US attack on renewables will lead to power crunch that spikes electricity prices
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
For Australia CSIRO found this number to be €9B. [1] Vastly lower than the subsidies a single large scale new built reactor would need.
[2]: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost-2024-25-...
In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.
Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
Look at the market dynamics and volumes. It is like everyone rushing in with home based storage for the ancillary markets being promised a ROI within months.
That lasted... months...
What is your suggestion? Nuclear power does not solve it, and won't be online until the 2040s either way.
What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.
A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.
Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.
At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.
When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.
I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.
Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
Yes home storage adds more money but a grid-tied PV installation without batteries is very useful in many parts of the country: Using the grid as your "battery" at night, a $20k investment can make your net electricity cost zero or even negative.
A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
Sure the panels may last 30 years, so you can juice the numbers and maybe you live in the middle of Nevada so you can get the upper end of the capacity factor but I mean, my estimate assumes nothing happens to those panels before the year 2055. My estimate also doesn't include financing costs for your car-sized purchase or any changes to your insurance premiums.
If you add a PowerWall for $15,000 that lasts 10-15 years, that doubles the cost despite increasing the capacity factor of the system, once again assuming you have zero issues with it until 2040.
> A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
I'd do it myself and I'd be happy too, because it's neat, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a good deal or that residential solar is a cheap way to get electricity.
I suspect the people who are happy with their financial decision don't understand the difference between opex and capex, and aren't factoring in the opportunity cost of their $20-35,000 investment. If you invest $20,000 in bonds at 5% for 20 years you have $53,000 -- or in the S&P 500 at 9% you have $112,000. Historically electricity prices have grown closer to 2% per year.
https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.
The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
They seem to have stopped showing home solar prices since 2024:
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Those are US numbers, Australian rooftop solar is 3 or 4 times cheaper.
And Lazard separately lists Commercial and Industrial rooftop solar which is much cheaper.
That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...
I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.
I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
> Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidizes so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China.
This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
If the fossil fuel supply chain is disrupted we get an energy crisis within weeks.
What happens if the renewable supply chain is disrupted?
Well.... all existing installations keeps working for decades and in the meantime we need to figure out an alternative. After a couple of years our emergency reserves would start to work harder due to old installations aging out but the impact would be near zero.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it, Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
Which is of course why all western reactors are struggling with cost. You do know that modular reactors has been a talking point for the nuclear industry since the 1950s? That is what the industry generally bounces to when large scale projects balloon in cost. They just never deliver.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
But somehow if we magically handout another trillion in tax money to the nuclear industry they will fix it this time!!
> If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction
With the minor caveat that you can't even drive the pump from the electricity final electricity you get out due to the volumes involved.
I love how the solution to horrifically expensive new built nuclear power is an even more economically infeasible technical solution.
Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
That does not sound very logical.
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
Why should I fill my storage with horrifically expensive nuclear electricity when renewables deliver? That is the question you need to answer.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Take a look at South Australia:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Which again leads us back to the question:
Why should I fill my storage with Vogtle electricity at 20 cents/kWh when I can instead buy renewable electricity at a fraction of the cost?
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
I already gave you the link:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
In terms of GW battery storage has already over taken pumped hydro. In terms of GWh we are a few years out.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-about-to-over...
Now you want to have a nuclear plant to solve for the "when cold weather and dunkelflautes" does not correlate use case?
Do you realize how far into "emergency reserves" you have receded because you can't accept the reality of modern new built nuclear power?
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
Generally they are older plants, often staying online through capacity markets or other mechanisms.
The question you need to answer is:
How will you force me with a home battery and rooftop solar to buy your 20 cent per kWh excluding transmission costs nuclear power?
I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.
Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
If you're comparing solar + wind to not(solar + wind), then either you're mainly comparing to fossil fuels, or discussing a world that doesn't exist.
Sure, you like nuclear. You can say "oh, well, if we snap our fingers and magically have the world be different than it is, then nuclear would outperform solar".
Magic doesn't exist, and if you take two people in any country and task them with adding 5GW of reliable generation, one person with nuclear and the other with solar + battery, solar + battery will achieve that goal faster and cheaper every single time, in every country on earth.
I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.
> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
That is why we are seeing massive 40 year PPA agreements, the state taking the entire financial- and project risk and similar steps to force the paltry few proposed nuclear projects over the final investment decision line?
