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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

My biggest fear is that Republican political correctness will come to over-regulate and stop the deployment of clean energy. You can already see it at the national level. Texas will have to decide if they like money and the free market more than being politically correct.

You can already see this conflict in all the areas where the new factories have been built from Biden's IRA. These factories generally raise wages quite a bit, invigorate communities that feel like they have been forgotten, but that it's clean energy doing the good is kept on the down-low. To mix metaphors: don't poke the bear, lest the bear cuts off its nose to spite its face.

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Solar panels are a commodity and they are getting cheaper. That will continue regardless of which political party is in charge.

Moving the solar supply chain to be domestic is a massive undertaking. First Solar, one of the stronger US companies, will be at at 50/50 manufacturing in the US versus not:

"We inaugurated our new $1.1 billion Alabama facility, which when, fully scaled, adds 3.5 gigawatts of vertically integrated nameplate solar manufacturing capacity. The start of commercial operation at the Alabama facility, along with our under construction Louisiana facility, which remains on track to begin operations in the second half of 2025, keeps us on course to achieve our projection of over 14 gigawatts of annual U.S. nameplate capacity and over 25 gigawatts of global nameplate capacity by 2026." https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/10/29/fi...

You are correct that it will take investment to continue to build factories here instead of Malaysia or India, but the factories will be built regardless.

My specific fear is that connecting those cheap solar panels to the grid will be the hard part. I have no doubt that they will continue to plummet in price, and than new innovative installation methods will continue to cause installation prices to drop, etc. etc.

The technology for a 100% renewable energy system for all of humanity is about 90%-95% there, the biggest impediment is political and not technical now. (Hard-to-decarbonize areas like industry is close but not there yet, and we can do all the other areas while new solutions are found for cement, chemicals, etc.)

My personal view is that rooftop solar and home batteries are putting a price roof on what people accept their electricity bills to cost.

As the solar and storage costs continue to plummet even if you can’t sell electricity to the grid we will increasingly see more and more homes with near zero electricity usage for much of the year.

No matter how much you attempt to force fossil fuels down these people throats there’s nothing you can do if people simply don’t pull energy from the grid. Then the expensive facilities sit unused.

Offloading these costs on the voters will quickly become politically untenable.

There's plenty that they can do to block solar for people that don't completely disconnect from the grid. And in some places it's illegal to disconnect from the grid, they can force that too.

To block solar, some states are putting high fees on base connections, and low per kWh costs. If the grid-connection fees subsidize the per-kWh generation fees, it breaks the economics of lowering your consumption from the grid with your own generation.

TX resident here: valid concern, but there are big moneyholders in TX investing in wind and solar here, and that has a tendency to override political orthodoxy. Lots of rich people who want their solar and wind investments to pay off, and they have pull in TX GOP.

The commission that regulates this (the Texas railroad commission) is fully republican as is most of their legislature/govenrment. The republicans are in charge of all this

And at the moment additions to the grid are mostly an open free market. My fear is that they will change that to stop renewable energy. Many places that are extremely anti-renewable for partisan political reasons, such as Montana, have been caught on tape changing regulations to highly regulate and stymie solar. Texas has not been that way and I think there's probably a >50% chance that Texas Republicans on that commission will continue to choose the free market over blocking renewables. But there is a risk.

In reality, the market will do it for them as the datacenter and energy boom requires more energy than green can provide and the money will flow anew to nuclear and fission.

Nuclear and fission take at least a decade to build. You can build the same firm renewables in 2-3 years. Regime change will occur first.

Right. As much as I like nuclear, you could overbuild solar or wind by a factor of 3 in half the time and pay the whole project off before the nuclear project even gets finished.

I am not violently allergic to nuclear, and am mindful that there will be places it is needed, although it’s going to be incredibly expensive and time consuming to build where needed. Texas has enormous wind and solar potential, they can skip it.

Nuclear power is fundamentally incompatible with a for-profit energy sector. It makes zero sense as a profit seeking CEO to invest tens of billions of dollars and over a decade of development to something that might pay for itself over the next half century if ever. Especially when you can build wind farms that turn profits in under 16 months and solar even more quickly these days. Maybe nuclear makes sense for a country's long term energy security. But that literally has no bearing on what happens with US energy investments.

There's also the huge amount of economic risk in each construction project, which is too much financial risk for an entity the size of a utility to bear.

I would argue that it makes little more sense for a nation state to take on that economic risk, either. Risk can be priced, and the bill for many the risks of nuclear are already picked up by others due to the laws around nuclear. If, even with those massive subsidies, nuclear is too economically risky for utilities, I would argue that it's too costly overall for anyone. Or at least a poor decision.

Until there's some major innovation in nuclear construction, the risk should be reserved for those with no better options (e.g. Finland, maybe the UK, etc.)

Rio Tinto is moving smelters to renewables and batteries in Australia.

I've yet to see anything solid in this latest talk of nuclear renaissance (which they talk about every year) that can't be put down to silicon valley nerds moving in weird political circles that are irrationally attracted to nuclear power.

I think it's one of those "be contrarian for the sake of it" positions. People think they sound smart for going nuclear because it ticks a lot of boxes at the surface level.

Then you realise it costs multiple times more than renewables and batteries (ain't that the real revolution), takes over a decade to build and imposes large obligations on the owners.

Democrat political correctness is the one that's killing all of these in California right now. Environmentalism requires that solar and wind be banned. And Nevada's brand of environmentalism requires fighting geothermal.

Citation needed.

Well most of the environmental laws in the way of this were passed by California Republicans, and then expanded by the courts (whatever partisanship that is), and broadly supported by Democrats.

But today it is not "politically incorrect" to advocate for changes to the environmental regulations for California Democrats. And they are definitely pursuing changes to regulations!

So you are very correct that regulations are in the way, and that Democrats are in power, but you are wrong that it's politically incorrect to change the regulations.

A universal phenomenon of California democrats is that they're always advocating and pursuing changes but never changing anything. It's been some twenty years of CEQA reform pursuit. Democratic Party control: Legislature from 1996-present day; executive from 1999-2003, 2011-present day.

In California politics, only Republicans pass things. Democrats always pursue and advocate.

All of the landmark CA laws (CEQA, CCCA, CCA, CESA, CDPA) were passed by Democratic legislatures. Most of them were signed by Reagan (who subsequently repudiated all of those laws as President) or Pete Wilson (who did not). The CSRA and CSGMA are the only two major CA environmental laws recent enough to be signed by a Democratic governor.

Notably, by today's political standards, (gubernatorial-era) Reagan and Wilson would be characterized as moderate Democrats.

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