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Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip after a few years of zero Covid.

We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess. It’s made me a AI accelerationist. Of the two civilizational dooms, I’ll take my chances with the computers.

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I think your take is giving much too much credit for "governments wanting to do the right thing" if it weren't only for those pesky populists.

Take your China example. The issue wasn't just that the government wanted to control Covid and the people pushed back. The issue was that their zero-Covid policy was extremely stupid. I kept thinking "Umm, what do they think is going to happen when they eventually open back up - of course Covid is going to ravage through the populace." And that's exactly what happened. The policy did extremely little to actually save lives in the end compared to much less restrictive policies elsewhere.

So I'm actually less pessimistic about the case for the energy transition. I do think it's particularly unfortunate that our tribal politics has led to people lining up behind "drill baby drill" even if there is no economic basis to do so. But I do think since we know the transition is possible without draconian cutbacks in standard of living that governments can help craft effective incentives to make the change more quickly.

>Take your China example. The issue wasn't just that the government wanted to control Covid and the people pushed back. The issue was that their zero-Covid policy was extremely stupid. I kept thinking "Umm, what do they think is going to happen when they eventually open back up - of course Covid is going to ravage through the populace." And that's exactly what happened. The policy did extremely little to actually save lives in the end compared to much less restrictive policies elsewhere.

According to data published by John’s Hopkins, China’s overall number of Covid deaths per 100,000 population was 7.6, compared to 341 in the United States.

Source: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

You are right that degrowth is not a politically viable path to saving the climate.

Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.

What works is: Changing the source of the energy we consume. Solar is the cheapest source of energy now. Wind is good in some areas. Nuclear can be useful too.

The amazing thing is that solar is so cheap now, there is basically no way stopping it. We may still want to burn gas and oil in the off-hours, but it will be expensive and consumption will be much lower than today.

> Nuclear can be useful too.

I wouldn’t call it just useful. As far as I understand it’s the best realistic shot we’ve got.

Why not solar, wind and storage?

To decarbonise transport storage needs to massively increase. There are 30 million cars in the UK, that alone is 3TWh of storage, which isn't far off a day's total energy use. If we can make 3TWh then it's reasonable that we can make 2 or 3 times that much.

It won't be financially viable to operate a nuclear plant for the few days a year that the wind and solar and storage and imports can't cover the use, better to simply increase storage and production a bit more.

Last time I worked the numbers on nuclear vs storage, I came up with… for the same amount of money and for the same amount of generation capacity, battery storage could provide about 4 hours of electricity before needing to recharge while nuclear could provide about 24 months without needing to shut down for a few days for a fuel change.

Pumped hydro storage was better, if you have the water resources and elevation change nearby. Lots of places don’t.

Water magazines and elevation change is required for pumped storage. But why not build that together will already existing hydro plants?

The magazines will be full at times, but when they are not, it should be possible to just pump the water back up again and thereby store excess wind and solar power.

I live in Sweden, and yeah, flooding large amounts of new land will be impossible by now.

The indigenous (Sami) people will say no and file lawsuits. And rightly so, they just didn't had that option 100 years ago.

But there is an abundance of existing magazines that can be used this way. They are full around November but after that they start to drain.

Your comment makes a lot more sense if I swap magazines => reservoirs, is that the word you meant?

Sorry, yes. Swenglish.

I’m interested in details. Nuclear is very expensive and not going down, while batteries are. So with your analysis, it could be possible to estimate how low batteries have to go before meeting nuclear… It could be irrealistic but let’s see !

On the nuclear side I was looking at a GE BWRX-300 (SMR) because my province is currently looking at building a few of them.

Specs: 300MWe, nominally $1B first-of-a-kind build cost and $675M next-of-a-kind build cost. Runtime between fuel changes is 18-24 months.

On the battery side I was looking at the Tesla Megapack 2 XL, since our neighbouring province has a bit of capacity installed.