Modern nuclear power is absolutely insanely subsidized.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_powe...
> Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem.
Sure to you because you apparently never had that job.
It's trivial to see you are just reciting from memory and not experience. Waste is a problem in that it is generated and must be handled, transported, stored safely. Perhaps you mean it's not a long term problem once stored?
Good job making it clear you don't understand the problem. Thankfully others do. Please continue to rant online out of the way such that you stay out of the way.
I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
> For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry.
12% come from Russia. [1]
> So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
I feel like environmental implications are relevant to discuss, and I think the topic is relevant.
> You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty?
Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. They have a 96% recovery rate. [2]
> And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
It didn't matter in my original post either which is why it's under "if we're being pedantic."
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...
[2] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...
Like I said, irrelevant compared to the fossil fuel supply chain supplying 80%.
> 12% come from Russia. [1]
Of course ignoring the intermediary steps in the supply chain which Russia controls ~50% of. But Kazakh uranium being processed in Russia is Kazakh!
And this of course ignores that my main point was that Russia is the largest player in the global nuclear technological sector.
Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
> Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. [2]
And now we again "solve" nuclear power by saying that reprocessing works. Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Just make nuclear power even more horrifically expensive! No problem!
Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.
Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?
How convenient.
> Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing.
They do the reprocessing at the Orano La Hague site on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. They also historically reprocessed for Germany there and continue to reprocess for Japan. You can look these things up before you respond, you know. [1]
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the flamewar style in the future? And especially please avoid personal attacks? We'd appreciate it.
Something like $70-80 per MWH.
https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/grid-storage-at-66...
Archive: https://archive.is/UXcdL
Coal is in a scary place right now in the US, see this as an example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1mmqwd3/i_live_in...
Basically coal is less profitable and more expensive in places that have always been coal counties. The only thing to do in these areas is mine coal, so the concern is that entire regions will be rendered worthless if coal collapses.
Which means local residents cannot sell their homes without taking significant losses, and they probably lose their jobs in coal, which manifests into a poverty trap for the entire town.
And there are hundreds of these towns all through Appalachia.
So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
To where, with what savings?
> retrain
To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?
Of course I want the use of coal to stop. But you need to reckon with these kinds of human factors if you want to effect change peacefully.
This is where Clinton failed. Having a documented plan to spend billions (somewhere on the order of 10 years of salary per miner, from numbers I could glean elsewhere in this discussion) doesn't make an impression when you have well-documented sound bites claiming that you intend to put them "out of business".
Right! It's a real chicken and egg scenario. It would seem to me that without this infrastructure, it would be very hard to retrain and build new industries. It would really benefit the people of these regions to vote for people who, as a matter of policy, would bring training and infrastructure to them. Unfortunately, the people who most benefit from such policies vote against them [1], so the resources available are insufficient. So the conversation is about poverty reduction through social programs to support people working in a dying industry, rather than growing new industries. The solution, might be to vote for people proposing such resources, which I know is a radical idea, but it's at least something new to try.
https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/the-future-of-america...
[1] https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f1...
Plus it's made a few people EXTREMELY rich so they've made their opinions and interests everyone elses problem too.
One man one vote. And yes the regions that contribute more to the economy are a priority. They fund everything including the military without which we'd still be a part of Spain.
The actual motive is to appeal to people who have made coal part of their identity. These are people who have never been anywhere near a coal mine, but have internalized coal as Important and American, and as a way to stick it to those stupid environmentalists.
In Trump's case you can throw in a personal obsession with hating wind power because you can see it from one of his golf courses.
Generally pathetic that people are trying to retcon this reflexive lib-owning vice-signalling from incredibly stupid people as actual industrial policy.
I have the questionable advantage of having listened to Rush Limbaugh almost every day in the 90s, reading lots of National Review, and taking in various other conservative media. I know the basis for these things, straight from the people pushing them. None of what’s happening is a surprise to me.
Coal is dead and it’s not coming back. Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Speaking frankly, the way politicians keep selling the fantasy of it making a comeback is cruel.
