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Comment by oezi | Hacker News Reader

I think you might be right in the short term or considering the past, but it doesn't explain why a lot of money is pouring into renewables nevertheless and that there just isn't any other path forward than building another magnitude more in renewables (as TFA says: Germany is aiming to triple(!) solar by 2030). This will change massively change the markets.

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It won't work. What needs to happen for that to work is extreme progress in accumulation technology. It's a pipe dream.

You cannot run any industry that requires power or energy on: oh, I wonder what the weather is like tomorrow. And if we want to replace coal and other really bad parts of reality, we have to come up with alternatives that work and actually exist.

Solar and wind now is not that. Doing more of this will lead to even greater non-linear effects on prices, which will bankrupt normal citizen. And industry won't want to be here. They need stability and _lots_ of energy.

Industry can definitely adapt to electricity prices. This is the power of free markets, they can optimize production and demand. Fluctuating prices cause by renewables will cause investments in storage and demand-side flexibility.

Only to an extent. But sure: let's hope for better storage technology. But this also immediately eats away at cycle efficiency.

There's a reason nuclear remains, despite cost and apparent risks. It's because it is still less bad than the alternatives.

In contrast nuclear, storage gets cheaper and better. Nuclear does not remain in Germany and is largely irrelevant almost everywhere else. My prediction is that it will increasingly become completely irrelevant, because it does not really help: We need storage, demand shaping, and peaker plants. Nuclear does not have any useful role in this world because it need to run all the time to be able to be profitable, so it can not be used to cover the missing gaps where there is no wind. So it does not make economic sense to today, and this will get even worse.

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