First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.

In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.

Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.

That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.

But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.

the op link though is about solar installations approaching their lifetime, which means contracts from 10-20 years ago. i'd like to point out that you started with a very strong statement ("in practice not true"), which was then variously hedged. more importantly the fact that in practice the mitigations have manifested ("repowering is a windfall") doesn't after the fact negate that the initial contracts were exploitative. in my experience simply verbalizing and pricing various hidden factors (i used Shannon L. Ferrell's "understanding solar energy agreements" as starting point), decomissioning being one of them but other points in ferrell also played a role, or even just developing a rudimentary payments schedule, ended up strongly discouraging land owners (and smh als the solar representatives). i'm glad that we're having this dialogue though, because i'm sure there was no malicious intent behind those omittions, and solar industry has become significantly more transparent since.

People and businesses came out of lockdown with saved money and basically free loans burning holes in their pocket which caused a spike in demand (Least important, probably no longer an issue)

Businesses came out of lockdown with a diminished staff and a ton of new uncertainty (much more important, takes a while to recover for some businesses that are planning production multiple YEARS in advance).

Deglobalization/ U.S. national re-industrialization, started by Trump, continued with Biden, which will increase prices on pretty much everything. This is both a reasonable response to the issue, and makes the issue worse in the short term.

There's a hot war with a major energy producer, Russia, which will increase prices for every product where energy is an input (almost every product).

The biggest manufacturer in the world, China, has randomly been shutting down factories and whole metropolises for weeks at a time for the last several years. We just got a correction in this regard, but it will take time for the supply side of the equation to ramp back up, especially given all of the moving parts and uncertainty outlined above.

Bottom line - lean supply chains function well when everything is stable for a longish period of time and it looks like it will continue to be for a longish period of time. In unstable/uncertain environments, supply chains break down, and supply can't keep up with demand, and the government can't keep handing out free money without causing prices to hyperinflate.

The next least bad option would be to reduce spending. It'd be slower to act, can't be targeted as easily as increased taxes and there's no possible way to reduce spending by the trillions necessary to have an effect on inflation.

The fed has the power to act quickly. They raised rates a little on almost a monthly basis last year. Each was a little experiment. If they raised them too much, they could reduce them the next month. If they raised them too little to fully counter inflation, they could continue raising them.

Finally, the issue isn't getting "money" out of the system - it's getting purchasing power out of the system - reducing demand. And most people are buying 5-20% of houses, banks are buying the rest. Most large businesses aren't paying cash reserves to pay employees, they're using debt to pay those salaries.

The vast majority of government spending is on Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and defense spending. Politically those are untouchable, mostly for good reasons - reducing any of them will result in people literally dying.

The vast majority of what's left is hugely impactful high ROI activities like scientific research, infrastructure projects, and other basic good governance activities.

Unfortunately, that would imply Congress has their act together. Since they currently can't even manage to keep from defaulting the US govt on their current debt, I'm not hopeful they will stop being fiscal idiots anytime soon. I mean this to imply both political parties are fiscal idiots as far as I can tell.

Probably the former; if they found new things to spend it on, they’d spend it independent of whether or not they raised taxes.

Congress understands, even if they pretend not to when it provides a public excuse for opposing popular spending that they choose to avoid (while not bothering with that pretense when they want to spend) that there is no necessary, non-self-imposed, relationship between revenue and spending when operating in your own fiat.

For well over 200 years. Compared to how Andrew Jackson destroyed the US economy, the current Congress is doing fairly well.

Taxes also reduce productivity/supply, which is that opposite of what you want.

I'm not sure if that's true. And even if it is the effect is much slower compared to the near immediate impact raising interest rates has had.

Also, I consider inflation as a tax on it's own. So adding a tax on top of a tax is pouring salt on the wound if you ask me.

I'm satisfied that cash is paying 5%, at least that takes a bite out of inflation. For the last several years savers have been penalized and borrowers have been spoon fed money so I'm glad that's reversing. And I'm glad that rising mortgage rates are putting a ceiling on the housing market.

No I don't want to pay more in taxes to cover the recent insanity that I had nothing to do with.

Maybe when you advocated for raising taxes you mean somebody else's taxes, not yours? I suppose that's usually what people mean when they say that.

Supply chain issues won't sort themselves out for 3-4 years, possibly more - it can take at least that long to get a new domestic semiconductor chip fab or solar panel factory from the idea stage to full capacity. And if you are a business, the level of uncertainty as to what 4 years from now will look like makes a huge investment like that less than desirable. (Source: I work for businesses in these spaces).

Businesses just aren't as nimble as we were led to believe, and it's going to be a bumpy few decades in all likelihood, assuming China stays on the path of no-dissent nationalism and the U.S. stays on the path of re-industrialization.

In the long run, we need to transition the energy grid to electric/renewables/storage as fast as possible to get off of the fossil fuel roller coaster that has caused every major inflationary event. In the medium-term, we need to reduce impediments to building physical things in our country, so that businesses can respond more quickly to increases in prices by increasing supply.