Old steel towns had to do this, coal country might look to them for a model on how to leave a dying industry behind. But seeing how they vote, they might not like the answer for what it takes to survive:
Pittsburgh PA - famous former steel town, faced very uncertain economic future after the mills closed, now a booming metropolis with top industry leaders in education, healthcare, sports, finance. What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Cleveland OH - once one of America's great manufacturing hubs, powered by steel mills, car parts, and shipping along Lake Erie. When industry collapsed, Cleveland faced deep decline, job losses, shrinking population, even bankruptcy in the 1970s. But today it's finding new strength as a center of healthcare, research, and culture.
Then you look at places like Youngstown OH. Unlike Pittsburgh or Cleveland, Youngstown struggled to reinvent itself. Population plummeted, tax bases collapsed, and poverty took hold. The city became a symbol of the Rust Belt's hardest struggles. What held it back? Overreliance on steel, limited diversification, and waves of outmigration left too few resources to rebuild. What are they doing today to fix things? Healthcare and education. Should have started a lot sooner.
One more example is Bethlehem PA, another former steel town that now has top industries in healthcare, education, and also some manufacturing.
So that's the model. If you're a dying town with an industry that's shrivveling up due to changing economic conditions, the model to survive is to quickly pivot to healthcare, education, and entertainment, and to invite a bunch of outsiders into your community with open arms.
And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, entertainment, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power, they're attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss of failed post-industrial policy.
Spot on, from what I’ve seen. Just keep doubling down on what hasn’t worked in hopes that one day it’ll magically manifest a Disney ending and the good old days will return.
Just cater to the rich folks! That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure. Rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich. Building prosperity is a difficult ordeal that takes time, sacrifice, a lot of money, and a culture of safety and community.
But healthcare, education, and entertainment are not exclusive to rich people, they're industries that everyone enjoys and can take part in. The doctors, actors, professors, students, athletes, researchers, who come from around the world to live and work in Pittsburgh are not "the rich". They have money, but they're still just regular people.
For example the students who come to Pittsburgh for an education are not wealthy, but they are flush with cash from the government and lenders. They are attracted to Pittsburgh not because it's a good place for the rich, but because it's a good place for students.
Incidentally, good places for students are also good places for the rich. So I agree, rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich.
> That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure.
Did you miss the part where Pittsburgh is thriving? Cleveland is doing okay. Bethlehem is booming. Youngstown... not great but moving in a good direction.
Wyoming here. Coal country. Everyone thinks this is dumb. Including the folks in Campbell county, our top-producing coal region that has been trying to build a wind farm [1].
Trump’s social media fans in Florida and Texas like this because it feels like owning the libs. (To the extent there may be pecuniary interest, it would be in power producers. Like housing, stopping new power raises prices and profits incumbents.)
Also, that Reddit thread is about coking coal. Not the thermal coal power plants burn. It’s about American steel production shutting down in the face of our trade war. Not this new economic miracle these idiots have spun up.
[1] https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/...
Dumb enough to make them reconsider voting Republican in the future? I doubt it.
I heard that before the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan support in Congress for phasing out the use coal in the US, so it seems quite possible that that bipartisan support will reassemble itself after Trump is gone (because the next President is unlikely to be as populist and as uncaring about climate change as Trump).
If you see it in light of all the other actions taken across the spectrum, you land at best at "desperate dice roll to re-tool the US into a manufacturing power from the 80s", and at worst at "deliberate dismantling of a first-rate world power into a second tier paradise for oligarchs".
But in this timeline, they tried to violently overturn the 2020 election, and they are currently trying to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering states they control as much as possible.
This isn't about earning the political support of people in coal country who vote GOP. If they ever face negative electoral outcomes in the future, their plan is to overturn the election using either force or legal chicanery.
What you claim didn't happen, and can easily disproven with data. Your interpretation of a reasoning of a policy (that didn't happen) is bad faith.
You are wrong about both electricity [1], gas[2] and total energy [3].
Europe was very dependent on energy imports in the past and current policy is the by far most successful attempt in a long at changing it. It will help us for decades to come.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
Gas imports like explained in the Wikipedia article you linked started in the 70s. There certainly was too much of a reliance on Russia, not enough investment in alternatives like LNG terminals and warnings of partners in the east were ignored with the north stream pipelines. In the end Germany got a lot of economic growth from cheap gas for decades and managed to get off Russian gas very fast. The European nuclear industry on the other hand is still heavily reliant on Russia.
