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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Using that money to build more wind and supporting infrastructure would make it much less likely.

People don't talk about it much, but CfD has killed nuclear. It lays the long term costs and risks bare.

Hinckley is going to overrun it's already high cost, and France will be left picking up the tab for any cost overruns.

I wonder if their contract lets them just build the equivalent wind power to save money? Or just shut it down and walk away.

At some point the cost of subsidizing expensive energy for another country is going to become untenable.

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There is no "equivalent wind power". They perform different roles on the grid.

Yes, and it's probably cheaper to emulate that role with other tech.

Not sure the contract would allow for it though.

yes this is what led us to the current war... relying on other tech.

Yes, that's what all the people who like fossil fuels and Putin say anyway.

But everyone else has responded by accelerating the renewable plans that those same Putin and Fossil apologists kept blocking for whatever reason, so it might work out okay in the end.

Would have been nice just to have 4 decades of sensible climate action, cleaner air, healthier citizens, less terrorism, cheaper energy, warmer homes and no-one threatening to nuke Europe when they lose an Illegal war of conquest of part of it though.

u do understand that most of the "renewable" model is to use gas/coal when there isnt wind or sun? guess who backed it... putin, biden and all the others ones that did not have nuclear as their main tech

No the model is to have energy storage and phase out all fossil fuels. Using gas peakers is an intermediate step, but the plan is not to increase the amount of gas used, but instead to electrify processes that currently use gas (e.g. heating).

im highly interested. how do you store energy on a worldwide scale? what kind of technology will you use for storage and what are the implications of building/maintaining those storage facilities.

From what I hear there are several options, most promising seems to be a combination of some sort of batteries for buffering a few hours at most and Hydrogen for seasonal storage. Googling will probably provide you with several studies on how to do stable grids with 100% renewables, I know I've seen at least two in the past.

ok what do you need (in terms of materials) to build a battery to store such energy and what would it like on a global scale? once you found the answer you might not want to call it renewable energy except if child labor in lithium mines and rare minerals from china are renewable.

The only reason this stuff is done in china instead of better places is because everywhere else Oil and Gas CEOs get to chime in for some damn reason.

Wait until you figure out what the alternatives require...

wind is an intermittent energy at best. a turbine lasts at best 25 years then you can't recycle it. there is nothing you can renew in wind energy. oh and wind is changing so you might build it somewhere with a lot of wind just to find out its not there anymore a few years down. not even talking about the visual pollution it creates.

money is not an issue when building energy such as nuclear. you'd need to price all the outcomes a nuclear reactor would bring to your economy and trust me no industry will want to rely on wind to meet their production goals.

Offshore wind clearly wins on 'visual pollution' as well, if you do consider that more important than cost.

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