Specs: 979kW output per pack, 3.9MWh capacity. For 300MW output capacity we need 306 units => $425M. The total capacity from fully-charged to fully-discharged is 1193MWh. Total time from full-charge to full-discharge: 3.9h.

In the middle of winter we have 8h of daylight and 16h of night/twilight. To provide 300MW overnight on a calm day we need 4.02x the storage capacity (16h runtime/3.9h discharge). That gives us 1231 units for a total cost of $1.7B.

Yes, the nuclear plant will be more expensive to run (trained staff, security, disposal, etc). On the other hand, the $1.7B cost doesn't include any of the devices that would actually be charging the battery packs either.

We do often get cloudy days and calm days here as well. Saturday, for example, we actually had pretty good wind performance but negligible solar performance: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1762085119576125812.... A week ago we had both dark and calm: https://twitter.com/SkElectricity/status/1760635567136452664.... These plots are summed across the entire grid in our province, so the commonly stated "well it's never calm everywhere" isn't really valid.

That’s interesting. The quotes for the nuclear power plant are really low though. France, which has a lot of knowledge and trained workforce for nuclear, is slowly building a reactor of 1.2gwe for like 20B euros. If you use those numbers… it looks very different. And that’s at least not idealistic price since it’s they are completing the construction.

Yeah, I'm really curious to see how the SMR thing shakes out over time. It does make sense to me that the costs between large bespoke reactors and smaller modular reactors would not necessarily be a linear scaling by MWe. Another factor that affects the price significantly is whether or not the reactor is being built at an existing site that is already licensed or whether it's a scratch-build at a new site.

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/8... talks about the Shin Kori 3 and 4 reactors (brought online in 2016 and 2019) costing $6.4B USD for the pair (after a 32% cost overrun), if I'm reading correctly. Those ones are 1416MW and 1418MW, or $2258/kW which is right in line with GE's estimate of a next-of-a-kind SMR build (spec sheet says $2250/kW)

Plugging the numbers using France latest EPR: 20B for 1.2GW is 16M per MW Batteries mentioned : 1.7B for 300MW for 16hr is 5.3M per MW for 16hr

So compared to EPR, we could spend another 10M per MW for production…. I saw a relatively conservative price of 2000$/kw AC at https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2023/utility-scale_pv

That’s 2M per MW. We can spend 10, an over capacity of 5x ! And that is not accounting for the price of money, it takes very long time to build a nuclear power plant, and you will have your PV plant in the year, probably a couple for mega pack due to demand.

To me, nuclear is not the future.

I’m assuming you’re looking at the Flamanville Unit 3? Reading through the history of that build is pretty bad for sure. I’m maybe jaded enough now to expect construction projects to go over budget by maybe 20-30% but lol 580% over budget is not normal at all.

Solar generation is much, much lower in the winter than in the summer, so we need to massively overbuild solar to have reasonable generation in the winter. And there are many times when there’s very little generation for a week or more because of weather, so you need to massively overbuild storage, too. Combined, it’s not cheap to reliably replace base load power.

Edit: I should note that one proposal I’ve seen to mitigate some of this is to improve long distance transmission, since it’s never cloudy everywhere, and taken to an extreme, you could, for example, put lots of solar in the Sahara to power the UK, or even send power from the hemisphere in summer to the hemisphere in winter. But then, besides the huge capital costs for building out transmission infra, you run into energy independence issues/trust issues between governments. But maybe within large political blocs like the EU, Italy/Southern Spain could sell solar power to the more northern European countries, with less risk.

This is true, however at the end of the day - this would work out to a per kwh cost of overbuilt infrastructure. Is there a reliable study of what this kwh cost is?

In New England we pay upwards of 14 cents per kwh or higher. My understanding is that this would buy a substantial overbuilt, it's likely that energy prices upwards of 30 cents per kwh would be politically viable provided there were guardrails to keep heat/hot water cheap.