Broad German anti-nuclear sentiment can be traced back mainly to Chernobyl and the exit plan that was followed in western Germany was decided after Fukushima. Eastern German reactors lacked containment and were shut down after the reunification. Contrary to an often heard claim western German nuclear was not replaced by fossil energy sources, but more than compensated by the growth of renewables. You could certainly point out that coal plants should have been shut off first, but that was even less possible politically at the time. In the end you have to shut off nuclear reactors because of growing safety risks caused by material fatigue and new ones have questionable economics.
Germany is not Europe. Over 70% of electricity in France is nuclear and they have plans to build at least 6 EPR2 plants.
They have an enormous fleet nearing end of life and are making political noise over a tiny number of plants they haven’t even taken the final investment decision on.
They are stuck arguing how the mindbogglingly large required subsidies should be financed.
In other words: They are betting on renewables as much as anyone else, they just can't bring themselves to stop wasting money on nuclear power due to political reasons.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/01/24/france-...
>We phased out nuclear power plants
your words. simple past tense.
- Nuclear waste has non-zero cost that aren’t factored in.
- Nuclear risks are externalized, not factored in.
- Nuclear power is heavily subsidized.
- Solar power industry in Germany on particular was destroyed for ideological reasons.
- Solar has much more capacity than nuclear for many years now: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/211972/212382/e...
A big part of the reason why nuclear power isn’t cost-effective nowadays is because those costs have been at least partially internalized. The US federal government has stopped producing cheap nuclear fuel by disassembling nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely. Plant operators need to pay into a federal disaster insurance pool.
I highly doubt that. If you multiply annual costs with the timeframe needed (millions of years) you get absurdly high numbers.
It the same way that the US got hooked on cheap Chinese imports.
Also renewables make too much sense right now. That's why a lot of dollars are allocated towards them even though subsidies are mostly gone.
Maybe that was the discussion where you're from, what do i know. Where I'm from we had a honest political debate about nuclear, and the public decided on no. It wasn't because of "ideology". We discussed the safety, the waste challenge, and everything else.
France did shut down superphenix for completely ideological reasons tho.
Also stopped investing in nuclear but that was not really ideological (the nuclear buildup originated in something of a misprediction, and sadly the country didn’t really capitalise on it).
Then it had to postpone the closure of at least two reactors following the second invasion of Ukraine, and this year officially dropped the phaseout and opened the door for new builds (unlikely as they are).
It absolutely did, back in 2003. This was pushed back after the invasion of Ukraine then repealed but Doel 3 and Tihange 2 were shut down under the phaseout plan.
Which, is similar to the German anti-nuclear approach, to be frank. Burning dirty coal instead of keeping an already existing nuke plant running isn’t a decision based on either environmental or economic reasoning, and that was done a lot.
Pendulum swings, etc, etc.
What? Did renewables get more expensive for some reason? Solar and wind have been cheaper than coal for years.
Attacking renewables is the ideological move because anything good is bad. It’s just weaponized ignorance.
what I don't understand is how this was obvious to me 20 years ago as a teenager, but European leaders just somehow thought it was a good idea. Was it just "a lucky guess" on my part? it was just so obvious that when you tolerate and interact with narcissists as if their behaviour was acceptable, they will simply escalate their behaviour. I was also critical of ties with the Chinese government and I was told I was just paranoid/racist. today we suddenly realise oh that was a bad idea, the leopards are chewing on our faces.
I reckon the rich and powerful saw it coming alright and they just figured they'd make bank before it got to the point they'd have to send the kids of poor people to war.
All we would have had to do was have no allies for the past ~60 years, and we would have never gotten burned. We also would have been entirely irrelavant to international politics, and likely wouldn't have become one of the richest nations on earth.
World politics is like love. It's better to have had a productive alliance that hits a rough patch, than never to have had one at all.
To be fair, the French got it right - they have their own nuclear deterrent and their own weapons manufacturing.
Of course making sense does not in any way matter to this administration, and Trump hates wind turbines because of his dumb golf course, but still…
China is going all-in on electrification, and that alone gives it a massive efficiency edge. Layer on top the fact that renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper every year, and the advantage compounds exponentially.
Take heavy equipment as an example: a Caterpillar machine might cost $10 million, while the Chinese electric equivalent is just one-fifth the price and burns only a third of the energy. That’s already nearly half the cost compared to diesel or gas-powered machines before you even count lower maintenance and fuel savings.