Why is this taken as a fact everywhere. Surely, interest rates is a zero sum game?

I honestly don't understand.

If you can borrow for 5% but can make 20% return on that money, then you obviously are heavily incentivized to borrow at 5%. If you can borrow at 5% but can only make 6%, you are not really incentivized to borrow. This means less purchasing will happen, slowing down the economy.

To think about it another way, which might help: borrowing is moving money from the future to today. To do that costs you something. The more it costs, the less likely you are to do it.

Credit Cards move money from 30 days in the future to today without much cost(and in the US often incentivized with rewards/cash back, etc). As soon as 31 days happen, the cost to move that money forward in time is suddenly 20+%, making it ridiculous for anyone with a clue to borrow money on credit cards past 30 days.

Mortgages move up your house purchase by up to 30 years. If it costs you a lot more to borrow today than it did a few years ago, you are much less likely to move up that purchase.

The same is true for companies and everyone else. The more it costs to borrow, the less likely you are to borrow, decreasing spending today.

The same with businesses. Let's say you're a growing business. Things are good and you've been investing your 10% profits each year into hiring. Now banks decide that all decently profitable businesses can have that same 0% interest mortgage with 100 year term. Why not double, triple, quadruple your team? You could achieve your goals so much faster! But then the banks are offering all of your competitors the same deal. But there's not enough talent to go around. Suddenly you're in a bidding war for decent sales guys and the starting price is a million dollar salary. And those million dollar sales guys are spending their salary, competing with other million dollar sales guys for shit they don't need - the price of everything goes up.

This is an extreme example to illustrate WHAT JUST HAPPENED with record low interest rates. The economy was being heated up by very very cheap money. Inflation started getting out of control.

Now, if you were in the above hypothetical scenario, you might say "Hey maybe we shouldn't give out all those crazy loans, people are going crazy with all of this money, and it's kind of fucking everything up." And you would be right.

And so is the Federal Reserve.

Hypothesis 1) Tik Tok believes AI/machine learning algorithms themselves are converging across fields, and the company is finding that its internal AI innovations can be applied to biology and materials sciences algos and, possibly, vice versa. We'll call this one the "data are data" hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2) Tik Tok has decided that it's an AI company, not a content platform company. This is subtly different, as the locus of intersection between social media and materials sciences is in the company's human capital, not the algorithms used. Call this the "Data Scientists are Data Scientists" hypothesis.

Hypothesis 3) Tik Tok, as an avatar of the CCP, is deliberately adding fuel to the narrative that its a national security threat, thus baiting Biden to shut it down, which would be hugely unpopular with one of his critical voting blocks. Call this the "Troll Biden" hypothesis.

All of these hypotheses seem really important from a geopolitical perspective. If social media companies become our primary engines of applied sciences, that would be a pretty huge shift. If the CCP is using Tik Tok to use cultural popularity to play chicken in the trade war with the US government, that's a pretty major development as well.

Any other ideas? Am I missing something obvious?

A recently announced deal in California would build out solar for $20/MWh compared to your $200/MWh nuclear worst case. Renewables can and will get us 90% of the way there. I recognize that a renewables based grid will require massive investments in grid infrastructure, which are long overdue anyway, as well as eventually storage/batteries, which is still on an exponential cost reduction curve. Bbut given the massive cost difference of generation, that would still be a dramatic net benefit.

Particularly when nuclear plants take a decade to build compared to a year for a solar plant.

I get that nuclear is cool, particularly fusion, but I really don't understand this "renewables won't get us there" argument beyond that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo

The short version, when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow you need storage. How much, in many places you'd need several weeks of storage.

One way to do storage is to pump water into a reservoir. That is currently 80% of our storage. We'd need 500x what we currently have in that kind of storage to cover our needs. For batteries, we'd need 250,000x the amount of all batteries the currently exist in the entire world. She goes over other methods of storage.

She also goes over how much energy we get from things. Examples:

1kg of oil generates 13 kWh (13 kilowatts for 1 hour or 1 kilowatt for 13 hours)

1kg of coal 8 kWh

1kg of lithium battery 0.2 kWh

1kg of water 2.7 Wh (not kilowatts, watts so 1000x less)

1kg of uranium 24 GWh (24 gigawatts, so 1 million more than oil kilo->mega->giga)

She also goes over how much pollution the storage itself makes.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

It's also quite a bit cheaper doing this than building out enough nuclear power + storage to service our needs.

Snowy 2.0 can provide about 5% of the power NSW needs. That means we only need to build another 20 of those.

And that's only for power, we're not even talking about energy here. And we're already out of mountains. So no: it isn't doable even until we can build mountains on demand.

The study says one more.

If they can't divide a number by another number they should stick to eating glue.

First in a PWR (the only nuclear technology viable even with subsidy) 1kg gets you 150MWh not 24GWh. This is even more misleading than pretending a solar panel will produce 1.3kW/m^2 every hour of the year or pretending a lithium battery is 10kWh/kg based on the voltage and the density of pure lithium.

