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If your goal is to de-carbonize the economy as quickly as possible, then anything better than natural gas or coal should be good enough. Then, when the last gas plant and the last coal plant have been closed, we can talk about closing down nuclear plants if and when solar PV and wind ramp up to the appropriate levels.
That is what Australia is doing, as it adds more wind and EV production, coal plants are being closed 1 by 1 in an orderly fashion.
Instead in Germany, they did it in reverse and found themselves in a position of weakness when Russia invaded Ukraine.
but not (just to be clear) adding nuclear.
There's a solid Australian national science report that's extremely clear that within Australia nuclear makes zero economic sense (for many dull pragmatic reasons).
Largely due to a total lack of at home nuclear experience and talent, a very long run up to any nuclear return, and a booming renewables industry that's growing so fast the race will be over by the time nuclear can deliver anything.
Also, to be clear, there is one side of the political aisle that is championing nuclear .. less as a solution, more as a distraction from their chronic AGW denial and lack of any other strategy.
Their "plan" in a nutshell is "just continue in as we are" until {insert <magic> happens} and "eventually nuclear".
This is less a roadmap and more fairy dust and wishful thinking.
I am not advocating for Australia to build nuclear plants. I am simply saying that they are trying to organise the transition properly by not removing coal plants too early.
I merely sought to clarify what the actual situation in Australia was for the benefit of third party readers who may have taken an unintended implication from that.
Which is probably why renewables are highly regarded in specifically Australia and US, but not nearly as much elsewhere; stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
It can be in places like in the middle of Australia, obviously.
I'm really curious: who is proposing to do that? Ok, there are some solar projects that are installed in fields where you could construe that they could be otherwise used for food production, but guess what? They can still be used for food production - as pastures (https://ruralsolarstories.org/farm-friendly/solar-pastures).
A great deal of solar in Australia is urban rooftop, there's been a subsidized rollout, and solar farms here can co-exist with actual farms, eg:
Solar farm trial shows improved fleece on merino sheep grazed under panels
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-05-30/solar-farm-graz...
Let's put it this way: there's that much variance in population density on this planet.
Around myself, personally owned roof is a luxury. A parking lot is a 5-story building if not 5-stories structure directly below a building. On the other hand, to some others, solar panels as sheds in a ranch is just a fancy shed that they're going to need anyway.
Rooftop solar for one household on a midrange under-$1m 50-story mega-condo with 20 rooms per floor reduces power draw of the building by 1/1000th. Outside the mega-city is mountain ranges and water sources. The rest 999/1000th of power has to come from there if it can't be sourced in-city, which means stripping mountains to bare soil and covering lakes in mega floats and dealing with environmental releases all the time, or alternatively just finding a valley in the mountains and building massive metal cans to boil rocks could work too.
Might sound like a William Gibson parody, some places are just like that. Some parts of his works are effectively just portrayals.
Bit more complex than that: the UK is north of the Canadian-US border and has parts at the same latitude as southern Alaska, has fantastic wind resources, and somehow is managing to do not too badly with PV either.
> stripping vegetations off mountainsides and farmlands to install mega-solars is just man-made disaster, not a positive decarbonization effort.
Human imagination doesn't handle the huge numbers involved very well, maths is necessary.
If we did what you're describing (which we don't need to because PV doesn't have to be in a contiguous sheet and rooftop PV can supply a non-trivial percentage of demand, and also a poor choice geographically, and you wouldn't want to because geographical diversity is good), then the EU could get 133% of its needs from Slovenia, which is one of the smaller countries in the union (only three are smaller), and that's already accounting pessimistically for capacity factor: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area+Slovenia+*+1kW%2Fm...
(Likewise with the US, while Massachusetts would be a really poor choice of location to tile with PV, if you did it would supply 117% of US demand all by itself: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=area++Massachusetts+*+1...).
If you put a 3m wide strip of PV on or by the side of the EU road network (not rail, not airports, not car parks), that would also meet 96% of current demand by itself. And for the US, that same number with the same assumptions about capacity factor and width would be 87%.
Where PV doesn't work is dense city-states like the Vatican, because rooftop PV is only a "non-trivial percentage of demand" not "all of demand".
What most people fail (or don't want) to see is how long-term decisions about nuclear power are: the three remaining reactors that were finally shut down beginning of 2023 were operated for 10+ years knowing that they will be shut down, so maintenance was deferred, personnel planning was done accordingly etc. If Germany would decide that it wants nuclear power back, it would probably take at least a decade until it has an operational nuclear reactor again.
