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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change

You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns.

If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.

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Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling (not increasing.) I mean, sure, there's a point of diminishing returns, but even at last year's prices I'm getting a 17.5% return on investment. Every year that goes by the investment gets cheaper, and the price of electricity goes up, so the savings just get better and better.

And this for a capital spend on equipment with no moving parts, no lubricants, no maintenance schedule (apart from a window-washer a couple times a year.)

It's a no brainer if you live anywhere the sun shines well - and LOTS of people have figured this out, so the amounts being installed are moving the needle.

plus with every advancement in cost and efficiency the amount of sun needed reduces. If you're a bit more north you might just need a couple extra panels compared to really sunny places. Even if it's just to offset instead of completely replace other fuels

The viability of solar panels in the north depends on eye watering grid prices, which isn't the case everywhere or all of the year. Whenever it occurs it is generally during winter time when a roof worth of panels provides a mere trickle of energy.

I considered some small-medium batteries and panels but the calculation came out massively in favor of putting the same bundle of cash into a financial investment portfolio instead.

I'm 100% with you here (see my comment above about fusion economics.)

But solar doesn't have to be local. Upgrading the grid to move large volumes of electricity from mid to high latitudes changes your equation somewhat.

> Solar and batteries are exploding in production, and prices are falling

Sure. Now look at the baseline. We’d need to 10x the growth rate for the numbers to rival the expected growth in power demand. The folks at the tech majors aren’t idiots. If they could buy this cheapest power at scale, they would. Everybody would. One can’t. The panels are easy, but the batteries are back ordered and getting the land and permitting takes years.

I’m in Wyoming. I have seen people spend more time and paperwork getting a wind farm and HVDC line up than an experimental (totally non-economic) nuclear reactor. That doesn’t apply if you’re putting up one windmill to power your off-grid house. But the economics present at that scale diminish when you’re building a fleet of data centre.

In the US, power growth rate is about 1% per annum or about 40GW. AI&crypto is doubling that number to about 2% per annum.

The US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it.

China is installing it at a rate of about 10GW per month, so capacity is certainly not the constraint.

> US is installing solar at a rate of about 40GW per year so we need to 2X it, not 10X it

2x means no carbon reduction. 3x means we can close coal by 2040 and decarbonise by 2082 [1]. And “panels are easy.” (We’re not 2 or even 3x’ing deployment inside a decade [2].)

Now look at batteries. Assume we ban EVs and send 100% of production to utilities. 10x.

Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas. It’s based on the same faulty logic as the failed nuclear-only strategies of yesteryear. It’s what we’re doing right now, which is why we’re installing about 10 GWh a year of natural gas over the 40% it already commands and why trillions are being invested in new natural gas infrastructure [3].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Un...

[2] https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/

[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

> Solar + wind with batteries only means we burn natural gas.

For a while. And much less gas than without the renewables.

A lot of that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway.

> much less gas than without the renewables

Yes? The point is that we are currently committing ourselves to a fossil fuel energy system through at least the 2080s by not building all the non-emmitting power we can. Those investments not only put down emitting capital equipment, they capitalize a bloc of producers who will do what they must to protect their investment.

> that load increase you are observing is about the change from fossil-fuel cars into electric ones. That one will stop eventually, and you don't want to delay it anyway

No, it's AI. EVs are rolling out much more slowly.

What do you mean by 10x a growth rate? If it's at a CAGR of 15%, you think it needs to be 150%?

If so, I don't think you have the right numbers. We are on track to completely replace all current energy (not electricity, but final usable energy) uses with renewable electricity within 15 years at current growth rates.

Even the most rabid estimates of energy use growth rate are not more than a doubling of total energy services in that time period. And with the growth rate of renewables, we'd be able to adapt to that.

It is true that there is less paperwork for a new natural gas turbine than for most renewable energy, but you also have to get that pipeline of gas built too (which, again, has less paperwork than electric transmission, but you actually still have to do it). Other non-renewable energy isn't going to deploy any faster than renewable energy.

> If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t.

If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned.

Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.

> If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864

This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year.

So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.

> Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels.

That's the point: 2024's solar is better than 1980's nuclear, but in the meantime we've pumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere we didn't have to.

It's difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then? That would make no sense. This isn't some sort of arena where we have to be fair to inanimate objects.

> difficult to see the relevance of your point. Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then

The same statement will be true in twenty years. We’re not building gas generators because they’re pretty.

We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential, even assuming the rosiest production growth forecasts for the next ten years. That gap is being filled with natural gas, based on infrastructure with 20 to 40-year financing timelines. Not building a nuclear plant today means more gas generators burning through the 2060s. (I’m assuming we build and deploy solar and wind as quickly as possible, too.)

> We have power demand growth well ahead of our solar and wind deployment potential

Justify that statement, please. What is preventing us from installing that much wind and solar?

If anything, nuclear's deployment potential is much more limited.

> Are you saying we should build nuclear now because we didn't then?

No, that would be a large comprehension error. I'm making the point because people seem to use what solar and wind can finally do now to justify us not having built nuclear 40 years ago.

I haven't seen anyone do that.

Except if we had wanted to be green energy in the 1980s, we would have given Carter a second term which means we would have had investment in Solar panels too. We would have likely seen a similar level of massive decrease in cost (not as big though, no chinese manufacturing) to make it pretty competitive.

But America didn't want to do the hard work of spending a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure and investment to our country. We wanted the cocaine fueled orgy of capitalism that Reagan promised us. So we ripped the solar panels off of the whitehouse and shared a bed with Saudi Arabia. Now gas is cheap as chips so we can just burn as much as we want!

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