Second the uranium is only a tiny portion of the unrecyclable waste and a miniscule fraction of the reactor. The net mass power density is not much better than wind, or par with wind and worse than glassless solar. Naval reactors have higher power density but have much stricter operating conditions and costs that cannot even be borne with tax money covering the bill.

Solar + battery has powered a multi day flight. Nuclear has not.

Additionally comparing cost for cost, nuclear requires just as much storage as renewables because storage is vastly cheaper than paying $12000/kW for capacity you only use for 100 hours a year.

In a context where you're considering the labour and resources required to provide the energy with fission, storage has been solved for a decade.

If we come back to the real world and consider the only metric that matters of joules of radiative forcing removed per dollar then there are only a tiny handful of places you'd consider putting a new nuclear reactor, and then only once you'd paid to maximise the renewables in the region.

The mast on a wind turbine is inert and recyclable and the nacelle is fully recyclable. A 15MW or 10MW net wind turbine blade assembly is about 100t or roughly 4t/yr. At 300W per person that is 120g of fiberglass. It is fully downcyclable at positive roi.

A solar panel frame is inert and recyclable, as is the glass. The part generating the energy which wears out is about 5kg for 400W (upper bound based on glassless hail resistant panels available at retail) or 1kg/20W net of mostly-sand for a 20 year life. This is 750g/person or a few times more than the uranium + storage facilities, but hardly prohibitive and fully recyclable at near break even cost (you can even turn them back into new solar panels without re-purifying at reduced efficiency). The glass is substantially heavier, but if you're pretending we as a civilisation can't have 30kg of glass per person, then I really don't know how to talk to you -- it's such a non issue that panels are rarely optimized for mass even though doing so adds very little cost.

The low level waste and inert recyclable structure of a nuclear reactor is commensurable with the 1200t/10MW of a wind turbine and also the ten or so kg per 100W net of solar. The concrete holding up the wind turbine is substantially heavier. Solar requires little to none. Solar can coexist with other uses for the structure or land.

Not to mention that you're comparing costs unfairly, given the costs of nuclear include the costs of processing and storage of waste output, and nuclear is the only energy source in which we control all outputs and have dedicated and well engineering processes for dealing with those outputs.

I think that people are being completely unrealistic regarding the cleanliness of solar and wind, currently we bury the blades and we just turf the panels, both of which are hardware that needs to be upgraded. The heavy metals in panels do not break down at all. Which is funny given everyones focus on the radioactivity of nuclear waste, which even though takes a long time to completely stop being toxic, does actually stop being toxic.

I think there's a happy middle ground, and we need a good mix of sources, but people are comparing on features that they want to compare on, and ignoring others.

One of the early issues with recycling companies scaling is that solar modules don't break very often, so there hasn't been enough volume to get the industry off the ground. Solar modules are generally good for 10-40 years, so we're just starting to get the first generation of decommissioned plants (which by the way, are generally being repowered with more efficient modules).

Same with wind turbines. In any case, outside of the valuable heavy metals, landfills really aren't that huge of a problem, despite consumer focus. Decommissioned landfills are already a hot commodity among solar developers in the Northeast for instance because they're great, relatively flat, centrally located land that you can build a solar farm on. So as long as we're succeeding at reclaiming heavy metals, the waste generation component is pretty trivial. They're really just part of the cycle.

Finally, the decommissioning cost of solar plants is usually bonded in with a utility PPA to be borne by the project company, just like with nuclear, so it is indeed a fair comparison.

I agree regarding our regulatory environment for nuclear being counterproductive (it's counterproductive for wind and solar too, though to a lesser extent). However, even in positive regulatory environments such as France, Nuclear costs 3-5 times as much to build on a $/MWh basis and takes much longer to site, permit and construct. There may be a small role for base-loading nuclear in certain areas that have poor renewable resources, but it otherwise rarely makes sense, regulatory issues aside.

It's interesting to hear that the recycling processes have changed, how recent of a change is this? I took my viewpoint from what seemed to be a overwhelming amount of (what I consider to be non-biased) resources, around the panels "being" recyclable, but not actually being recycled. And I don't think it's unreasonable to be wary of toxic waste given the entire purpose of this thing is to clean up our energy system etc.

I also wasn't aware of the decommissioning being bonded, cheers for that.

Do you think there's a difference between (what I assume for you is) the US and other countries progression along the lifecycle of solar? I feel like in Australia where I am, a lot of the articles I'm seeing are bringing up that what you've mentioned as solved problems, don't seem to be here. I will admit though that we are fairly useless being an economy that derives so much from coal exports.

Yeah so the pricing thing I do understand, but I also just think it's important to continue nuclear as an option anyway for future improvements and general management of brain drain.

Cheers for being chill, I find topics so divisive these days, I never mean to come across and ignorant of other opinions and I try to engage and not just be a "this is my tribe and I'll die on this hill", this problem is too important for it to be a "I'd rather be right" type deal.