Right, you can just wrap it into the cost. I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this, but my impression is that permitting and labor are a really big portion of the cost in the US, rather than eg panels being the driving cost. There are also a lot of blockages in getting projects approved because there's not enough transmission capacity in many places, and many places require that the new producer fund the new transmission infrastructure, rather than that cost being shared, which is insane.

Transmission capacity does seem to be the main problem with expanding the grid in several countries - a problem that applies equally to new nuclear (which can't be where older coal/gas/oil plants are as they tend to need things like large amounts of water)

You can build wind to compensate some of this.

And of course a ton of short term storage.

And then you build a bunch of cheap, inefficient gas peaker plants for the two weeks a year where neither are enough.

At the moment it looks like that will be a lot cheaper than nuclear. But if nuclear gets cheaper, that’s also a great option!

Good points, all. But you'd still need to overbuild solar by quite a bit in order to make a reasonable amount in winter, in many areas.

In Northern Europe, you definitely need Wind power and probably some natural gas dispatchable capacity.

In most other places, you can overbuild the PV panels. Which isn't too bad, since you do not have to overbuild inverters or grid connections.

Or hydrogen. On windy days (or sunny in the southern US) you use the excess electricity to generate hydrogen, and then when there's a shortfall you convert it back to electricity.

> Why not solar, wind and storage?

Because it’s nowhere near effective enough.

———-

I suggest watching a few videos by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder to educate themselves on this topic

https://yt.artemislena.eu/search?q=sabine+nuclear+

Why would a particle physisist know anything about the economics of running power generation

What’s your point? Economy has to be stable/grow at the expanse of humankind going extinct?

I posted videos in reply to this comment:

> Why not solar, wind and storage?

So that people who ask such questions can do their own research and study things about nuclear power. Nobody said anything about economy.

So make it easier for individuals to convert cars, build and sell them, by removing barriers to the market. Move away from corporate monopoly thinking in infrastructure. Enable many individual solutions, and allow them to stand or fail on their own merits; Grass roots vs. Top down. Implement tax-breaks instead of subsidies.

For thre few days a year, we’re also fine burning a bit of natural gas.

I don't think it's that realistic; nuclear simply takes way too long to build. For instance, the most recent nuclear reactor under construction near where I live has been under construction for 40 years and it's still not complete. In the meantime, the amount of added solar, wind, and hydro has been several times the power that single reactor will have once it's finally done.

I’m all for trying, but solar is the one that’s taking off at the moment.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but if solar is cheaper, why isn't it the dominant energy source today?

Seems like a win win, people get cheaper energy all without force. Generally the market chooses the best product, which is why we replaced horses crapping all over our cities with cars. It wasn't legislation or some global consortium of governments that phased out the horse, it was a better product. What am I missing here?

Problems with storage and/or grid connection.

Here in the northeastern US, the permitting process for adding new power plants to the grid is long and cumbersome in a way that is usually the long pole in adding new generation to the grid when the new generation is as quick to put up as solar. We have more solar power in the process of getting approval than we currently have installed.

Because money is the wrong thing to use for decision making, we should be tallying resources and energy expenditure. Money is an imperfect proxy for something akin to human labour and related activity, and does not encode information about physical resources being used

Momentum, installed base, established interests, changing uses.

Foolishly reductionistic model: at the instant that solar becomes defacto cheaper, if everyone immediately changed, you'd need at least [total world power consumption / solar panel production rate] years to change over.

2022 world electricity consumption was about 25000 TWH. That envelope-backs to about 2800 GW if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere and there are no transmission losses.

In 2022, we installed about 228GW of solar panels. Assuming constant production (HAH!) that says it should take more than a decade to replace the existing demand. Which will of course stand still for us.

Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power; about how quickly folks are convinced to change; about the construction of projects which were planned before this price threshold was passed; about the impact of using grid power to do transportation work which was previously done by pumping dead dinosaurs...

