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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

New battery backed solar is already cheaper than gas/coal in most areas. This is why the percentage of solar is exploding world wide while nuclear has stagnated. The economics just work out that way. In theory you hit an inflection point at X% wind/solar, but prices just keep falling so it hasn’t happened yet.

Germany made a huge sacrifice by subsidizing early and very expensive Solar to in a northern country to really kick things off. But they’re stilly paying subsides on those early installations.

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>in most areas

Most areas in California, maybe.

> This is why the percentage of solar is exploding world wide while nuclear has stagnated.

No, solar is exploding because it's heavily subsidized, either monetarily or by other schemes like net metering. Nuclear has stagnated because it requires huge upfront cost, and stability in building new capacity.

No most of the planet. Including Nevada, Texas, … even much of South Dakota.

Look at a globe some time, most of the world is much closer to the equator than Germany yet battery backed solar still beats gas/coal/nuclear in parts of southern Germany.

PS: Nuclear, coal, and natural gas also receive plenty of subsidies. It turns out removing all subsidies from electricity production actually pushes wind/grid solar even harder. What it discourages is rooftop solar which isn’t a good fit for many locations.

Those are four states. We're currently without wind and have clouds in Pennsylvania where I'm visiting family, how do you propose we generate enough electricity and cover this coming weekend where there will be rain and clouds.

My list was hardly every state Hawaii and Florida are a great fit for solar.

As to PA, this time of year demand is very low as you need minimal heating or cooling. Similarly while solar output is low in stormy weather wind isn’t. Similarly the region has plenty of hydroelectric which can offset production from days with high wind/solar production to days with low wind/solar production.

Weather tends to be a tradeoff where hydro and wind improve just as solar and demand decline. In extreme cases like Washington state batteries are pointless and the ideal mix changes.

Beats solar means nothing at 5AM in Poland when wind is at 5% of capacity. https://i.imgur.com/LAJ2cKP.png

This is the real problem with renewables. You need to 20-30x them to get to real usage. Or have 100% redundant gas coverage, with giant political problems coming with it.

“battery backed solar” Poland is far from the equator yet it’s still a great fit for solar thermal power which can cheaply store energy in hot water.

It also has 12.5GW of PV because it’s still a cost effective location for solar power.

You can't just wish batteries with day's worth of electricity generation capacity into existence.

Ultimately it just takes money and time.

You don’t get anything in seconds, but over years you just pay people to build them and they build factories just like you pay people to build equipment for other types of power plants.

New limits always show up with new scales. People will advocate dramatically scaling nuclear as if tens of thousands of people with the skills to operate them are sitting around with nothing to do. Lack of skilled workers is actually a larger limiting factor for nuclear than the few years it takes to build a single reactor and one of the reasons they can’t make a significant difference without at least a decade of lead time and more likely several. Current programs can teach people reasonably quickly, but you need not just students but more people trained to teach the material.

Good! I want renewables to be subsidized and fossil fuels to be heavily taxed at every step!

And the result is that energy costs for end consumers are rising and inflation is increasing.

The trade off being the survival of the human race, and of course less money flowing into the hands of the Saudis, Russians, Exxon, and other corrupt organizations.

Sounds like a win/win.

Or, we could build nuclear and still enjoy our economies. If you support full renewables for degrowth reasons, don't pretend they are more economical.

Nuclear requires much larger subsidies…

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