I imagine that they'd eventually run out of land to put them on, but from what I've seen, utility-scale solar often sits in places with a fair bit of room for expansion.

The other factor here is that many agreements between a solar power and a utility that buys the power only have 20 year terms. Generally, there's a strong incentive to renegotiate at the end of the term, but frankly, that renegotiation is kind of a mess in practice. It depends on the policies of the state, the utility's interests, the ISO market, etc. as to how that ends up working. Every solar farm is working in at least five overlapping regulatory environments - local, state, utility/retailer domain, the ISO or regional grid, and the federal regulatory environment. Decentralization is nice in theory, but definitely makes it difficult to scale the widespread change that's required right now.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/articles/carbon-rivers-make...

EOL turbine blades have also been used in several architectural projects as everything from a concrete reinforcing agent to actual structural components.

Solar panels are currently still problematic, however there is huge industry spend on recycling R&D. Are you prepared to bet the farm that recycling tech won't run down the problem in less time than it would take to permit and construct a nuclear power plant given the 5 years it takes to permit one and 7-10 years it takes to construct?

Currently those reactors only exist as experimental reactors, so it's fair discounting them. Same as it's fair to consider the waste generated by wind since the vast majority of blades end up in landfills. Even though on theory they needn't.

Difference two being that after those gen3 reactors are done you still have 10% of waste which can be used to wipe out cities and ecosystems, while after you are done recycling turbine blades you have slag and (if properly neutralised) chemically inert goo

This is where PWRs are after 60 years of maturing the technology and there are many low hanging fruit to be picked because there have not been large quantities of silicon panels for more than a few years.

Those Gen 3 reactors are still steam engines, and it's questionable whether steam engines can compete even if the heat source is free.

That's not to say that the blades are more dangerous than the nuclear waste, just that the nuclear waste has many years of waste management engineering behind it, due to its danger. So there are defined processes of management that are well tested, well designed and well implemented.

Processes for blades currently are just bury them in landfill, which causes a bunch of unmitigated issues.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turb...

The idea that we "just bury" nuclear waste in the same way a dog buries a bone, is kinda funny, but very far from reality.

This also doesn't even touch on nuclear waste recycling, which is enormously beneficial.

Same goes for solar cells, the recycling process is similar (but easier) than most regular electronics and if you think nuclear power plants don't require heavy metals in their construction, boy have I some news for you about what is in your laptop/desktop.

As far as disposal of nuclear waste goes, yeah there's a ton of engineering involved because the stuff is just that big a pain in the ass to deal with for any length of time. Given half-lives typically range between 30 years and 5 times the length of recorded human history and that the rule of thumb for "safe" levels of emission are 7 half-lives we're talking about borderline geologic time frames before certain types of waste meet anyone's definition of safe. We could also spend a moment here reviewing all of the incidents in the last 40 years where source material has managed to jump a fence and ended up crapping up an entire village or neighborhood. All of that is to say that anyone peddling the notion that storage of radioactive waste is a solved problem either has an agenda and no ethics or is grotesquely uninformed.

It looks less silly when you acknowledge the problems while explaining how they are outweighed by the benefits.

Windmill blades are inert, downcyclable and smaller in mass per joule than low grade nuclear waste.

Battery technology is NOT on any kind of exponential curve.

We’ve been waiting decades for the promise of renewable energy. Time is running out quickly.

100 million barrels of oil a day and 40% of electric power generated from coal.

I get that no one likes to admit they were wrong, but it’s 2022 and not 1985. All that squandered time means we’re unlikely to avoid serious climate issues

UPDATE

Just to be crystal clear: Battery technology is NOT on any kind of exponential curve.

People who are telling us to wait because they think they’re improving exponentially are sending us past the point of no return

Maybe we can get it to 25% by 2030?

Hopefully we can stop building coal plants. Incredible emissions. 40% of global electricity…

And Germany is restarting

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/world/europe/germany-russ...

If a poor country can achieve this, there is nothing stopping much richer countries.

You didn't lose a decade due to renewable capabilities. You lost a decade due electing the wrong politicians, influenced by big oil.

Carter installed solar panels on the White House. Reagan removed them two years later. It's nonsense like that that resulted in your lost decades. While other countries were already racing ahead.

Is it really renewable? (I don't know, but I assume biofuels are only viable with massive fertilizer subsidies. Also, I hope "renewable" doesn't mean "let's cut down the Amazon rainforest and wait 200 years for it to grow back".)

Cutting down the Amazon to power cars would indeed be foolish but the same folks protecting the Amazon are the same folks pushing renewables. Likewise, the current president turned a blind eye to deforestation while pushing for more fossil fuels. For the time being if you want to protect the Amazon it's the renewables folks you need to get behind.

I'm sure we can deal with a 30% electricity deficit that happens randomly with a few days notice. We can shut down unimportant things like residential power. No one really needs lightbulbs every day of the month after all.

On the grid scale, a pumped hydro facility can provide energy storage for thousands. Energy storage is technologically a solved problem, it’s just not equally distributed yet.