I don't care about who closed the last nuclear plant. I care that the Greens who are for the de-carbonization of the economy advocated for the removal of nuclear energy and because they needed more energy anyway, they simply decided with the government in power to buy it from Russian oligarchs instead.
They did not have to do this. They could have stopped building new nuclear plants, keep maintaining the ones they had until such a time as the PV and Wind production could replace all the power generated by the nuclear plants and then start decommissioning them.
But they followed ideology instead of logic and ended being at the mercy of Russia and had to scramble to fix that problem in the last few years when this could have been avoided.
In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France which ironically is generating it with, you guessed it, nuclear power. How about that?
Does that sound like a good rational plan to you?
Your posts smell bad of the common standard, troll induced, irrational green hate. Die G-grüÜÜüuNnnNeEnn!Discussing nuclear energy is interesting but not at this level...
> In the meantime, they now import a lot of electricity from France
How much of the total is it, 1% or something? That is not "a lot".
And has a right wing party that is trying to stop renewables rollout with some vague plan to do something with nuclear in a decade or two even though Australia is near perfectly situated in terms of land and resources to take full advantage of the renewables revolution.
The point of my comment was that whether you are trying to move from coal or nuclear or gas, you need to do it in an orderly fashion and not act on ideology like the Green party did.
Instead, they decided to close the nuclear plants without having a back up besides Russian gas. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
And that's not a fixed thing. Just look at Boeing safety today vs two decades ago.
Why not go all in on solar?
Solar is still being held back by battery tech, at least for scaling properly from my limited understanding. Then there is the problem of efficiency in places with less sunlight like a lot of northern cities. I think it will definitely be the best option for sunny places once there is cheap and dense batteries.
US is an exception to that, nowhere near the mean.
It's just about the most CO2-intensive fuck-the-planet way one should possibly travel ~60 miles...and doesn't even get into the pollution aspects of jet emissions at high altitudes.
For 2022, his jet usage equaled 2,100 tons of CO2.
To put that in perspective: if you drive 10,000 miles a year, and get about 25mpg, then you're using about 400 gallons of fuel, which equals 7.6T of CO2.
Just from his flights alone, Musk generates as much CO2 as nearly three hundred cars.
Everything we manufacture is unsustainable, but some are more than unsustainable than others. EV manufacturing is preferable to ICE. We need to accept that if we want to keep humans on this planets and out of poverty and hunger we need to use our environment in our favor with some degree of unsustainability, there’s no way out of it.
The large car problem is only a problem in cities, and should be addressed there. Countries like Netherlands address it really well: bikes and pedestrians get the space they deserve and cars are isolated in their own infrastructure.
The Chinese are trying to help, but Americans like tariffs more than they hate climate change. (At least that's the preference that their political system expresses.)
Also, you suggest that a trade war is bad, because you might no longer be able to buy stuff from other people. But then you suggest that the right way to prepare for a trade war is to pretend that you are already in one, ie do to yourself what the enemy would want to do to you in a trade war? (That being limiting your ability to buy from the rest of the world?)
China spent similar amounts and has a vibrant, world leading EV marketplace, supplied by their vibrant, world leading battery industry, and 50% EV penetration domestically and export plans that terrify the countries that chose not to follow this path.
Also if the governments want people to move away from ICE cars, then maybe they should stop putting tariffs on cars coming from China.
At some point, you need to make a decision and stick with it.
The way I see it as a consumer in the EU is that the EU is simultaneously saying we need to transition to a lower carbon economy as quickly as possible but then increases the price of goods that could be used in this transition. Make it make sense.
Is it my fault that the carmakers in the EU failed to invest EV tech?
So why am I being asked as a consumer to subsidize the legacy carmakers who were very happy to rake in billions of euros in the last 10 years while selling Diesel engines all the while knowing the the Chinese EVs were just around the corner?
The problem isn't with keeping Chinese cars out through tariffs. It's keeping them out, and at the same time not stimulating domestic green energy development enough. Why should the energy transition be bottlenecked by incumbent interests' profit margins?
Yes, that's why you should let people buy cheap Chinese goods.
> The problem isn't with keeping Chinese cars out through tariffs. It's keeping them out, and at the same time not stimulating domestic green energy development enough.
Didn't you just say capitalism was good, and now you argue the opposite?
No. I was criticizing the notion that not being "altruistic" is always bad. That is not the same as saying selfishness/capitalism is always good.
They sell some cars to Europe and North America, but the amount is negligible compared to what they sell domestically, and still much smaller than what they sell to ASEAN and the Middle East.
