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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

> production of wind energy is crucial for meeting science-based climate goals

What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?

I hear people talk about their solar installations all the time, and it seems like the anti-nuclear sentiment is finally wearing off too. I don't think I've ever heard anything positive about one of these windmills. It seems to be a fairly straightforward wealth transfer from tax payers and utility consumers to the windmill people. Property values go down and electricity prices go up. Windmill people move on to collect the next subsidy.

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They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies) and tend to produce peak power during periods when solar is offline (e.g. at night or cloudy days). Farmers like them because they don't take up much space and they provide revenue independent of how well their crops do, which varies wildly year to year. It's cheaper than burning fossil fuels (though not quite as cheap as solar)

Adding wind to the network does not make electricity prices go up (unless you do something stupid like shut down all your nuclear plants at the same time). That's nonsense. It's maybe not quite as cheap if you factor in the storage requirements to build up the grid "properly", but still cheaper than coal at the very least.

> They pay for themselves in a couple of years (even without subsidies)

Do you have a source on this?

https://www.turbinehub.com/post/how-long-does-a-wind-farm-ta...

It's also worth mentioning that, while I'm not anti-nuclear on principle, the economic return on nuclear projects ranges somewhere between "multiple decades" and "never" - and there's a large empty gap on the timescale of a decade between spending most of that money and starting to receive dividends. And you'd better be running it 100%

At least with solar and wind the buildout takes a few weeks or months, and you can start collecting even with a partial buildout.

This is a frequent argument against nuclear, that it’s too expensive(and takes forever to build).

But this wasn’t always the case, and so I wonder if it’s really such a strong argument.

In Sweden most of our plants were built fast and have been an enormous success.

The speed was partially enabled by an economy of scale that will not be possible to reach again like it was in the 50s / 60s / 70s.

Why wouldn’t that be possible?

Mainly because the government was backing the investment on national security grounds because of the cold war. Every variety of nuclear investment was through the roof

There was also massive demand for electricity as it was being extended to rural areas and as electric household appliances became common.

Until the AI craze there was no long term demand for that much additional electricity, and who knows if that will hold.

I'm afraid this bit - ROI time / profitability - is what will kill practical applicability of fusion power. There's already tens if not hundreds of billions in investments and decades of research, and it will take that again to turn it into a commercial endeavour, if ever.

That said, nuclear is great for baseline power production, and even with renewables generating the brunt of electricity, you still need a baseline and a quickly scaling backup (gas generators). Battery parks help too for those, but they have limited capacity of course.

They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy. Building a wind turbine today has about the same all-in "LCOE" as running existing nuclear plants. Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.

Not to say we shouldn't build more nuke plants, but they're extraordinarily expensive to build and have construction timelines measured in decades so it's nearly impossible to make them pencil out on a per-kwh basis when compared to wind or solar + batteries that can be deployed and commissioned in 6 months.

>They're ~the cheapest power options available and provide decades and decades of zero-marginal-cost energy.

It's not zero-marginal-cost energy because they do need maintenance. But I'm more interested in knowing where your lifespan idea comes from. I have seen multiple sources agree that wind turbines are expected to last 20ish years, after which they must at least be taken down and refurbished, if not cut into pieces and buried (as they are not recyclable).

>Building new nukes results in electricity that's about 4x as expensive as building turbines instead.

This sounds impossible, especially if you count land value, maintenance, grid stability measures that are required to deal with flaky power sources, etc.

There’s standard maintenance as with anything mechanical but most importantly for energy - they don’t burn a fuel that is subject to supply/demand, international relations, or shortages.

“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario but more realistically, modern turbines from Vestas have 30-yr lifespans (which are often exceeded) and the newest gen GE turbines come with 40-yr lifespans.

There are inherent issues with LCOE but it’s the ‘least bad’ metric we have to compare energy sources. As of 2022, it looked like this:

https://www.powerengineeringint.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

With onshore wind about $0.04/kwh and nuclear more like $0.22/kwh. Which sounds outlandish until you realize that PPAs for wind auctions are regularly under $0.03 now and Hinkley C is going to cost something like $50 billion for the two reactors and the rate guaranteed to the owners is north of $0.18 now which will return them something terrible like 7% IRR.

>“Decades and decades” would satisfy your 20-yr scenario

Actually it's more like "decade and decade" lol

I have been surprised at the figures I found for nuclear power versus wind. The reason our nuclear reactors cost so much, so far as I've heard, is that each one is designed anew and there are tremendous regulatory compliance costs. I think designs could be standardized and regulatory stuff streamlined, so as to drastically reduce costs for nuclear. Say what you will about Chinese safety or quality, but they seem to be cranking out a ton of new nuclear reactors as most of the West is foolishly retiring theirs with no good replacement.

