Hacker News Reader

Comment by ViewTrick1002 | Hacker News Reader

We’ve solved both. The research has moved on from VALCOE to whole system modeling. Including transmission, storage, backup, firming and modeling it hour by hour.

Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper in climates ranging from Australia to the Nordics:

Some recent ones:

Finland, 2025: nuclear scenarios 71–84% higher system cost; unrestricted least-cost optimization builds zero new nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Denmark, 2026: system-level LCOE including storage, flexibility and system integration; renewables substantially cheaper than nuclear. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Australia, CSIRO + AEMO GenCost 2025–26: whole-system modelling including transmission, storage and firming; renewables + storage remain the lowest-cost net-zero pathway. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

View on HN

I do a lot of work in this space, including all that modeling you mentioned. "Solved" is a bit of an overstatement. The system works, and it can work with renewables+storage (modulo total supply of BESS is not there yet). However, there is high tail risk to not having steady baseload power.

And, even under ideal conditions, baseload is still quite hard. Especially in Southern Europe (e.g. which has quite a bit less land than Australia, and less wind than the nordic countries).

Fundamentally, I agree that it boils down to cost, and the people writing $XXB checks are generally pretty good at financial modeling. If nuclear makes sense, and the regulations allow it, they will build it. However, it's fighting against a highly variable, zero-marginal-cost renewable market with something that is high capex. Same reason people don't build new coal in the US despite certain politicians trying to popularize it.

My guess... If it does take off, either it will have to be wildly cheap (unlikely), or there are geopolitical concerns about the gas backup that Italy currently relies on so heavily to make the renewables work.

I love renewables, especially solar with batteries, but I definitely see the tail risks of not having some amount of independent base load, for which nuclear seems like the best fit. The tail risk could materialize from different sources; could be an asteroid, nuclear war, weird weather patterns etc. nuclear would chug along in most of these conditions. So if I would be a policy maker or decision maker, I would definitely invest in nuclear and maintain an industry regardless of the initial cost. I would try to make it as cheap as possible.

This is having decided that we must waste money and resources on new nuclear, and trying to rationalize it.

We fix tail risks when we encounter them. Not by envisioning your pet ones to make your solution fit.

> We fix tail risks when we encounter them

You're suggesting to start fixing the issue after the blackout happens?

Building the only dispatchable source of zero CO2 emissions electricity is not a waste of money.

Valcoe paper is written by the founder of antinuclear movement in Denmark(which led at ti becoming one of the highest coal burners), has wild assumptions about hydrogen getting basically free for firming

Australia's weather is different from what we got in Europe. And let's not pretend many of aemos estimations are already obsolete due to increased costs of transmission and hydro storage that are huilt.

Dk still has worse emissions vs france/sweden, just like SA

If you don't like nuclear, you'll have gas peakers, like Germany

Germany made their electricity both very expensive and high CO2 per joule.

German gco2/kwh are dropping but it could have been so much better with nuclear similar to France

It is still very high, especially when you consider how expensive it is.

> Studies are converging on renewable energy systems being cheaper

Cheaper for how long? And in what conditions?

What happens in a post petrol world? What happens when china stops exporting panels/batteries/inverters (aka a good 50% of the current supply)?

Until one day a volcano wakes up and decides no one can have sunlight for a few months.

Edit to add: heh, the CSIRO eh? That bastion of truth.

Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues? Or the majority of the Eastern European due too hot or low rivers? Or half the Swedish fleet multiple times the last couple of years?

Please do tell what is wrong with the CSIRO GenCost.

There are scenarios where either can fail, that’s why it’s smart to have a multi pronged energy strategy. Maintain strong industries for being able to do both renewables and nuclear in house so you can hedge the tail risks of either of them. Not everything needs to have the most economically efficient model. As we’ve seen with the supply chain problems they happened during Covid, some things are more important than absolute cost.

"Multi pronged" works when different technologies complement each other. The problem is that renewables and nucelar power competes for the same slice, a battle nuclear loses with a mile. Any grid will include emergency reserves. But those optimize for lowest possible CAPEX and higher OPEX. Since they sit idle most of the time.

Nuclear power has the opposite spread of ruinously expensive CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.

I would say the pandemic shows that you do not need to account for every possibility. Humanity is amazing at adapting itself and finding new solutions to the problem at hand, rather than wasting all our resources trying to prevent the next made up disaster.

This is why we model with 10 year winters, X00 year floods or similar. Fix reasonable problems, leave the tail risk as tail risk. The worst that happens are rolling blackouts until the grid adapts, which is no different than any other outage due to grid maintenance or someone cutting a cable with a digger.

> Or do you mean half the French nuclear fleet offline due to corrosion and cracking issues?

It mostly happened because covid hit at the same time.

I'm interested in why people think this is wrong, in case this is the reason for the downvotes.

Because what is true for these 3 countries is not true for all countries. There are counter-examples where nuclear is cheaper.

In most countries which don't have the advantages of Australia or Finland, you do need a mix as the OP was saying

What is Italy lacking? Sun? Wind?

Usually comes down to industry energy needs.

I didn't downvote but it's nonsense, nobody can sustain a winter with batteries and other storage.

I only checked the first paper and it doesn't seem talk about what would happen if a 3 weeks bad wind event would happen in winter, and a rough look at the figures makes me think it just wouldn't work at all. I didn't check the other papers.

And the proof is in the pudding anyways, if it's that cheap and feasible to do, well let's see who's doing it.

It is Simon Michaux that throws out the figure that you need 2TWH of storage to make it through he worse of Winter.

https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/why-renewables-cannot-power...

I think he points to a valid point but completely over plays his hand. Everyone that has argued these kinds of points have brought valid arguments but have completely under estimated the pace of change.

Do keep in mind that Michaux is a fan of being a little contrarian. He likes the attention it being to him.

He might be right, and him pointing to the issues may actually be something that helps us avoid these issues. Generally, knowing about a problem is a much better position than being slammed by something you didn't anticipate.

I tend to think long term we are going to a much lower energy world, that we made the mistake of building a world and our expectations to the paradigm of fossil fuels. But I also think that we are not going back to the stone age and that renewables will do better than the pessimists. Good chance we will hit a reasonable mid-ground even if it means living standards change, possibly a smaller, slower but more intentional world. It may be nice even if it means you can no longer get a slab of Coke for an hours wage.

I think the complete opposite, we are going towards a high energy world, I expect the current electric grid to be multipled by 3, both to replace petrol and add new usage on top.

Which makes the whole "we'll build renewables and storage" sounds even more unrealistic

They just model the weather hour by hour. But you’re made up scenario is of course impossible to cover.

OP (ViewTrick) is very well known in the online nuclear energy community. He is the moderator of the NuclearEnergy subreddit where he regularly bans people for saying positive things about nuclear energy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com