The confounding factors abound. But that's an ignorant sideline answer to why. :)

> if the sun is always directly overhead everywhere [...] Apply whatever multiplication factors you like about what percentage of the year a given real solar cell will generate power

A simple but useful back-of-the-envelope estimate would be 25%. Half of the day, there's no sun, so you have 50%; the other half, it increases gradually until the middle of the day, then decreases gradually until the sun sets. Simplifying this to a linear increase and decrease, if you plot it into a graph you'd have a pair of isosceles right triangles, which cover half of the area, so you have another 50% over that first 50%, and the end result is 25%.

(IIRC, the real result for the single-axis trackers you'd find on grid-scale power plants is something like 30%, showing how good that simple back-of-the-envelope estimate is.)

Yes, it’s a total win!

It’s dominant already in newly added capacity. It just takes a while, mostly due to permission processes taking long.

And limited grid capacity, which is also held back by environmental review and nimbys - at least in the western world.

> Additionally, it is not effective unless you want to return to pre-industrial society.

Still needed to some extent even in your optimistic scenario. Because growth is increasing so is demand. New sources of energy are not displacing old ones. Just covering new demand.

Coal is being displaced already.

Sorry I forgot to include some data that motivated me to post it. If we are talking about coal, for example this graph [0]. There it seems that coal is actually growing.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-production-by-countr...

You have a point. China is going wild on call. In industrialised countries, coal is being pushed out though. (Your graph shows the US and Germany.)

So it's do-able, but we haven't quite reached the tipping point yet in China.

The thing is: I am confident that Solar will push out Coal, even in China.

China is building a lot of new factory capacity for PV modules. Factory capacity is proportional to the acceleration of PV power production: It's a second derivative. The more battery capacity gets added, the faster PV capacity will start growing. The more PV capacity grows, the more clean power will be produced, competing with coal.

http://www.earth-policy.org/mobile/releases/highlights47

Degrowth is really about scaling back on the over-the-top way we live. It's about finding a sweet spot where people live well but not at the expense of everything else. It’s cool and useful that solar is cheap, but degrowth means chill on the endless buying and using and discarding stuff, be sustainable and make sure everyone gets a fair shake, not just those who can afford it.

Consuming more thoughtfully is cool and all, but it's not going to save the climate.

I feel the same. The entire planet enacted a total reorganization of society in a matter of weeks! Oil is worthless if we aren't all consuming, governments can give generous payments to those who need it without nonsense about how we will pay for it, it was a frightening but honestly optimistic time, we had problems but they can be solved, its only a question of willpower.

Now we can see that vast quantities of people in the first world think not being able to go to Arbys is a human rights violation, and worse still the friendless losers who were pining to back into the office.

If sitting indoors is too much of a sacrifice for people, what happens when they need to make real changes to their lifestyles?

> I feel the same. The entire planet enacted a total reorganization of society in a matter of weeks!

I'm not sure what this refers to but it's not COVID response. At least where I live (the USA), outside of the major metro areas, nothing was enforced except school closures. The Stay At Home "mandates" (more like suggestions) and business "closures" were all pretty much unenforced and widely ignored. Even if our government, by some miracle, manages to enact effective climate rules and legislation, it will be ignored if not enforced. You can't just write a law or set a mandate and then say "Well, our job is done!"

> We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess.

We've already innovated our way out of this mess. We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there).

Covid is a good example. In most of the liberal democracies people accepted the restrictions their governments argued were necessary to combat Covid. I think these restrictions were significantly greater than what is needed from individuals to combat climate change.

"We have all the technology available now to decarbonise the economy (well, mostly; we're still a bit limited in a few areas; but we can get a lot of the way there)."

Then why can't we?

The answer is that it would take some Government mandates, and we are back to the original post, that if the Government mandates anything, it will hurt some sector, and then there is popular uprising. At least in US, 50% of country is ready to go to war anytime someone sneezes and merely forgets to say 'bless you'.