More like they said five, then ten after five years ahf passed.

>Battery technology isn’t on any kind of exponential curve.

Thats simply false, and a weird thing to fabricate. The very idea discredits the rest of a person's assessment of tech.

https://news.mit.edu/2021/lithium-ion-battery-costs-0323

> I get that no one likes to admit they were wrong,

This is some extremely strong projection. J'accuse

The article doesn’t discuss any exponential decrease for a reason. And most of the “dramatic drop” looks like it happened in the first 10 years

Time is running out.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/chart-behind-the-three-decade-coll...

THIRTY FOLD ISNT EXPONENTIAL.

Please reevaluate the plan. It likely contains a lot of optimism and a few required miracles

A * exp(b * t) = A / 30 => b = - log( 30 ) / t

As far as I can see a thirty fold decrease does fit into any exponential curve if you have the right rate constants or times, so I don't really get what you mean with that.

You say that "nobody likes to be proven wrong" but I in fact do like to be proven wrong. The "nobody" appears to only apply to yourself.

As always the rebound effect is kicking our ass, instead of producing the same and polluting less we pollute the same and produce more

> +416 Change in renewable generation (TWh)

> +5 Change in fossil generation (TWh)

I'm confused by this, it doesn't add up: change in renewables + fossil generation = +421TWh, so why does it say +389TWh for change in global electricity demand? Is 32TWh just going to waste?

I disagree with the premise and therefore with their conclusion. Renewables (plus storage, plus demand management, plus HVDC transmission) will get us there. But there isn't here

The waste is not a solved problem. In Germany we have huge problems with it hence why nuclear is on the way out.

Nuclear in France had problems with running during the summer due to the water in rivers being too hot and the system not maintaining the correct temperature difference.

Then on the other hand, it depends on how much uranium we use. "LWRs only consume about half of one percent of their uranium fuel while fast breeder reactors will consume closer to 99%. Currently, more than 80% of the World's reactors are Light Water Reactors (LWRs)."

So moving to fast breeder reactors would essentially live us with enough uranium for hundreds of years.

California is the great example for solar power without needing a lot of storage/imports, in a similar way that Iceland is a great example for geothermal.

The right way to fix this of course would be to take the same technology that lays undersea fiber optics, and take REBCO superconducting tapes and lay completely efficient under-sea power cables to locations with 8 hour separations around the world, then build solar their. It becomes a very different equation if you start having reliable sunlight.

We could do this today - none of it requires new technology. What it would require is a degree of international cooperation and trust which would be more or less unprecedented.

I do kind of wish some "change the world" billionaires would get interested in this, because it's an expensive project but it can both make money and is not the sort of the thing that requires more then commercial cooperation agreements to get started. And a single, global-scale electricity grid would definitely revolutionize things.

To get a billionaire interested you can’t position this tech as a global solution; it’s a nonstarter. However you could get a billionaire interested if you identify an economic arbitrage opportunity it enables that isn’t easily eroded.

Doesn't mean you should turn of any power plant, but it is just not a very good or efficient way to generate energy right now. Economic considerations will always restrict security. It was the case in Japan and will be the case everywhere else as well.

Fission is only efficient if you manage to reduce the question of ecological impact to CO2. But the overall calculation is far more in favor of renewable forms of energy.

Running a nuclear power plant is very cheap. Building it is expensive and requires lots of capital upfront. The cost of nuclear is mostly interest. That is why it is a bit more expensive in UK (private capital) vs France (state capital).

How "the overall calculation is far more in favor of renewable forms of energy." ? In order to build enough solar or wind, plus batteries to replace all the nuclear production, we will have to extract a lot of resources (rare earth, lithium, etc.) pour a lot of concrete (for wind) which creates a lot of CO2, make lots of iron (energy hungry and producing lots of CO2). And all the waste involved, and they also have a lifespan, and needs to be replaced over time.

Not saying that we should not use solar/wind. But I am not convinced that it is the silver bullet and we can replace all the current and growing energy production with solely solar+ wind. It seems to me more reasonable to have a base line with nuclear, esp. if CO2 reduction and preparing for oil/gaz/coal peak are the goal.

Auke Hoekstra would disagree with the claim EE alone is not sufficient.

https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1557466581185224704

*really just solar and wind, which seems to be mostly what people mean when they say renewables

A renewable does the same thing, but when there isn't sunshine or wind you cannot just bring more in.

Throttling a nuclear reactor can not happen as quickly, and the have much slower ramp rates as well.

Pumped hydro storage was developed because of this reason. We would likely use batteries today, instead of more pumped hydro.

Same answer for nuclear, if you can't turn it up enough, then you simply haven't installed enough.

Storage can help mitigate the ramping concerns about having lots of nuclear on the grid. For France to be able to have 70% of generation as nuclear, they depend on using the continents grid for balancing, in addition to having some very high priced fast damping nuclear plants. But charging storage with solar, and using that stored electricity, is cheaper than using nuclear in the first place.