It's that simple. This isn't some grand plan to destroy foreign car manufacturers. If foreign car manufacturers get destroyed then that's by accident, as a result of them not staying competitive enough, not because that was the end goal from the start.
Of course it's in western governments' and manufacturers' rights to not accept this fate. But the most productive way to avoid that fate is by increasing their own competitiveness and by moving faster themselves, not closing themselves off while at the same time staying lazy about the energy transition. That's just rent collection.
They do that partially as you say to develop their own energy independence. But there would be more efficient ways to do that, and specifically they wouldn't need to give gifts to foreign consumers.
I'm not sure why you think that I think it's nefarious? Western consumers (and other foreigners, like in ASEAN and the Middle East etc) get stuff for cheaper, that's nice for them.
The Chinese government subsidises these companies with tax payer money that they take from other parts of the economy; it's a net loss for the Chinese economy overall; but perhaps a net plus, if you focus on just the politically connected companies.
If you want to find anything nefarious: it's that rest of the Chinese economy that's being shafted.
Most conversations on the Internet I've seen about this topic paint Chinese subsidies and Chinese car exports as a grand, deliberate, evil plan to cripple western companies and industries.
> But there would be more efficient ways to do that
I really doubt it. We have not seen any other examples of green energy rollout that is better. The improvement in Chinese air quality in just 15 years is staggering: Shanghai now often has better air quality than Berlin. Health outcomes do not easily show up in GDP figures.
If consumers have to pay less, that's a Good Thing.
That's not how economics works.
It's good for the economy. And it's good for other companies, that you haven't mentioned. There's more than two companies in the market.
False.
Some are built in under 5 years and many are currently being built on those timelines: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-20/china-app...
And how long did it take to get the permits? How long will that take in the US?
I highly doubt any new reactor (that's not already in the planning phase) will come online in the US within the next 10 years.
That's a reasonable prediction. The US has essentially regulated new nuclear power plants out of existence over the past generation. That doesn't mean that there's anything about the technology that means it takes a decade to build, though. It's just a policy failure.
Near term because nuclear can take a long time to build out.
Cheapness does not equal low carbon.
I've been through Nevada and into Utah, you've got loads of desert, enough to make PV stable.
Wind is much more stable in certain places than others, and certain altitudes than others.
What really makes things unstable is when you don't keep your grid in good shape and it sets fire to a forest. Or acting like Texas and thinking grid connections with other states is somehow bad.
(And I'm saying this as someone who actually likes nuclear, thinks the public perception of the danger is over-stated, and who thinks everyone should have build a lot more reactors decades ago).
I'm expecting most batteries (worldwide) to be used for cars, with bi-directional power so they can function that way (for grid storage) when plugged in. That doesn't say much about what any specific country will do, and as Texas demonstrates, US states can have their own independent energy policies.
No they don’t. They can provide a stable curve during the day at scale. But that doesn’t help with night time or the fact that demand does not peak when the sun does.
Even then, the US covers how many hours of longitude?
Because that's how much extra pre-dawn the west can get from the east, and how much post-sunset the east can get from the west — even just diversifying geographically from San Fran to Cisco Utah* gets you nearly two hours.
* why is a ghost town the most notable place in the area, according to Google Maps?
A result in the vicinity of Hotelling's Law with vote capture rather than profit maximisation.
It's a damnable doom spiral emergent from a system setup by founders largely opposed to party politics.
If team "east side" and team "west side" are butting up against each other with the hope of the 50%±1 of the population behind them all being on their side, but suddenly one or both of them has to face factions behind them splitting off — well, it's like how often the US Democrats are upset about the US Green Party "splitting the vote" (do US Republicans have the same reaction to the Libertarians? Libertarians barely get in the news here on the other side of the Atlantic).
I think that without proportional representation, that just pushes the half-way point further from the new party. Can anyone who has actually studied this confirm or refute? I'm in danger of LARPing XKCD here: https://xkcd.com/793/
Then there's sortition. I'm intrigued, but have no opinion on how good it would be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
This is especially clear if you compare it to more modern democracies who had fallen ill to fascism before and had to harden their rules after the devastations of WWII. I don't think the dysfunctionality of democracy both in UK and the US is a coincidence. Up to a few years ago the last mental hurdles have fallen and bad actors discovered that there are surprisingly little hard rules preventing them to play the game in bad faith — and so they did. The media landscapes in the UK and US (Murdoch!) did their part.
