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Comment by braincat31415 | Hacker News Reader

The US and European alliance was a marriage of convenience. One of the results of Ukrainian conflict was manufacturing moving from Europe to the US. Energy has to be built from something, and Europe does not have it.

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Europe has sun and wind. In the time it would take the US to build one nuclear plant Europe can build over 10x as much renewable capacity, for 1/10th the cost. As much as I'm pro environmental protection, the reality is that a lot of places are preferring renewables because they are cheaper and faster to build than traditional power plants for the same energy outputs. Even Texas is building tons of renewables for this reason.

So yes, energy will be built in Europe and elsewhere.

One word: BS. Germany energy shortages were in the news early this year, and last year, and the year before then. See this, for example: https://www.power-technology.com/news/germany-wind-power-sho... Germany and its renewables is just a laughing stock at this point. One cannot run an industry on renewables, and they are finding this out. There was already some talk about restarting nuclear power plants.

With your optimism, they would have tackled this problem already.

Texas already paid its price for their lack of investment in traditional generation facilities.

Here's the real time state of Finland's power grid. Zoom out to the month view. Solar is pitiful this time of the year, and wind is horribly inconsistent. Some days the wind doesn't blow at all and the fossil fuel "co-generation" plants need to be spun up. You can't just ignore the demand for reliable, base load power.

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

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