And at current prices of roughly $200/MWh for nuclear, and $20/MWh for solar, you can throw away an awful lot of solar capacity before nuclear makes any sense financially. And at $160/MWh for storage, which is a levelized cost which includes charging at ~$50/MWh, there's even room to not use all the battery capacity everyday and still have a firm energy source cheaper than nuclear.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

Storage isnt particularly cheap, but while solar and wind are 5x cheaper than nuclear power it is waaaay cheaper to combine solar+wind+more storage for a fully dispatchable grid than it is nuclear+less storage.

Imagine a world when we could move stuff and communicate with the other coin of the planet from coast to coast. We could call it pipelines, internet, telephone cables or something like this. Can't wait for this to be invented

The nuclear central of Vaporhizeyou in Ukraine is a liability? In some aspects, for sure it is a weak point in the safety of Ukraine. It depends on the point of view and in what direction the winds blow.

The beginning.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/europe-rivers-drought

Not any more.

This is only true if you're going for some pedantic definition of renewable energy where it only counts if you're at 100%. Which, this being HN, is the kind of thing I expect but...

The reality is different: we need to reduce the impact of climate change by any means necessary since are already in a state of climate emergency. If we calculate that using fossil fuels to build solar/wind turbines/wave energy/etc. and then using those to power homes will be a net negative in global emissions, then we should do it. We can build the next generation using renewable energy.

Worrying about whether this fits some definition of renewable energy is just a distraction. Renewable energy is not the end goal, tackling climate change and reducing pollution is.

This will surely still put most renewables in front of fossil fuels and (depending how you count it) most nuclear.

But it is a largely ignored metric by the general public

First, we need to look at where renewables are being used and if they're actually in the areas of greatest pollution, i.e creating a net reduction rather than just meeting a government number.

For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work.

1: https://www.withouthotair.com/

If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.

another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.

We need to zero our emissions, if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. And natgas isn't going to do that for us.

Temporary hacks have an odd way of becoming permanent features, especially when mind-blowing amounts of money are on the line.

Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.

So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't?

The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.

Here in France, half of our nuclear reactors are now off (and we had to turn on some old coal plants because of many unexpected technical issues). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

The new EPR (Flamanville) continues to be delayed and the one in Finland that just went live has been shut down last week. Also, we may have to reduce the power of many of our plants that are built along rivers because we won't be able to cool them off during droughts.

It's much easier and safer to install renewables now (as we just started with offshore wind) that bet on nuclear. It's also quite difficult to envision relying on Niger and Kazakhstan to supply uranium in the long term…

The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-...

Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

Yes, it really made sense for De Gaulle to launch the French civil nuclear program in 1969 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_programme_nucl%C3%...

But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue. And by the time we hit such limits, we'll have many more long term storage options.

I'm not against nuclear (it's fine) but let's not pretend we're still in The Glorious Thirty.

>The world still uses coal for 40% of electricity and now Europe is firing up more coal plants because of the war in Ukraine.

Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.

>Would it be safe to assume we lost at least a decade of time waiting for the windmills, batteries, etc?

We're not waiting https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2021/executive-summar... but we could do much, much more with renewables.

>We could be talking about carbon neutral by 2060 instead of 2050.

We're also talking about being carbon neutral and retiring all nuclear power plants in France by 2050, so… https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospective...

If this were the case, we wouldn’t be starting all these coal plants.

“Yet France, with all its nuclear power plants (half of them off due to technical issues), also has revived some coal plants.”

Yes, so coal, with its large greenhouse emissions, is still used instead of renewables

Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?

What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.

Let's look at the UK, between 2000 to 2021 Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart):

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

UK electricity component of the consumer prices index (in real terms 2010=100): 68.1 to 128.2 (source https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

Can't find the exact same series for France but you can compare the two between 2010 and 2020 here and see a comparable trend: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/d40f8154-...

We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!

Just to get our terms in-line, renewables typically include hydro-electric. Hydro-electric is a great power-source if you have the geography for it. My province of Ontario, between Nuclear and Hydro, pretty much only derives 5% of power from fossil fuels. The problem is, there aren't any more places to dam to generate hydro. So that's done.

And yeah, there is a ceiling on how much wind/solar you can handle as a percentage of your power-mix because you need to rely on base-load to bridge the intermittency of wind and solar. I don't know what that percentage is ... maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 60% - but it's going to be somewhere in that range.

>We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising.

It doesn't matter if they are free! You're not replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar because you still need to run your economy when the sun isn't shinning or the wind isn't blowing. You'll need base-load from somewhere else. Nuclear is actually terrible for that because it can't spin up and spin-down on-demand. Hydro and Natural gas are perfect for that, but like I said, if you don't have the geography for hydro, you're stuck with natural gas.

Modern electrical grids are powered by a much larger range of primary energy sources, and increasingly have distributed storage and generation as key components. This requires some sophisiticated load-balancing technology, but we're not reliant on engineers throwing switches on a mainboard like it was 1950 and slide rules were in everyone's pockets, are we? For example see:

https://www.nrel.gov/grid/advanced-distribution-management.h...