The math is simple: electric wins. And renewable compound the victory
Then 4% relies on Federal lands [2]
1 -https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...
2 - https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/program/2025/vast-federal-l...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...
https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
Edit: I’m 100% for renewables. Unfortunately half my country is against them and they won last time.
It's no different from Fox News headlines saying Medicare for all would cost X billion and not mentioning that business as usual would cost twice that.
An attempt to turn a popular, cheaper option into a scary bogeyman with selective lies.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/06/05/americans-vie...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/07/china-moves-to-curb-s...
the same interests that prevent it today would still exist
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
In other words: China is building enough renewables to both cover the grid expansion and offset existing coal usage.
That's not what the data I had linked above seems to indicate (2023 to 2024 it went from 5.7 to 5.8 TWh)
And it keeps building coal power plants: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants, though the article is also optimistic that China is at/about to reach peak coal.
And it's also funding coal power plants abroad, thought the scale doesn't seem that big compared to their domestic production: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Con...
> From December 2024, coal power generation declined for five straight months before ticking up slightly in May and June, mainly to offset weaker hydropower generation due to drought. Coal power generation was flat overall in the second quarter of 2025.
> The chart below shows growth in monthly power generation for coal and gas (grey), solar and wind (dark blue) and other low-carbon power sources (light blue).
> This illustrates how the rise in wind and solar growth is squeezing the residual demand left for coal power, resulting in declining coal-power output during much of 2025 to date.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
What they are doing is ensuring energy reliability and phasing out old nasty coal plants in favor of modern ones expected to have peaker like capacity factors.
The US is far, far worse than China.
If you let the market choose, it would choose a lot of wind and solar.
> Despite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies).
So the admin just needs to get out of the alway and let the market solve this problem. Not try to centrally manage the economy like the Soviet Union.
1 - https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-a...
But keep in mind most solar is built on private lands only needing local/state approval. With the biggest builders red states like Texas.
These have always been present – I remember seeing them even as a kid, but they were just symbolic protest² and you'd only see them out on farms that had turbines in view. What's different now is that you'll see these signs in towns, and the people who have these signs in their yard are also winning county supervisor/councilor seats that they use to regulate wind to death. Temporary "pauses" are put on permit requests that get tabled while they "study" new rules endlessly; road and shadow setbacks are being increased; turbine height caps are introduced at levels that prevent the current machines from being upgraded; noise limits, lighting mandates, even county-wide caps on turbine numbers.
I think the trend is still positive in favor of wind in Iowa, but at the local level, there is a concerted effort to bog it down in red tape and kill it.
¹ Never mind that the scenic countryside is actually just amber waves of industrial corn and hog manure lagoons.
² As much as I can recall, I wasn't exactly in tune with local politics as a child.
But it just goes to show you being involved in local government, showing up to advocate for green energy projects, etc at local levels is one of the best things you can do.
I know, not real-time. Renewable energy credit trading, and such. But you become the demand for clean generation if you choose to do so. It is easy. If you are in Marin, Contra Costa, Napa, or Solano go to https://mcecleanenergy.org/opt-up/
Similar CCA's are all over California and probably beyond.
This isn’t about subsidies. Orsted, for example, is being blocked on national security grounds using environmental regulation [1].
Power producers are in on a fix.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
Which is horrible for the US economy as it insulates our companies from market pressure, preventing them from adapting.
It's amazing how much leeway many people give this administration for policies that they have a long history of opposing: government ownership of companies (10% of Intel, US Steel's "golden share"), blocking private development of energy production, sending the National Guard to hostilely takeover cities, etc. It's the sort of stuff that they've accused their opponents of wanting to do in deranged, nightmarish worst-case scenarios.
"You betrayed everything you believe in, and for what?"
"To own the libs."
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
This is one thing that actually prevents the power price spikes since the batteries can jump in to cover gaps. I can quote many installations that have completely paid themselves off in 2 years (see hornsdale battery as an example - one year of operation alone, 2020, generated profit of half its initial $90million cost) and while this 2 year payoff will come down as more and more are installed part of the reason the payoff is going down is due to power price costs becoming more and more steady as more batteries are installed.
Even the USA is installing massive amounts of capacity right now. Look at Texas - 3x battery capacity available in 2025 compared to 2024 due to massive installations coming online and they are a state that does not do a lot to support renewables at all. There's no stopping it, it doesn't need subsidies and it's one of the most straightforward capital payoffs available right now.
