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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but I think the GP's point is that this doesn't just happen overnight. Let's say the same people who planned out keeping this nuclear plant open another 5 years today said "ok, let's plan out a same-price solar build and get it started".

How long would you expect the planning process to go, buying up the land, permitting, the construction process, connecting it to the grid, testing, and then finally energizing it? A couple years? More? (Also remember that this is California, where people will put up stupid roadblocks even for construction out in the desert, away from anyone's home.)

Now, they absolutely should be doing that in parallel! It's dumb that they aren't. But this nuclear plant is running today, and will continue to provide much-needed electricity, and that'd still be needed if we got this (unfortunately only hypothetical) solar project going right now.

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> Sure, but I think the GP's point is that this doesn't just happen overnight.

The article says Diablo Canyon generates 2,250 megawatts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_California says "The Solar Energy Industries Association predicts that California will increase its solar capacity by over 27,000 MW over the next five years".

According to the chart titled "California Solar PV Capacity by Year", they added two Diablo Canyons worth (4,779 MW) of PV capacity last year alone.

More importantly, Nuclear generates the base load capacity that renewables struggle with - the 27,000 MW is great, but its use it or lose it, as we dont have anywhere near the capacity in place to store the excess - nor will I think we will build it in anything resembling a timely manner.

Keep in mind you need to multiply those power numbers by capacity factor. Solar in California is at ~29% capacity factor (much higher than I expected honestly), while nuclear is generally around 92%.

That is, Diablo Canyon actually puts out 2,070MW of power from it's nameplate 2,250MW. While 4,779MW of PV in California will generate 1,385MW of power.

So, they really only added half of a Diablo Canyons worth of capacity last year. (Still an impressive amount of power, but not as much as it seems).

It seems that people do not understand that capacity factor is the #1 criteria when building an electricity grid.

Electricity grids do not have the luxury of being able to shut down, they must meet the demand every day of the year, every minute of the year

Technologies with an higher capacity factor are inherently more valuable than the ones who don't and technologies with an unpredictable capacity factor are worth even less than those two.

There are lots of gas generators with super low capacity factors, but the capacity factor is not the key part of the generator, it's dispatachability, the ability to generate when asked to by the grid.

Neither nuclear nor coal are very dispatchable, as they can not respond to changes in demand in cost effective ways. Gas turbines can easily, as can batteries. While the sun is shining, solar can be dispatchable, because it's easy to shut off on demand or turn on demand. But for 60%-75% of the day, solar is not dispatchable.

In the modern grid, dispatchability is a far more useful attribute than capacity factor. Capacity factor is just an incidental.

In today's world ran by fossil fuels, there's not a need to turn off the non fossil fuel production, there's always more parts of the economy willing to get cheap electricity.

What matters then is the reliability and this is why the capacity factor and especially its variation are critical. See what happened in the EU when the russian gas turned off.

Batteries are a low scale solution at best at the moment anyways and aren't working at the scale of a grid.

If that's the reasoning, it's just a variant of the sunk cost fallacy.

The question is what is the most effective use of our limited resources right now. Diablo Canyon will be shut off at some point, causing a momentary blip in emissions rising. Is $6B on a short extension a good use of our resources? It's certainly difficult to see much benefit.

Instead, the benefit is mostly to assert that we still are open to using nuclear. Which, fine, is a good goal, but instead what if we just spent $3B each on an SMR, with the expectation they would probably fail? I think that would have a bigger positive impact towards more nuclear in the future.

Check the markets. Everyone’s losing money on solar. If there’s a sunk cost at play, it’s probably there.

You must be looking at very different market data versus the rest of the economy and players.

Solar projects take about 6 months. Solar projects are one of the only types of major infrastructure project that regularly come in ahead of schedule and under budget. (I couldn't quickly find the cite for this, but if I find it again I'll edit it in).

If you show me a 1GW solar plant that took 6 months to build, I’ll eat my hard hat.

California added ~5GW in solar last year.

Doesn't have to be all in one project.

And how many years ago did those start planning?

You're just moving goalposts. Solar is by far the cheapest and fastest to put up and plan for.

Im moving them back. The original statement was that a solar plants go in in 6 months, which is a total disconnect from reality.

No they asked for 1GW of power in 6 months. You responded with the amount of capacity added in 1 year implying that amortized over a 6 month period. They asked how long it took from the start and you accused of moving the goal posts but it just looks like you’re talking about different things - throughout vs latency.

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