Sure, but "just build nuke plants cheaper" isn't really a viable plan when you need electrons tomorrow. There's a well-known issue in the West that we've lost the ability to build large projects on budget or schedule and there a million reasons for it, but none of it really matters to people buying power.

As of today, if you had $20 billion and had to choose between maybe generating your first watt from nuclear somewhere around 2040 if things go well or just building 15,000 3MW wind turbines that could start generating power next year and will have over a decade of revenue coming in before you see the first dollar from the nuke - investors make the obvious choice.

One does not "merely" manufacture and install 15000 3 MW wind turbines lol...

I’m sure I dropped a 0 somewhere and the math works out to be 1,500 turbines - but China installed over 5,000 turbines last month.. so even the larger number isn’t too outlandish

Yes; there are a few companies (iirc / top of my head) developing or deploying small-scale, standardized / modular nuclear power plants; NuScale [0] has developed a few models that have gotten Nuclear Regulatory Commission approvals in 2022 and this year [1] they approved a 77 MW generator, which is enough to power a data center. This one weighs about 700 tons, about 23 meters tall, is built in a factory and can be transported / installed anywhere.

[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-approves-nuscale-powe...

Unfortunately Nuscale (and the other SMR companies) aren't going to work.. they keep missing all their deadlines and earlier announced plans/contracts have all fallen through when they start to try and build the things. Nuscale is instructive in that they announced a plant in 2015 that would provide energy in 2023 cost $3 billion in 'overnight' dollars. In 2018, they increased the cost estimate to $4.8 billion. In 2020, they increased it to $6.1 billion. In 2023, they increased the estimate to $9.3 billion -- before a single shovel had hit the ground. Needless to say, the utilities who would be on the hook for these costs walked away. Why in the world would anyone spend well over $10 billion on an "SMR"?

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nuscale-uamps-project-small...

For what it's worth: one of the reasons Google has a datacenter in Iowa (of all places) is that there's a windfarm out there making up something like 60% of the local power generation. That makes the power super cheap (and with all the land they have, that windfarm can continue to scale).

If Google's putting their money into it, I suspect there's more to the wind story than "wealth transfer from tax payers and consumers to the windmill people."

Same in the Netherlands; companies like Google, Microsoft etc invest in offshore power alongside the government and energy companies. Unfortunately this also means they "claim" a percentage of its capacity for newly built datacenters, meaning that it's not so much replacing non-renewable energy sources as adding to total production.

It’s one based on science instead of whatever someone finds convenient. So sub 2 C.

Why would wind not be essential for it? Wind is free just like solar. Some places have amazing wind. Wind costs have declined dramatically so it’s a viable piece of the mix.

Wind power is among the cheapest sources of electricity, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...

Wind power also has the benefit that it keeps the carbon in the ground and isn't contributing to the massive climate crisis that humanity and the earth's ecosystems are facing. And there's no direct waste from energy production.

Property values? Do you live on an oil rig or something?

They’re just not a big fan of windmill people ok?!? ;)

There are some who think windmills unsightly, which I don’t understand at all. The old style associated with Dutch stereotypes is cute and picturesque, and the modern type futuristic. If I see windmills within eyeshot, my first thought is, “oh cool, the people here really have it figured out.” Of all the things that I might see on the horizon, windmills are among those that would bother me the least.

Ok but this is about offshore wind

> What exactly is a science-based climate goal? And why would wind energy be essential for it?

Land-based wind power is OK-ish. It's susceptible to renewable droughts, but it's fine as long as it's just a part of the mix.

But the offshore wind power is pretty much the _only_ reliable renewable, outside of classic hydro and exotics like tidal power or geothermal. Offshore wind generators are pretty much guaranteed to always produce at least _some_ power due to diurnal wind patterns.

Electricity prices go up? Are you blaming the windmills? It should you blame the new AI data centers

And windmills are profitable by themselves. And reduces foreign imports with increasing taxes on this goods. If we removed all subsidies coal would be the real affected.

I am not sure about property value but burning gas next to homes creating health problems to power Elon musk data centers surely doesn't help. The dark fumes from coal, gas or oil are going to affect it.

As usual, the facts are in the linked report not in the journalist's summary.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nrMSJOxI6Iqw6HRKtnvWjOkj3tp...

It's more precise, avoiding that strange construction, "science-based". If I understand correctly, linguists call these productive analogies (?), where we start producing more of them by analogy to some root, so:

Faith-based -> Community-based -> Evidence-based -> Plant-based -> Science-based

Or some other hypothetical inheritance chain.

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