I actually think the predictions in the article won't come to fruition honestly. The battery installation rise is dominating the investment landscape right now and it's completely flown under the radar without any political controversy (no things such as questionable media trying to claim battery banks are somehow bad for our health and should be stopped) nor are there subsidies required.
Of which none exists in the west. I love how suddenly we will achieve scale without the middle step of... building hundreds of prototypes to scale up the industry.
Everyone talks like it is already done.
Nuclear is a decent option, but it takes years to bring new capacity online.
There's nothing wrong with investing in nuclear that'll come online in 5+ years time, but at the same time the government should also be green lighting all projects capable of adding capacity more quickly.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho was smart enough to rely on people smarter than him. But Trump and Co just aren't that smart...
Taking the environmental hit for lower energy costs is understandable at least, even if those who are more financially stable would prefer not to. But whatever this is makes no sense and is just puerile revenge.
It's just so self fulfilling. Someone is being very stupid. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's him. Possibly it's both of us.
But there is no way out of the conclusion that the country is (at least) a near majority of very stupid people. Not merely mistaken or holding different values, but genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Of course if I'm the stupid one, maybe my reasoning there is also wrong. I know I conflated individuals and groups in a less-than-rigorous fashion.
But either way I feel unable to find a solution to this conundrum. Certainly I can't if I'm stupid. And if a majority of voters are stupid, then it undercuts the principle that enables us to live in the same region together. I am rapidly running out of ideas to continue that.
Having spent some time in the US, my theory is that things have got so complicated over there (or more precisely nobody is incentivized to make them simple), that it has fried people's minds. They just respond to the last stimulus, having given up trying to make sense of anything, as they attempt to get through each day as best they can.
Healthcare is the obvious example, but I'd say that that is representative of most things in the US, in terms of being a minefield where one foot wrong can wreck your life.
With any luck the midterm elections will allow sanity to return.
Nor do I think the "apolitical" will become any less so. I see no reason why the midterms should give radically different results.
Now, it just so happens that historically things swing a bit back at midterms, and given how close things are that's enough to sway the entire power structure. It's an unfortunate reality of voting: a one-vote margin is no different from unanimity.
Even so I do not expect the overall tone to change any time soon. Those proportions seem fairly durable.
As far as I'm concerned everyone who lives here should vote. Felons, infants, people in jail, anyone who can pull a lever or an unambiguous gesture. I'd even include fetuses if they could. If the law affects you then you should have a say.
This is undoubtedly a stupid idea. But the current system is clearly broken and I'd be willing to at least try taking the principle seriously.
I disagree with it. But I think it is worth discussing.
We don’t have universal suffrage. The most-successful democracies in history never did. In our day-to-day lives and commerce we weigh opinions based on their source. And the current system isn’t working, in many cases because the majority votes for something stupid.
We could fix those peoblems, or we could add additional problems by layering even more broken systems that the US (among others) has tried before and rejected on top of the existing problems.
Plus, of course, there is little appetite for any given set of fixes. We can easily calculate who will benefit, and because of the division I mentioned, half the people will oppose the change just to avoid losing influence.
I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch, which would at least make some of the existing alliances moot.
The evidence is very strong that the reduction of the dimensionality of discourse and the polarization are a direct result of those features of the electoral system.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch,
That's not only not a solution, it is not even an actual option. You can't start from anywhere except where you are.
They don’t. The only solutions to deep-rooted antipathy are forgiveness and annihilation. We aren’t anywhere close to that, despite what idiots want to manufacture.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch
This is meaningless at best, stupid at worst.
At least he’s talking about nuclear now and not the pipe dream of coal generation
Even stats I find are from a friendlier permitting regime. And now I bet all the money will be poured into projects not needing federal approval.
And we might hope something good comes out of the nuclear this admin wants to build. The US has a lot of room for approval there.
1. Data centers, primarily driven by AI. Why? Because they can (and do) negotiate deeply discounted prices AND either don't pay for the connection and required infrastructure or they only pay a portion of it. Who pays for the rest? Consumers. Who subsidizes the discounted electricity? Consumers.
