Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The flip side is that what you are saying is that nuclear power will be commercially viable into the 2100s. And betting the house on that. While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.

That seems absolutely insane.

Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.

Who cares if we get to 95%, 97, 99% or 100% carbon neutral electricity when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough. Transition that final firming to whatever carbon neutral sources we land on when their emissions matter in the late 2030s and 2040s.

We need to optimize decarbonization per dollar spent with the shortest time to market.

You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.

We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.

The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?

And that is certainly not new built nuclear power.

>While knowing that the electricity they provide is expensive enough to lead to energy poverty for generations.

What are you on about?

>Jevons Paradox did not happen for nuclear power. What happened was crazy cost overruns, cancellations and the industry collapsing into its current state.

And the opposite happened in the past whilst europe was building bunch more of them.

>Who cares if we get 95%, 97, 99% or 100% when we still need to decarbonize agriculture, aviation, chemicals, industry, construction and so on?

Funny you say that when some of those are significantly harder. Are you going to turn on steel plants only in summer? Do you think that might have some effect?

>You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world? They aren't needed anymore. Complaining about "equality" because your desired solution didn't deliver in time is a kindergarten level argument.

You should tell my government and the neighbouring governments.

>We've spent the past 70 years subsidizing nuclear power. It just never delivered on its promise.

It did exactly that?

>The relevant question is: Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?

it has spent €700 billion to $1 trillion on the energywende (a metric which doesn't properly include a lot of private investment) and ends as one of the worst emitters in europe whilst deindustrialising due to high energy prices. They jerk eachother off about how high their renewables share of the economy is every summer and then import and fire up the browncoal and gasplants again troughout the other seasons. When that solar panel is producing a 10th of it's average summer output (already below the capacity everyone loves to roll with for articles) in winter there's only one big winner possible. People like to point out how france's electricity production is subsidised when they come out looking good even when the gov intentionally puts a stick in it's wheels by essentially forcing it to subsidise pricing to competition.

> Where does Germany spend the next €100 billion today to avoid the most emissions?

They could spend much less and restart some nuclear. https://www.radiantenergygroup.com/reports/radiant-energy-gr...

> You do realize that renewable subsidies are being phased out all over the world?

CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.

Denmark required CfDs too. https://windeurope.org/news/successful-danish-offshore-wind-...

Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.

This tells me you are not serious. The easiest nuclear reactors to restart, as per that same nuclear lobby group, were those in the north.

Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.

What problem are you solving with even more overproduction in the north leading to re-dispatch?

> CfD is going strong in the UK; it seems about the only way of deploying it, given the revenue uncertainty associated with market saturation/cannibalisation.

> Denmark required CfDs too. https://windeurope.org/news/successful-danish-offshore-wind-...

I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything. Of course not lookign at solar, storage or on-shore wind.

Lets lookat those. In Germany, which still do CFD bids for solar, even though a ton get built on pure market value, the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.

The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero or negative. They trade money for a tiny bit of certainty. That is how far we've come.

> Of course, other subsidies exist. Feed in tariffs. Transmission charges. Capacity and ancillary service payments to provide services that solar/wind do not.

Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays when the majority of the eastern european nuclear fleet is offline? Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?

People like you love to complain about these things, but you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.

> Northern Germany is already overproducing electricity, leading to curtailment of renewables.

Overproducing some of the time. And pulling electricity from Sweden and Norway at other times.

> I love you now are trying to smear off-shore wind costs on everything.

Why is Denmark running the CfD auction if everything is so rosy for onshore wind and solar (plus batteries)?

> the CFD bids today are below the market price for the capture-rate of their electricity.

OK, they are betting on the future value of the electricity they produce being lower than today.

> The CFDs are also structured to not pay out when electricity is zero

So existing generators with older CfDs have priority over new generators with CfDs? Interesting.

> Who pays when half the French nuclear fleet is offline?

Why were they offline?

> Who pays for the N+1 requirements coming from nuclear power being enormous single points of failures leading to large reserves being necessary?

So the 1.X GW of standby is bad, but the whole-system sized standby required for intermittents is fine? Also let's not confuse the capacity factor of nuclear (including scheduled maintenance) with the odds of nuclear being offline unexpectedly.

> you can never formulate a solution where nuclear power is required to pay for the problem large single points of failures cause in the grid.

Wait, is this where I am meant to talk about SMRs? Or nuclear peaker power stations?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com