US commentors I discussed with always pointed to free speech, I just don't hope they mean it like Elon Musk: Free speech, as long as it is the right kind, and I am deciding which is.
It's baffling why america treats political parties like sports teams
Polarization is a centrist cope that has no actual content. Some people actually have values and there is a sincere disagreement about values for some people. Only centrists who have no values and love the status quo think people having values is a problem.
This is, after all, Hacker News. The demographic here isn't that different from Reddit's, as much as many would try to deny.
It's amusing to me that I have no idea if you mean to:
1. Agree, yes, center-left to liberal bubble.
2. Disagree, it's not a center-left to liberal bubble.
3. Sardonically point to something else by comparing to Reddit.
4. Other?
This one.
Eliminating EPA regulations isn't going to make nuclear more competitive, either.
Public transport is what should be promoted, not electric cars.
Full disclosure. I invested in TSLA in 2012 and made a substantial amount of money. I think Elon is a solid dude
My colleagues wonder how I can spend so much time commuting and don't stay in a hotel like they do. That's because they think like car people. Because 3 hours in car is torture. Being away from your family 5 days a week is preferable to them. Sure, traveling so much is not ideal, but my point is that trains can be far, far superior to cars. Cars only make sense last mile and in rural areas, in my opinion.
- Electric Trains - Electric Trams - Electric buses - Electric cars - Electric Airplanes
... etc ...I can't understand the basis for your views. While he has also spoken about increasing oil production, that's about energy security - not about increasing energy consumption or GHG.
Like most SV types, he doesn't understand that just because there's no CO2 coming out the stack doesn't mean there's no CO2 footprint. The plant construction, operations, and fuel supply all have enormous CO2 footprints.
Nuclear is also the most expensive per kw/hr of any method of generation. As it matured as a generation method, it has only become more expensive.
...which is why nuclear and coal plants have been shutting down across the US and elsewhere; they just don't make good fiscal sense for power companies. Wind and solar have plunged in cost and are almost an order of magnitude cheaper, and energy storage tech is rapidly maturing. And no, this isn't hurting us; we're building out solar and wind at a rate 7 times faster than the nuclear capacity being shut down.
They also don't have any of the security or safety concerns. They can also be distributed far more easily; nuclear power plants are very difficult to site because you have to find an intersection between "the grid can take tens of gigawatts of power being injected here", "there is a plant nearby that can supply the plant with power during standby or for cold start" and "it is geologically stable enough". Contrary to popular rants, the biggest problem isn't NIMBYism.
Further, nuclear can't change load any faster than on a timescale of "many hours" so it's only usable for base load.
> While he has also spoken about increasing oil production, that's about energy security -
You know how you get "energy security"? Diversifying energy sources. IE: Wind, solar, energy storage, and more HVDC transmission lines.
First off, this is an extremely uncharitable take. Where did he say that there is no CO2 footprint? Second, the CO2 footprint is still much less than for fossil fuels.
>Nuclear is also the most expensive per kw/hr of any method of generation.
This is not even close to true. Not in other countries, anyway. I gave some citations elsewhere in the thread.
>You know how you get "energy security"? Diversifying energy sources.
The idea behind these statements was that Europe should be less reliant on Russian oil and gas. Local production is the most straightforward route. Nothing about that is incompatible with diversification. But you cannot snap your fingers and replace a machine that burns oil with one that runs on electricity.
Maybe it has something to do with being the co-head of the announced Department of Government Efficiency with Vivek Ramaswamy, who he definitely supports, and who yelled at the Republican primary:
“The climate change agenda is a hoax”.
Musk sure criticizes Dems for every single little thing but I haven’t heard any criticism about that…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ye9lg8hWfQg&pp=ygUjVml2ZWsgcmFtY...
They’re simply using a wink and a nod with the word “agenda” to fool rubes into protecting Oil and Gas interests, which include dictatorial petroleum-states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.
No, I don't. Because I don't think it has a clear referent at all.
Aside from which, what I do or don't know is completely irrelevant to what Elon Musk means when he uses the term.
That said, I'm pretty sure that the guy who owns Tesla is in favour of EVs taking over.
>They’re simply using a wink and a nod with the word “agenda”
This is exactly why political "discussion" doesn't work well on HN.
Actions speak louder than words.
ITT I see many people who seem to believe they can predict the future with perfect confidence, and that supporting evidence is not required for these predictions.
Last time he pulled out of the Paris accords and incentivized increased oil production, while making none of the massive investments in renewables and EVs that the Biden Administration would later make.