2. Increased electricity use in an area tends to raise the prices for everyone. We actually saw this in the crypto mining boom (eg [1]). In short, in a region like upstate New York where it otherwise has access to cheap hydro power, the local provider will have a long term power supply contract for a certain amount of electricity. A big increase usually means they now have to buy power on the spot market, which can be much more expensive. This raises the average electricity price for everyone;
3. The administration is pushing a huge expansion in LNG exports. IIRC ~41% of US power generation comes from natural gas. A huge increase in LNG exports will inevitably cause a rise in natural gas prices for all domestic power producers. This is in part driven by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine but natural gas suppliers have seen (and pounced upon) an opportunity to drive up the wholesale price of natural gas;
4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;
5. While all this is happening and we're not really building new power plants (at least not enough to match demand), the administration has cut off renewables, which are key to meeting demand beyond any environmental concerns (which are real and true). Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;
6. Private equity has turned its eye to the guaranteed profits of electricitiy providers [3]. This will do absolutely nothing other than raise prices; and
7. Lip service is given to nuclear but it simply isn't the answer, primarily because the lead time for building a nuclear power plant is about 10-15 years. Plus it's one of the most expensive forms of electricity (in LCOE terms) and having a company safely manage a nuclear power plant in an era where regulation is being gutted doesn't seem like a great idea.
Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without government subsidy. Why not just subsidize renewables instead, particularly solar? Efforts such as small modular reactors to lower costs simply make no sense. Larger reactors are more efficient.
I think by 2030 a significant portion of the population will be paying $0.50/kWh or more for residential electricity.
[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...
[2]: https://cleanenergy.org/news/tva-executes-the-largest-electr...
[3]: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t...
This is so funny to me, because if you listen to anti-solar people, they'll tell you it's a bad idea because it doesn't generate anything at night. Given what you say, even if batteries weren't a thing, it would seem like solar would be an ideal component of any power grid, even if it didn't produce any energy for the nighttime whatsoever.
1. The price. It has plummeted in the alst 10-20 years and shows no signs of abating;
2. For many people it can be placed on their roofs so doesn't take up any land or generally require building any new structure. Generally the only planning required is artificial barriers in place to protect electricity providers;
3. It is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves turning a turbine. No moving parts is great for reliability. You do need some infrastructure to convert the panel output to the right voltage (eg an inverter) but that's all commodity tech;
4. Batteries are a largely solved problem for energy storage. You can use golf cart batteries if you really want.
There are problems. We need panel standardization, which I think will come with industry maturity.
Another big issue is lack of regulation for solar companies who use predatory financing on consumers and can actually make selling your home much more difficult. This is a big enough problem that any realtor will tend to advise you not to get solar because of the selling issues. This shouldn't be the case. It's a regulatory problem.
Where, in the USA, can an electricity seller increase the price without government approval? Hell, your [2] link is about an entity of the federal government, there are no shareholders.
Wrong, actually. At least in Australia, peak energy is in the late afternoon when everyone comes home, around 6pm. The other peak is in the morning around 7am. These are times when solar is not producing significantly, meanwhile it makes baseload unviable during the day.
As AC use increased, industry switched from oil to electricity, coal to electric arc, and as power grid stabilized, peak usage shifted a lot in the last ~20 years. That's why summer/winter time do not make sense anymore and a lot of European countries are talking about not switching anymore.
This is especially true in Australia, a world leader in rooftop solar, here's something from AEMO on the topic:
> Both minimum and maximum operational demand are shifting to later in the day, driven by increasing contribution from rooftop PV. Minimum operational demand is expected to occur in the middle of the day by the mid-2020s. Maximum operational demand is expected to shift later in the day by an hour or two, when PV contribution is falling but temperatures are remain high (depending on the region and POE).
The peak demand depends on a number of factors including what city/town it is, the season, the mix of residential/industrial usage, the time of day and the day of the week [1].
Also, if the peak time includes summer afternoon/evenings from 3pm to 9pm (as it does for several cities), a significant portion of that time is in daylight hours. In January in Sydney, sunset is after 8pm. You have lower (or no) power generation from solar at dusk so say 7pm but that's still 4 of the 6 peak hours where solar is impacting peak usage.
Power companies will tend to point to residential peak demand to justify price increases while often just entirely excluding industrial usage that drops off at about the same time.
Also, residential power usage (in Australia) is changing as building standards change (ie Australian houses are notorious for their energy ineeficiency, historically) and the rollout of residential solar. Smart meters, energy efficiency and batteries can really put a dent in peak electricity usage and this will only continue given how comparatively expensive Australian electricity is.
