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Comment by _hypx | Hacker News Reader

This is just another anti-nuclear blog post. It is as irrelevant as every other anti-nuclear blog post that came before it.

The problem with renewables has always been that it is not a form of dispatchable power, and that it is highly variable depending on location, time, geography, etc. Because of that, it doesn't matter how cheap it is, it can never power a grid by itself. So you will always need something on top of that, such as baseload power like nuclear or a system of energy storage. As a result, the "low cost" claims about renewables simply do not pan out in the real world.

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Yet in the "real world" companies are rolling out huge amounts of Solar and Wind while new Nuclear is a rounding error.

Meanwhile armchair nuclear advocates keep saying this is impossible.

Well it is impossible. You'd need to overbuild and connect to neighbour countries, and we all know that can't be done ;)

https://nitter.nl/enn_nafnlaus/status/1565923581246091264 has some interesting graphs and calulcations. The overbuilding described isn't very much higher than what the French planned for their nuclear plants. It is higher, though.

Take away the subsidies and see how long that lasts. Where I live the solar panels get covered in snow every winter. Yet the power company won't even hire teenagers to clean them off. They stay that way until the snow melts generating zero watts of electricity in the meantime.

It's obvious they only find renewables valuable for the subsidies, not the energy (what there is of it) they produce.

You need some new lies, these ones wore out.

Subsidy free PV is cheaper than marginal costs of thermal generation in an ever growing region, and panels are reaching cost parity with roofing and facade materials.

Snow also doesn't sit on a panel that is vertical and being used as a facade or fence (or just sitting in a paddock or field improving yields by reducing wind damage).

In real world we have Germany which used natural gas for base load power generation which resulted into explosion of energy prices. Now they are using "expensive" coal and have manageable prices.

France restarted its nuclear power plants and guess what? Prices for energy went down! How is that even possible when renewables are so cheap and nuclear power can't compete with price?

That's because renewables by installed capacity looks like a big source of power, but by actually provided energy they are negligible rounding error, especially in winter.

> In real world we have Germany which used natural gas for base load power generation which resulted into explosion of energy prices. Now they are using "expensive" coal and have manageable prices.

Funny that having a corrupt leader who is literally employed by gazprom led to sabotaging the renewable rollout and putting it behind by 5 years. In spite of this renewables still replaced every joule that nuclear would have produced were the reactors refurbished at greater cost and 10% or so of the fossil fuels.

> France restarted its nuclear power plants and guess what? Prices for energy went down! How is that even possible when renewables are so cheap and nuclear power can't compete with price?

This is so laughably stupid that it rebuts itself.

> That's because renewables by installed capacity looks like a big source of power, but by actually provided energy they are negligible rounding error, especially in winter.

So 40% of electricity in Germany being produced by wind, solar, and byproduct-derived biogas is a rounding error but producing 2/3rds of that via nuclear in the 90s was significant?

>France restarted its nuclear power plants and guess what? Prices for energy went down! How is that even possible when renewables are so cheap and nuclear power can't compete with price?

Because the nuclear plants that went down were already paid for.

They went down in the first place because theyre expensive to maintain and France was cutting costs.

If nuclear were cost competitive then they wouldnt be riding on the coat tails of soon-to-expire reactors built in the 70s and the % of French electricity supplied by nuclear wouldnt be going down.

German nuclear power plants weren't paid for? What kind of excuse is that?

>or a system of energy storage.

Like pumping water uphill. Which, contrary to pro nuclear propaganda, is cost effective, scales and doesnt require particularly special geography.

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