For example, if solar input to a grid at noon greatly exceeds demand, or there's strong afternoon offshore winds, an advanced grid could instruct all battery storage linked to the grid (in the form of everything from electric cars to home battery systems) to switch to absorbing that output in real-time, while keeping the overall grid energized. The notion that you'd even want a steady state baseload system dumping power into the grid in that situation makes little sense. If the sun goes down and wind dies down, then switch all the battery storage to feed into the grid, on a real-time second-by-second basis. That's how future grids will operate in the absence of either nuclear or fossil fuel inputs.

Because Gerhard Schröder, the former chancellor who approved NS1 in his last days, liked Russia, which earned him nice board seats on Russian energy companies. And because Angela Merkel had her constituency in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the landfall site of the pipelines.

And LNG was always associated with fracking in the US, so for environmental reasons it was not very popular.

I don't believe Australia plans on going to Nuclear any time soon.

For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Of interest is SA which has a wind/solar/gas mix, Tasmania which is Hydro/Wind, and Vic/NSW/Qld who are all still heavily using fossil fuels.

Yeah, so they'll use natural gas and coal as baseload.

>For those of you interested you can see a complete breakdown of our power generation here: https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=1d&interval=30m

Expand the range to more than a day, and yeah, Gas+Imports(Coal?) is ~40%, so you're stuck on fossil fuels forever.

South Australia is also so small that it's almost pointless to use as a data point.

German here. Let me tell you that a lot of us have been asking the same question. :)

Your argument seems to be that "they built these pipelines so that must have been a rational decision" but looking at the track record of the conservatives (Merkel's party, "in charge" for 32 out of the last 39 years), their donors, and the just straight-up corruption cases routinely found-and-ignored in this party... I'd say you need to find better arguments.

EDIT: and yes, as siblings point out, their competitor SPD didn't exactly take a rational stance on this either...

Again, I mentioned Germany, but it isn't just Germany. No country in the world is running on wind/solar. There are no near-term plans for any country on Earth to replace fossil fuels with wind/solar. It isn't the fact that some conservative leaders put some extra taxes or regulations on solar and wind. It's that solar and wind cannot actually replace fossil fuels. Solar and Wind are diffuse, intermittent power sources, with no grid-scale battery technology available to bridge that intermittence. Therefore, you need natural gas to use a base load when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing. This is also why natural gas companies tend to be one of the biggest supporters of solar and wind.

For solar, the ministries are by now steeped in a mentality that's hostile to renewables. Robert Habeck (greens) is now minister of economy and ecology, and even when he told his houses to come up with regulation improvements to solar, the results were... weird. One report stated that the proposals included rules like "if I use any of my own PV generated power in my home, I receive none of the regular public subsidies anymore for the power I send into the national grid." There was no technical or logical grounds for that; it was just that all the ministry mentality by now was "if there's a way to put stones in the way of renewables, the default is to do that."

Frankly, and I'm sorry to sound rude about this, you need to stop using a country as an argument for which you clearly have no idea what the political & societal conditions are. Like I said in my first reply: find better arguments.

I don't take this as rudeness but rather a result of a different worldview.

The disconnect you and I have is that you believe that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. In a universe where that fact is true, the fact that wind/solar hasn't been rolled out would most likely be a result of bad government policy.

I don't believe wind/solar can replace fossil fuels. So the fact that wind/solar haven't succeeded in Germany is perfectly inline with expectations. It wouldn't matter what policies Germany put in, because it isn't possible for wind/solar to replace fossil fuels was never going to work. There was no policy that was going to change the reality of this.

Let's torture this a little longer.

Regardless of the minutia, and internal politics, the big picture reality is that Germany still invested in wind/solar to a greater extent then any advanced economy.

I understand you're saying that mistakes were made and more could have been done, and this political party didn't do a good job, etc., but that's par for course. That's how any complex government program is run in a democratic nation. In fact, maybe you even have to price that in. That is, if a well-managed, rich nation cannot shepherd through this transition, that also says something about the viability of wind/solar.

With respect to why Germany is still building natural gas pipelines. In my mind this was an actual rational decision because I truly believe that when it comes to high-level people in the know, there is an understanding that wind/solar is never going to work. You would not be spending billions of dollars when an alternative is both cheaper (as proponents of wind/solar claim), geopolitically less reliant on an authoritarian state, and also gives you political brownie points (because everyone loves wind/solar).

The other countries know that if they hard stop energy flow their economies will suffer, and these projects take a decade to plan, a decade to sell, and a decade to implement. Anything Germany is building now was probably developed or announced in the 00s.

That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind).

There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter.

We should try to get as much energy from renewables like sun & wind, but I think we'll still need another form of energy generation. Energy storage can help us increase the upper limit of renewables in the total yearly mix though.

The cost of inefficiency is a function of energy stored, not storage capacity per se, so effectively its cost scales as (storage capacity) * (# of times charged/discharged). Therefore low efficiency isn't particularly expensive for long-term storage.

