking about energy intensive industries, not electricity production. If Finland has to compete with other countries that have cheap renewables, it will lose these industries. As an example of something like that today, look at primary aluminum production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_primary_a...

There are 31 countries on that list, from China to Venezuela. Finland is nowhere on there.

In the all-electric economy of the future, every energy intensive manufacturing activity will start to look like aluminum production.

The viability of renewables depends more on population density than location. There are always some natural processes you can take advantage of to generate power. And if the density is low enough, like in Finland but probably not in the US, existing hydro should be enough to cover most energy storage needs.

Here is what I suggested in my comment:

> storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades

With storage on solar thrown in as only one option at the end. And though it will probably be a dominant solution because it will be by far the cheapest most locations, it won't work everywhere. So look to other tech.

I desperately hope Olkiluoto comes online soon, but it's also a pretty clear indication that nuclear is not a spectacular option for Finland either. But it may be your best option!

At least battery storage seems to be unrealistic solution. The needed amount of energy storage for several months is enormous and in addition to that problem, batteries tend to self-discharge.

Geothermal energy and hydro storage are not without problems either. I am not sure about ammonia storage, but it would be interesting to see some calculations about the feasibility of storing so much energy by using hydro or ammonia.

Thanks to the local green party we are behind schedule in nuclear energy. They have dragged the process by years and also in practice forced us to have a new reactor type. In reality much better solution would have been at least two smaller and more traditional reactors (which would provide also more redundancy) than more experimental reactor which is also uncomfortably large. However the older nuclear reactors we have, have worked pretty well and are still producing energy cheaply and reliably unlike renewal energy.

I don't understand how the Green Party could have influenced the choice of using France's EPR versus other tech. Areva designed the large EPR because larger reactors are supposed to be more cost effective than smaller reactors.

How has the Green Party dragged on the process of construction? What delays did they cause? I ask because I don't know the specific causes of all the delays, even the latest since it was first powered on. It's hard to get this info, which makes me suspicious that it's actually a third party causing the delay, because then those doing the building would be able to clearly state a great reason for the delay. Instead we are mostly left guessing st what is going on with construction.

Green party managed to stop the process of getting new reactors many times with different political tricks. And when they finally reluctantly agreed to build more nuclear energy, they demanded that only one (or was it two, I cannot remember the exact details anymore) reactor should be build. And because of this limitation on the number of new reactors, we then needed to have a higher power reactor instead of several lower power reactors.

And because of the foot dragging by greens the other new reactor project failed. They managed to slow the process long enough that the German reactor was of the table (thanks to the foolish politics of Merkel in Germany) and then only Russian reactor was available. And after Russia started war on Ukraine that Russian reactor project was canceled.

Can't (isn't?) Finland's grid be connected to places where there is solar?

Perhaps in theory, although transmission losses would be large. But I wouldn't want to be on the mercy of distant countries, perhaps on different continent, for getting energy, especially during winter. And as there are other possibilities than solar energy, I don't see why to go for solar energy instead of the other alternatives.

Indeed; though I thought EU had a lot of inter-country grid connections (perhaps more as backups). The distances don't seem outrageous compared to other grids.

Edit: looks like Finland does indeed have international grid connections and imports about 20% of its electricity

I am not familiar with the winder conditions in Southern Europe. Is there enough sunlight during winter that it would be feasible to provide a lot of solar energy during wintertime - not just for local use, but to northern Europe as well? It might be that even there is too little sunlight and the solar power would have to come from different continent.

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