How do you fight climate change, even if technology is available, if 50% of the country literally believes in a real physical hell (not just a concept), and that the other side are demons here to steal the blood of their children. How does the committee organize rolling out a technology when half is praying and citing versus and that is the starting point for any technology roll out plan.

You can’t just shut down the fossil fuel industry before you have alternative green energy infrastructure in place, this is a multi decade project. Otherwise the price of oil shoots up and you get inflation which affects most people’s ability to get by. “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.

> “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills

I do agree that finding alternatives quickly is crucial. However, when all is said and done, our financial concerns and even our personal well-being don't matter as much in the grand scheme of things.

>However, when all is said and done, our financial concerns and even our personal well-being don't matter as much in the grand scheme of things.

That might be true, but most people care very much about their own "financial concerns" and "well-being".

> “Populist anger” might be justified if people have a hard time paying their bills.

If the costs of current living standard wasn't externalized to future generations (to the detriment of the environment), they couldn't afford those bills to begin with.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to reduce people's living standards once they got used to it. So yes, the end result is what you're saying - however, I think it's a very important nuance. It was always a card house; we just chose to ignore the issue and continued to build on top of it.

"externalized to future generations"

Exactly. Too few people understand economics, that current costs are being brought down by offsetting future costs.

The same with any pollution in any industry. If the industry is allowed to follow bad practices, and cause pollution but not deal with it, then they are not bearing the brunt of the full costs of generating that pollution. Someone has to clean it all up eventually, typically the government, then people complain about taxes.

You can complain about taxes, but you just voted for someone to cut regulations on industry which then causes the pollution which needs tax dollars to clean it up.

(I know CO2 is not a 'pollutant' technically, it is just another example of the 'cost' to the environment is not being allocated correctly to the producer. I feel need to be correct since even using the word 'pollutant' is a right wing argument point on why climate change advocates don't know what they are talking about.).

I guess the great thing about putting the problems off into the future is that I/we'll be dead by then (though I suppose it depends on how fast moving the whole thing is). What confuses me about that whole thing is that most people seem to want to have children and want a better future for them.

It's not even externalized to future generations, just to other continents whose inhabitants produce crap for the West

> this is a multi decade project

Yes as Exxon report suggested:

"Thus, even if solar or nuclear technologies were to be considered viable alternatives, they would not really displace fossil fuel energy for next 40 to 50 years, and CO2 growth would have to be estimated based on realistic market displacement of the fossil fuel technologies."

This was 42 years ago. Maybe it is time for “Non-Populist anger” now.

Solar panels didn’t really take off until 10-15 years ago because their efficiency was very low and didn’t make much economic sense. Battery technology is still a big hurdle.

Can elaborate which governments do you have in mind? The EU reduced CO2 Emissions in the last years https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...

There are ways to reduce carbon emissions drastically without incurring populist anger. It's not so much the population that would be angry from these measures as the corporate interests that supply carbon fuels and products that use them.

I've tended not to worry about the warming much partly on the basis that AI/acc and similar tech will fix it all.

Reasoning: Intelligent robots and AI will be able to build all sort of stuff and even without that solar + wind nuclear will probably overtake fossil fuel shortly. We can have the bots cover the Sahara with solar and run carbon capture. Also fusion may work although I'm not so sure about that one.

How would AI be beneficial in your opinion?

I'm pretty confident AI will be at least as helpful here as a blockchain will be.

Our governments are so dysfunctional and corrupt our only hope is that AI will actually be benevolent and can help guide us and solve problems. Because, as the comic, and thousands of other examples show, our governments aren't actually capable of leading and solving problems, even when the problems are blatant. Same when the solution is easy, but it will cause the wealthy to lose money, see US health care and taxation systems.

> hope is that AI will actually be benevolent and can help guide us

I think that a lack of biochemistry will probably quickly lead to the conclusion that it’s not worth it.

We should stop acting like AGI is just a matter of time and that it'll save all our problems, this is borderline a cult at this point.

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