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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

> On a level playing field without subsidies

On a level playing field without subsidies, we'd be in underdevelopped shitholes. The idea that a modern economy can grow without some agency being brought in somehow is utopia.

> where we can build solar and wind power generators at scale

How do you build those, without the decades of subsidies to ramp up production and decrease costs?

> they would pummel all the other energy sources on costs alone

They would collapse the existing grid. There's a reason why Germany is investing €450bn in its grid to support continued growth [1]. Batteries could make up for it, but scaling batteries won't happen without subsidies.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-rejigs-sprea...

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I see where you are coming from and I could have been clearer. So let me put things straight.

I'm not arguing against subsidies, I'm arguing against ignoring the subsidies we provided and provide for older forms of energy generation while lamenting that we subsidize new forms.

On a level playing field where both are equally subsidized, solar and wind would still outcompete coal. Their point seems to be applicable to the degree to which harmful power generation is subsidized relative to regular power generation, not just the subsidies themselves.

I wouldn't bet on it.

If your accounting model is "build some production, plug it to the grid and let someone else worry about the details", sure, you're right. But if you factor in grid development costs, the picture is different.

For instance, you lften hear about Germany importing lots of energy, and usually there's always someone to say "But they export a lot, too". Well, these imports & exports require lines to happen, and these lines aren't cheap. The EU mandates that countries should develop interconnexion to facilitate the market, but this ruling mostly helps intermittent energy sources.

Another example in France, where the south-western region has a lot of solar, and not many industrial consumers. To make things worse, that region is close to an interconnexion with Spain, which has a lot of solar production. In order to move all that power to places where it can be used, new lines have to be built.

These costs are not factored in if you only price new production, but they're also significant.

This is also not factored into France utilizing ~10 GW of neighboring flexible fossil fueled flexibility to not have to turn down their nuclear reactors as much during the night.

The French grid would be even more uneconomical without the interconnections.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici...

> to not have to turn down their nuclear reactors

They are reducing production almost daily these days, but usually around 12-14h, due to solar production.

I wonder if that wouldn't be served better by storing the excess solar production into a flow battery, or similar storage dimensioned to serve a city.

Which means the economic prospects for new nuclear power is laughably bad.

Shipping got containerized without a significant amount[1] of tax breaks or handouts for that purpose. Rail standards were developed without significant preferential treatment as were the early electrical standards. Without subsidies of specific tech we'd likely see more balkanization and partial standardization of the grid. Perhaps the grid would have remained less reliable longer. In all likelihood things would "mostly" be the same on a medium-long timeline.

Remember, prior to the 1960s and 1970s expansions of the federal bureaucracy the government didn't really get as proactively involved in this sort of thing as they are now. Though there were several cases in which they lit a pile of money on fire and kept feeding it until they got the results they wanted (I can't think of an example of this that wasn't directed at defense tech though).

I think it would likely be a lateral move, or close enough to lateral that we can't really say with a high degree of certainty whether it would have turned out better or worse. I think it's very possible that without tax breaks we'd have gotten more solar earlier but with a slower adoption curve after that if none of this stuff was subsidized.

[1] I know of none but I don't want some nit picker to find some case where someone got a $2k research grant in 1961 and act like that invalidates the point here.

Federally funded US hydroelectric dam projects were a big thing in the 20s and 30s. But your point stands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority#His...

"but scaling batteries won't happen without subsidies"

Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.

> Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.

That demand is created by the variations in prices created by renewables, which are themselves subsidized. In a world with coal, gas, nuclear or hydro, there simply is not enough demand to develop batteries.

So, in a world with no subsidies, how do you pay for batteries, not good ones but bad ones for decades until the industry ramps up? It simply doesn't happen.

It's not an indictment either. Subsidies are simply the way heavy industrial investments work, and in the electricity sector investments are so massive that without subsidy, barely anything happens.

"So, in a world with no subsidies, how do you pay for batteries, not good ones but bad ones for decades until the industry ramps up? "

A world completely without subsidies would indeed work different, but still would have demand for batteries.

There's lots of demand when the payback is very quick and easy. Batteries being built right now make tons of money on grid stabilization services. But once those easy gains have been taken, making the less certain investment scaling up the batteries to handle that cold snap that happens a few days a year etc will not happen in the free market.

In a free market, where everyone is free to ignore consequences, coal would be the obvious solution - but if the climate change costs are priced in - then batteries do become attractive. Lightweight ultrapower batteries are high tech. A simple batterie for the grid, that can be big, is not and quite simple to build.

We started to price in the CO2 externalities - and demand is skyrocketing.

Subsidies are more of a geopolitical/welfare thing in this context.

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