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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

No, I'm assuming it can be built because the unit economics work better.

Back in 2013 I remember people used to constantly trash solar and wind because it was 1-2% of the grid anywhere, max, while nuclear power was often 10-30% (or 70% in France). We're at that same point with storage.

Since then we've had a decline in nuclear power due to the high cost and enormous growth in renewables due to it being 5x cheaper.

Unit economics prevailed with solar and wind and theyll prevail with storage. solar + wind + 8 hours storage is not just the cheapest way to get to a 98% carbon free grid it's also the fastest.

Gas is still the cheapest "battery" by far though, which is why so many countries use it as baseload and peaking. Pumped storage, batteries and syngas combined only make renewables a cheaper baseload/peaker than nuclear power.

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This whole article illustrates a huge benefit of solar over nuclear: if you deploy 90% of the required solar panels, you get 90% of the energy, while if you build 90% of a nuclear plant, you get nothing. The power of incremental deployment.

> you deploy 90% of the required solar panels, you get 90% of the energy

No. You get 0% to 90% of energy.

E.g., right now in Germany solar is at 22% of its capacity. Wind is at 11%

On average you get 30% of capacity.

But, a solar plant with a nameplate capacity of 1GW is roughly 15-17x cheaper than a 1GW nuclear plant and starts chipping away at gas and coal usage almost straight away, not in 15-20 years.

> On average you get 30% of capacity.

Average means nothing when the output is zero (at night).

> a solar plant with a nameplate capacity of 1GW is roughly 15-17x cheaper than a 1GW nuclear plant

And produces zero electricity at night.

> Since then we've had a decline in nuclear power and enormous growth in renewables.

The only reason we've had decline in nuclear is politics. That's why now Germany is busy burning coal and importing electricity.

> Unit economics prevailed before and theyll prevail again.

Wishful thinking is no substitute for reality. Where are the calculations? That include both the need to ridiculously overbuild renewables and the need for the so-far-nonexistent grid scale storage?

Germany is burning less coal than it used to 10 years ago.

Somehow this fact is not only relatively unknown, most people seem to have been led to believe that the exact opposite is true.

Nuclear propaganda has always had a bit of a reality problem.

> Nuclear propaganda has always had a bit of a reality problem.

Propaganda cuts both ways. For example, you completely ignore the reality that the sun doesn't shine at night ad that the wind doesn't alway blow. So Germany shut down its nuclear plants an now is burning coal to compensate.

Someone literally advocates for rolling blackouts in a sibling thread because renewable generation is intermittent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35675328

This is a good comment describing the current situation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35660884

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