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Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

Pure FUD. The wind doesn't blow all the time and battery technology at scale isn't there.

Yes, this argument gets repeated again and again and again, and when you ask about storage you never get a decent answer. And yet, the argument keeps getting repeated even by people who matter and make the decisions. When I started watching debates in the Dutch house of representatives I pretty much lost all hope. Of the 150 members, I'd say 145 are either unable or unwilling to think quantitatively and do simple napkin math. Not just regarding energy policy but in all areas. Yet they are verbally very strong, which makes the problem even worse. I suspect it's the same in most western countries.

If you think I'm exaggerating, remember when the Royal Statistical Society asked "if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" and 47% of Conservative MPs and 77% Labour MPs got the answer wrong. Many technical people cannot even fathom this, and tend to assume that people who cannot answer such questions must be severely mentally impaired in general. That is completely wrong; you have lots of people who are near geniuses verbally but incapable of or unwilling to do quantitative thinking.

The decent answer is, simply, that storage will be built when there is enough renewable capacity to charge it from.

Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.

That's magical thinking. Let's start with the obvious question: what kind of storage would that be? Remember, your argument against nuclear was price. Have you run the napkin math on your preferred choice of storage?

What is this trivial energy storage tech I've never heard of?

Pumped hydro, probably. There are implementation details that make it tricky in practice, but those are less technical and more political in nature.

Pumped hydro works great if you happen to have a dam-able river that environmentalists don't care about.

Those do exist, but I'd estimate 90% of the world don't have them.

> The decent answer is, simply, that storage will be built when there is enough renewable capacity to charge it from.

In your fantasy land a housing crisis is impossible!

The decent answer is that housing will be built there are enough construction materials to build them from. So a housing shortage will never happen.

What, Britain has housing shortage? Did they run out of clay to make bricks? Did they run out of buyers? Did they run out of money, while housing prices rose 10x? Did they run out of Land while 97% of the land is not built on? what could it be?

Do you even read what you write? You make no sense.

As the old saying goes: "Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to talk nonsense".

Yes, why not both?

Money is fungible. Each dollar spent on nuke generating capacity is that dollar not spent on several times as much renewable generating capacity.

Not when you take the capacity factor into account. Nuclear reactors have far higher capacity factors than wind and solar.

Even after you take capacity factor into account.

And the cost of the backup power for when wind and solar don't generate enough?

Yes.

The most expensive serious storage solution is LiIon, and even that's merely the same cost (or at least, the bell curves of their prices mostly overlap) as an equivalent nuclear reactor.

(I'm deliberately ignoring any claims about future battery costs; while I'm expecting them to come down, they don't need to in order to make this argument).

"and even that's merely the same cost (or at least, the bell curves of their prices mostly overlap) as an equivalent nuclear reactor."

citation needed.

• PV utility scale with battery, Germany, €55-€100/MWh, (2021): https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...

• LCOE for nuclear, analysis based on new nuclear worldwide but priced in Euros, €67-€82/MWh, (2020): https://energy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2020-10/final_repor... page 40-41

Money is fictional - only raw resources, manufacturing fapacity and climate disaster are real.

I thought this should be clear to everyone today, when energy price whent up 10x because yoy can print euros but can't print jeoules of energy or natural gas.

Renewables and nuclear use different resources and manufacturing capacities.

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