[1]: https://localelectricianssydney.com.au/electricity-peak-off-...
https://democracyforward.org/work/uncovering-trumps-ties-to-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-franchis...
You know we're an exporter of fossil fuels not importer right?
Global energy policy, particularly relating to solar, begins and ends in China. They’re the largest variable marginal consumer of energy and producer of solar panels.
How are you measuring this?
No, the actual answer is that it’s pure ideology: this is about Owning the Libs, pure and simple, irrespective of the collateral damage to the economy. We’re currently being led by vengeance-minded morons who want to destroy anything that has even a tangential connection to liberal politics, and renewables are definitely on that list.
And unlike solar they work 24/7.
That's very optimistic. And yeah, I see how this comment is kind of the equivalent of bringing up Obama or Hillary or something when it's about Trump's bullshit. To be very clear, I hate any efforts to impede energy build out.
Or you build the power plant and data centre somewhere with a stable economy. No tariffs on importing model weights.
According to government figures, 11% of electricity costs goes toward green initiatives, and 5% to VAT, which is also earmarked for green initiatives. The government has promised that as we become greener, we should see the prices come down, but the opposite has been true [3]. The green energy sector is currently largely subsidised by fossil fuels, as we transition more and more to green energy, the true costs are realised. Our Energy Secretary (failed prime minister candidate) says:
> Responding to the 6% price cap rise, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it was due to "our reliance on the fossil fuel markets" and added: "We're acting to bring down bills for everyone with our mission for clean, home-grown power that we control."
The irony is that we don't make our own wind turbines or solar panels, so our grid is still precariously dependant on foreign actors. We're breaking away from the likes of Russia to become dependant on China - great. Bare in mind, all of this effort for the UK which produces less than 1% of global emissions, but outsources its manufacturing to Countries such as China that have not even started to attempt to reduce their emissions (recent drops are due to economic collapse).
[0] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
The UK does still need to build more on shore nevertheless.
This is exactly what I'm arguing against. The UK only has two real sources of renewable energy, solar and wind. The articles I linked showed that there were periods where we could barely get the energy we needed - and that included the imports from the EU. There is no real answer currently to storing that energy.
The UK historically had a strategic decentralised reserve of gas which were decommissioned (although articles do not show it). A prior government foolishly turned us into a "on-demand economy" for energy, and we had zero buffer to global prices. Fuels such as gas, diesel, petrol, coal, etc, can be stored for long periods and are very energy dense.
> Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.
Solar panels have a lifetime, the entire fleet will need to be rotated within 10-20 years, but they are currently being purchased directly with tax payer money. The UK has not yet demonstrated that it can incorporate all of these costs at a similar or lower rate. These panels are not manufactured locally, and we are reliant on external countries to produce them. Wind turbines are a similar story.
This is completely incorrect, and it makes me wonder if the rest of your comment is too.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/14/china
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-mine-spray-painted-r...
Every single place in earth that went all in in solar and wind is now paying the price of their eletrical engineering ignorance in absurdly expensive bills and low reliability.
This is not true. Solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuel generation for new capacity. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-and-solar-en...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
Otherwise you're just burning money without an alternative to meet increasing demand (which is likely why costs are increasing and why the additional supply is being built).
If this is happening (which frankly I doubt) it's just corruption.
Nobody wants a new coal or nuclear plant in their back yard.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5319056/trump-clean-ene...
They do need planning permission of course and that's where they can be blocked.
They are. And it’s undercutting the owners of pricier plants. Hence Trump using environmental regulation to block more solar.
Maybe some forms of green energy have helped in some areas and times of day, but they have done nothing to stop the climb.
It's time to try something other than solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices, and may be making it worse (TOU energy plans are becoming the norm because of the broken duty cycle of solar)
This isn’t about subsidies, it’s about standing in the way of the free market.
And why do you think cost relates to a form of supply? It seems more likely that demand is also much higher (data centers, more air conditioning, etc).
What does this mean?
> solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices
Why would the government intervening to ban supply make things better?
This policy is a hand-out to power producers. It constricts supply. It’s Trump copying San Francisco and Los Angeles housing policymakers, except for energy.
I can't even begin to understand your logic here.