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Comment by pepperoni_pizza | Hacker News Reader

> This is a common rebuttal, but not grounded in reality. Even assuming ~20% capacity factor for "apples to apples" comparison to legacy thermal and nuclear, solar and batteries are the cheapest form of power to install.

I looked it up because I was curious, according to Wikipedia average PV capacity factor is 25 % in USA, 10 % in the UK or Germany.

Nuclear has 88 % capacity factor worldwide. Meaning to replace 1 GW of nuclear installed capacity you need 8.8 GW of PV installed capacity in Germany or 3.5 GW of PV installed capacity in US.

Which might still be economically worth it, I don't know. But it is a number that surprised it.

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It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid, and tens of billions of dollars or euros. Germany deploys ~2GW/month of solar, the US ~4-5GW/month. Total global nuclear generation capacity is ~380GW as of this comment. At current global solar PV deployment rates, even assuming capacity factor delta between solar and nuclear, you could replace total global nuclear generation with ~18 months of solar PV deployment.

Yes, the biggest advantage of solar and wind is that they can be built as many small projects, instead of few gigaprojects we seem to have lost the ability to execute in the West.

I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land.

> I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land

Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.

Why is this even a crises? Sure there's fossil fuel price shocks but watching mission control for Artemis and comparing it to the Apollo missions the difference in tech can't be understated. We've made massive progress in only 50 years as a civilization collectively. We used to basically waste energy powering giant displays. Now we use a fraction of the energy on far better ones. 50 years from now we're likely to have so much solar and batteries deployed that it might actually hit "almost free" levels.

Which law do they use to make it illegal?

> It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid

There is only one country on earth that can currently build a new nuke in 10 years. They are currently building more than the rest of the world combined.

For everyone else it’s 20 years at the absolute minimum.

Nuclear fills a base load role better than solar+battery though, imo.

A healthy power network will have a variety of generations sources available.

Modern grids favour flexibility over fixed baseload generation (like nuclear) though. When you turn off a nuclear power plant its operating costs basically stay the same, which is horrible when you could cover your whole consumption with basically free solar/wind.

actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is deadly to the economics of nuclear.

This is what France faces today.

France's EDF Warns Solar, Wind Surge Straining Nuclear Fleet Costs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47037839 - February 2026

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