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Comment by akamaka | Hacker News Reader

What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid.

You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries aren’t yet able to bridge the gap in times of bad weather, but what they are excellent at is spoiling the economics of any other type of cheap electricity generation that comes with high capital costs.

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> When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop

In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog is to subsidise long-term loans for private borrowers. They still need to make a profit someday. But you reduce the time value of money for them.)

The investment doesn’t make sense for a non-nuclear power. But if you’re already producing nuclear waste at scale for your military, it’s a little silly to pretend you’re safer without a civilian reactor in the middle of a desert while all manner of subs and ships patrol your coast.

You are right which means that the cheap excess solar energy during summer and during the day will drive a boom in those industries which can leverage such intermittent availability of very cheap energy.

The problem you describe seems to be one targeted by the TerraPower project in Wyoming. It plans to operate at 100% capacity at all times (345 MWe), but makes itself more akin to other renewables by incorporating energy storage into its design. It is supposed to be able to increase capacity to 150% (500 MWe), allowing it to respond to energy scarcity. But it can also respond to energy abundance by storing excess production in molten salt storage tanks.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center.

EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved.

Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real.

With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.

> how to separate utilities from money

Forced labour? Central planning? Requisition? How exactly would that work? Somebody still needs to build and operate those power plants.

Also commercial and industrial users consume >60% of all electricity in the US, should they also be subsidized? Or subsidize residential users?

If I had answers, I wouldn't be saying that it's a good time to think about that.

But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.

It certainly brought plenty to some people, didn't it? Other people still get nothing.

Fewer and fewer get nothing. Capitalism raised billions out of poverty and continues to do so, in every place it is allowed to work.

    Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
    -- John Maynard Keynes.

I think he's onto something as I see the lengths Boing, Intel, FAANG, et. al going to benefit us all everyday...

Well they did overall, throughout their entire existence, didn't they?

There are so few corporations which build things to better the world and make money in the process.

99% of the corporations build things to earn money. Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.

In many cases, the desire for money, not the need, is the driving force behind the technology. See n startups which are discussed here and categorized as "this is better as X. they're just trying to earn money with no real benefit to anyone".

Did Exxon hide their global warming research to benefit humanity? Of course not. Did Tetra Ethyl Lead added to gasoline instead of Ethanol, just because it was better? No because it was patentable and ethanol was not. Did WV created "better" diesel engines to benefit the humanity? No the engines were only "better" for their bottom line and problematic for every one. Did DuPont hid the effects of forever chemicals because it was beneficial/harmless to the nature? On the contrary.

Companies do whatever they can without breaking laws (or bending them with money) to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.

I like this take about current (Generative) AI hype:

    The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
    -- jeffowski (at Twitter/X)

> Their wares sometimes do no harm, but it's the exception.

I disagree with that to a very extreme degree (also it's a very silly thing to say unless you don't see any value in computers, smartphones, planes, automobiles, washing machines, fridges and other appliances).

The things you listed are generally the exceptions. Also the question is whether society/people benefited from VW, Exxon, DuPont etc. to such an extent that it outweighed all of those things?

Of course it's relative, if we value access to cheap and effective transportation, synthetic clothing, various plastic products etc. more than we care about all the negative externalities that's what we get... It's all down to incentives, corporations are inherently neither good nor evil.

> to earn more money. The products we get are side effects of it.

I agree that's true on the whole. But that's why humans do anything at all (replace money with other tangible or intangible benefits). Absolute altruism doesn't scale and isn't in any way sustainable.

They did when they were led by people passionate about the technology. As soon as MBAs got ahold of them, it was all about enriching shareholders in the short-term.

Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US.

Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality?

Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.

they could use renewables?

Right, and? Will that also be socialized? Or will they have to build their own grid?

Who pays for it? If everybody gets all of the above for free, then why would they ever work and contribute to covering the cost of these free for everyone services?

Once a large number of people stop working, who actually works to grow the food? Who builds the houses?

Communism does not work.

Who said anything about "free"?

Everyone pays for it.

It's interesting that you bring up a large number of people no longer growing food as if that's not the current reality. What do all those people do now that they don't have to work for food?

Someone works grueling hours in the sun to grow it and then the rest of us work and pay those people that grew it money. Is this really a question?

If the people doing the growing are getting all of their needs met why would they grind to produce food to sell for money when they get money for free?

Why would the vast majority of people in the bottom 50% of the economic ladder work at all if they were getting all of their needs met at no cost to them?

Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too!

I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things.

The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an urban population. However, not everyone lives in an urban setting and delivering clean water to remote populations can get astronomically expensive.

As rational citizens we must acknowledge this unfortunate reality and figure out how to deal with it fairly and equitably. Profit seeking enterprise has been astoundingly effective at driving down these marginal costs for a whole host of goods for centuries. Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!

> Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!

You mean governments signaled the creation of a market by printing and lending free money to build those systems ?

That same government is now over 30 trillion dollars in debt.

That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.

The only time it won't scale to meet output is if the price stays high, but if the nuclear energy is already on the grid and has elastic pricing, the rest will take care of itself.

But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.

Did you read the post you’re responding to?

> That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output.

If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.

> people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.

But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?

If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.

I'll take "What is market failure?" for 400, Alex.

> But the price of energy can be negative

Is this a sign of over-investment?

Is it case that the metric we're using does not show the actual price? https://www.squeaky.energy/blog/the-unintended-consequences-... shows a way to get "free" electricity on a regular basis, while it still costs consumers a very non-zero amount. In the case of solar, revenue could be achieved through out-of-market payments (CfD, power purchase agreements, renewable energy certificates).

Or is it the sign that the nightmare battery dominated grid is starting to happen? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl... Battery operators can choose between strategies designed to maximize revenue, profit, competitive advantage, or competitor losses, over any given timescale and with almost perfect deniability.

(or is it something else?)

Easily solved via sane energy policy. Of course politics will likely make this impossible in the US.

In a rational environment you run your nuclear at 100% 24x7. The cost of the fuel is not material running at 10% vs. 100%. Letting parasitic intermittent power sources screw this up is simply financial engineering by largely bad actors. At least currently.

Then you use intermittent power sources to provide your peak loads during the day, and any excess you ideally start putting into storage - whatever that may be. If you have effectively free marginal power during certain peak times, I'm positive industry will find a way to turn that into money.

I still have hope sanity returns to the energy discussion, but it likely won't happen in the US during my lifetime. The cost of solar and wind is entirely politics - the storage cost is literally never considered when reading articles on the subject. The hidden costs are likely 10x or so what the marginal cost per kwh everyone loves to spew. Lots of folks getting massively rich off this disinformation so there is huge inertia behind ignoring it - even from very smart people that should absolutely know better after a few hours of reading on the subject. Just look at many of the posts here at HN.

The environmental costs of methane (natural gas) are simply not being considered. The methane leaks into the environment are underestimated by at least 10x if not much, much, more. Pivoting from nuclear and to natural gas has been an utter environmental disaster.

It's worth remembering that the anti-nuclear crowd was always backed by big oil, and even in the age where solar and wind are being pushed, big oil benefits as the unmet demand for base load power, in the absence of nuclear, means that they get the business as there is no alternative.

They pulled the green crowd along for the ride hook, line, and sinker.

There is nothing inherent or natural about that scenario, it is all due to the failure to properly design electricity markets.

See also: the 2001 California electricity crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...