So maybe we'll see gas turbines continue to provide power that ultimately is sourced from wind and solar via hydrocarbon conversion, but that's perfectly OK since it would be carbon neutral.

The upshot is this is all a reason to be sanguine about solar and wind.

Because of inconsistency, solar and wind will remain non-viable as a primary source of power.

As for comparison to natural gas and such, CO2 taxes will be increased until those are phased out. Still economical? Taxes will be raised until they aren't. We have to leave most of the carbon in the ground.

To be fair, waste isn't really the issue with nuclear power either.

So what is?

Because you're working overtime here against it without giving any reasons whatsoever.

Cost. It's the reason few nuclear plants are being built. No other reason is needed.

Wind and solar will provide cheap power at times, extremely cheap at times when the production outstrips demand. It’s a simple and easy business model to buy this cheap power and sell it back to the grid at times of high demand. Buy some batteries, then buy low and sell high electricity. Bam, grid evened out by the invisible hand.

I keep hearing its so much cheaper, but renewables keep requiring dark patterns, more money, more subsidies. If it was so much cheaper it would just win automatically because of the market.

Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two.

Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency.

Wind even has major long term intermittency issues. This just happened in Europe: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/why-this-fusion-tech-may-be...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrotron

Nuclear has been around quite a while as well, but is heavily encumbered by public sentiment, sub-optimal regulations, and knowledge atrophy. There is much more room for optimization before running into physical laws.

Are you looking at installed capacity or effective production?

The price of renewable energy is often very low, frequently even negative. This does not reflect renewables advantages, but their disadvantages: being available in abundance when the energy is not needed or wanted.

Even the Energy Return on Investment is barely sufficient for solar, for example, so I have a hard time believing that the cost is actually competitive.

PV produces 10 to 20 times as much energy as it takes to make, dropping all the time with improvements.

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/busting-the-myth-on-energy-retur...

Since people are studying psilocybine for depression, PTSD, etc, why not others like Mescaline, LSD, or DMT? Why leave something off the table? Maybe LSD is great for a specific type of PTSD and psilocybine for depression? You got to study it to figure out. And who knows, maybe these drugs don't actually help at all. Either way, you have to study them to figure anything out.

> Mescaline and psilocybine have been used in spiritual and therapeutic settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Yes and no. Those are the active ingredients, but these have not been distilled. From my extremely naive understanding, other chemicals here could affect people differently. So to create a safer and more therapeutic drug. Maybe you even need some of those other chemicals. But you can't find out without testing.

One thing is for sure, in a clinical setting you want very controlled dosages. You're not going to get that by ingesting plants/fungi.

In our current political reality, anything that is not desirable to Republican elites will be argued against as if it were simply a technical "Mistake." No matter how many times they're out-argued, they continue arguing on a technical basis. "Tax cuts to the rich increase jobs and wealth for everyone" and "Climate change isn't being caused by human action" are probably the two most glaring examples of trash arguments that should sink under the weight of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, but they may never go away. And it seems that more and more political arguments are increasingly in this camp, emboldened by the persistence of these incorrect assertions.

Politicians/elites are blatantly arguing in bad faith at least some of the time. They won't be convinced by any argument or evidence, no matter how damning. They are getting away with this because outside of hard science, nothing can be "proven" and they will surface any doubt in an argument and simply magnify it. At some level, it's a social hardship that owes to epistemology and the limits of our knowing.

Of course there are still difficult technical questions of governance as well. Policy making is not easy. But at this point, it's extremely difficult to distinguish between arguing against "mistakes" and arguing against something that is simply inconvenient to the arguer. On the surface they generally look the same - like a person in a suit making a technical argument. The trash arguments are poisoning the well, making it impossible to share a space for discussing the truly difficult questions with those who disagree.

We live in an era of noise, and we are in desperate need of better filters. How do we detect an argument made in bad faith? How do we respond once we know an argument can't be won? I don't think we have good answers to either question.

The noise isn't surprising. Certain industries are notorious for producing pollution. Mental pollution produced by bad-faith "debate" is just another instance of a general pattern.

A cure? Cui bono is a reasonable first test for bad faith. It's not infallible and can lead to paranoia, but it's better than nothing.

But I think the pattern is even more general, and transcends political positions.

Some people are inherently entitled, narcissistic, and exploitative, and they will always try to gravitate to positions of power unless there's an explicit mechanism that stops them.

A minority of these individuals are unusually inventive and productive, but most are simply resource parasites. Once in power they do incredible damage.

And they are very adaptive. They will operate successfully in every traditional political system you can imagine. And they will use conflict and mistake rhetoric, as suits their needs.

Are you saying this is another way in which the Elites stays in control ? Good way to 'increase passion' :)

Supply side effects are real. Certainly it's reasonable to say that their impact has been drastically overstated in the political arena, but dismissing the entire concept as a trash argument misrepresents reality.

We place faith in effective political and social institutions and aggressively defend them from those that attack them or bypass them.