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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

Why does electricity need to be profitable? Are roads, justice systems, or armies profitable?

Most electricity and infrastructure is profitable. But not after carving it out in a way that looks at it in complete isolation. Just like train infrastructure creates a lot of business around the area of the train infrastructure, even if the train itself may seem not self sustained.

They are not profitable. They add taxes to gas so that it pays for it.

Sure, but then that's not "profitable" in the direct sense of "makes rich oligarchs richer".

I'm all for improving the quality of life for society. In the end the goal is to live well, not to destroy our living conditions for a few oligarchs to make more money. But "profitability" is not generally optimised like this, unfortunately.

I'm fairly sure that the total economic value that we get out of roads far exceeds the cost it takes to create and maintain them, yes. A similar argument can probably be made for justice systems and armies.

If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful. I think that's what we're talking about here.

I think that for your analogy to work, you also need to consider the total economic value that we get out of electricity as opposed to just revenue from electricity bills...?

If every government had subsidized and pushed forward a transition to ~100% nuclear power back in the 70s it would have effectively solved climate change. Electricity, industry and heat production account for >50% of CO2 production.

Then there's all the other effects of not having a high demand for hydrocarbons including less Middle East entanglement, less mining and drilling, more abundant and cheaper oil for uses other than burning it, etc.

> If a power generation system costs more to operate than the value of power we get out of it, it's probably not very useful.

There is more than money. There is stability (not depending on foreign oil, peak oil, etc), there is climate change, etc.

Notice how for roads you compare the total economic value of all roads against the cost of them. But for electricity you compare a single power generation system. You are not comparing the same thing. A fair comparison would be the total economic value of having electricity against the cost of all electricity infrastructure. Sadly this fair comparison is irrelevant in this thread.

Profit is the best way to measure that economic outputs exceed economic inputs, which is the whole point. But profit doesn't work so well as a measure when the outputs are hard to measure per individual beneficiary. Inputs are generally always pretty clearly measurable, but outputs aren't always, as in the case of roads and bridges - although even there often you can.

Electricity is super-duper easy to measure the individual benefits of, so profit is a really simple and easy way to measure the overall effective economic benefit. It's not perfect though - there are external costs to consider which aren't paid for directly, but we have lots of experience with that across all sorts of industries and usually solve for that via taxes and regulation, which become part of the profit equation.

It does not. But there are so many sources that can be. And easily at that. So why go this route?

A lot of countries consider energy security national security, and national security always bats last.

A lot of countries also use it to help subsidize (or help cover up the costs of) their military nuclear programs.

That's just not true. Event is PWR reactors take their root in the nuclear program for plutonium generation, that's not the case anymore.

Why would we choose a more expensive form of energy rather than cheaper forms?

There are good reasons to choose more expensive things, but "nuclear sounds cool" is not a good reason. There must be some sort of rationale and benefit beyond that.

Emissions.

Batteries and solar and wind are a lot cheaper, faster to deploy, and scale a ton better.

Nuclear is far too slow to solve our emissions problems, there's no chance of us being able to scale the nuclear industry to be able to confront climate change on the time scale necessary.

In contrast, batteries, solar, and wind are scaling on their own, without the massive government subsidies that would be needed to deliver nuclear too late to help.

Nuclear is actively negative-value too, because it discourages investment when people know that government-subsidised competition is coming.

Those things you pay for indirectly via taxes. Electricity you pay for directly. you can build unprofitable economically uncompetitive power, like nukes, and your rates will go up. People tend not to like that, but you can do it.

So the alternative is relying on solar panels made by a quasi-hostile country, because for some reason we can't produce them economically ourselves, or continuing to burn fossil fuels?

Countries just can pretty easily make solar economically themselves, it’s no great secret. But they don’t because china makes them a bit cheaper , you keep them forever and we’re not in a war. You think all the billions of parts and steel in a nuke will all be locally built too? For eg Go look up who owns almost all the foundries in the world that are required to build large pressure vessels for reactors.

So, option a sounds great to me, but you clearly have some kind of agenda here, that maybe you could make clearer

The costs for generating electricity needs to be paid for somehow.

Having the consumers of the electricity pay for has a lot of advantages!

Not sure about profitable but the lower the cost is the generate electricity, the better off the world will be. Cracking energy is, to state the obvious, a huge unlock.

Because in their wisdom the politicians have created energy markets.

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