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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

> US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity)

That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA.

That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).

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That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.

Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage

A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c

As usual, explain how you're going to power heat pumps in the Northern half of the country during a 3 week bomb cyclone. There are answers and they cost money.

The only answer we're using is to build 1:1 natural gas capability for solar, which is roughly double the cost. That's a solution, but it needs to be accounted for when comparing options.

Couldn't this also be solved with transmission from other parts of the country? or is that what you're saying?

Yes, but you have to pay for a line you don't plan to use much, so its capital costs should be attributed to the generation method requiring it. Which is fine, but not including it is dishonest about the true costs.

I think if you designed and built it with the idea in mind that you're building your renewables in the sunny/windy centre/south of the US to be transported to a these places all year round it's a better idea than it being a backup. But I agree that the cost of over generation should be factored in to comparison pricing. But I also think we don't include enough of the costs in FF infra either.

The coal plant in my hometown was always running on cold days. It didn't need anything else to be available when needed besides several hours of lead time.

Mostly relying on long-distance transmission has high costs in capex, opex (losses), reliability, and security.

Alternative to natural gas? Wind, geothermal, or nuclear. Wind is already in the northern half of the country and operates well when winterized, unlike the ones in Texas that broke since they were not winterized during that freeze a while back.

Natural gas and fossil fuels are not our only options, they are the easiest options.

Context is solar and pricing. You can't only build solar, because people will freeze to death. So you can't say "solar+batteries is only $X/W!!!” because you're ignoring that you must also have a rarely-used natural gas, or install a rarely-used long-distance transmission line, or install rarely-used storage capacity. Which is fine, but you're being dishonest about costs if you don't.

It's also like to see a comparison to giving people/companies a discount if they have alternative methods of heating for 3 weeks and agree to be powered off. Places like hospitals and universities often have generators and do this. Sand "batteries" (aka electric resistive heaters in a few tons of sand heated to 1000°C) might be cost-effective if standardized. You keep it insulated and hot until the power goes out, then you let it bleed heat out to keep you from dying.

You’re ok if governments give up and simply tell consumers “you deal with it”?

Places like hospitals have back up in case the mains goes out. It’s no longer a back up if used as the primary supply.

They get cheaper electric rates by agreeing to be the first loads shed if the grid is overloaded. This is a standard thing. If their generators didn't start, they wouldn't be cut off, but it'd be a big deal.

> You’re ok if governments give up and simply tell consumers “you deal with it”?

Paying people to be prepared and willing to go without electricity in times of extreme supply-demand balance is a part of the solution. It's a regular thing for data centers, hospitals, etc. It may be cheaper to pay people to install sand batteries than to install longer-distance interconnects, and if people voluntarily agree, why would you object?

> a 3 week bomb cyclone

Sounds pretty windy to me.

I'm not sure how often the upper Midwest gets Dunkelflaute. If rare enough, then overbuilding wind is a possible solution (especially combined with additional transmission) but, again, those costs must be accounted for or the solar costs are dishonest.

https://www.ehn.org/europe-faces-challenges-from-low-wind-an...

> That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test.

These are numbers from the known far-right organization....err... Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...

> Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x?

Exactly. And you need closer to 100x for some locations (Germany) for the solar to be reliable enough.

Solar is _very_ cheap when you don't care about reliability, and impossible otherwise. Wind is a bit more nuanced, but in general has a similar story.

Those costs with storage are if you want 100% power from solar which is not reality. US alone gets 20% of power from nuclear today, we’re not going around tearing down the base load and adding solar. We’re keeping base load and adding renewables, which include wind.

Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?

No, they're not for 100% (it's impossible with the current technology) but in the framework of a renewable grid.

> Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?

Solar is not dumb in some parts of the US, like California or Nevada. It's dumb in the Pacific Northwest or Minnesota.

On the other hand, offshore wind is the _only_ form of renewable energy that is at least a bit reliable due to the inherent diurnal wind patterns near the shores.

This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner).

Citations:

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...

https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-s...

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report

https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-w...

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