Comment by epistasis

Comment by epistasis 8 hours ago

The entire world is switching to sustainable energy at a tremendous rate because they are the cheapest source of electricity, and storage is economical on every grid's peak price to low price swing that I have seen. In places like Pakistan solar is taking over because the grid made really poor investments in very expensive fossil fuels. In Africa, a panel and a battery is cheaper to run than a generator, which is life changing. As that scales up it will revolutionize entire economies.

In the US, the vast majority of new generation is renewables, matched with a ton of storage. There's some gas too, but it will be uneconomical to run these gas plants before their end of life:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/21/eia-projects-record-6...

The biggest impediment to cheap sustainable electricity is political and basic ignorance of the voting public that allows utilities to continue installing familiar, but more expensive fossil generation.

Moldoteck 8 hours ago

what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs? No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself. South Australia might get close having extremely nice weather patterns but even they will periodically import from fossils neighbors. Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone

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epistasis 6 hours ago

> what has home solar to do with country's grid and industrial needs?
Why are you asking this question without answering it? Unless you're assuming I said something I don't, I don't understand the relevance here.
> No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself.
A couple of fallacies here: non existence yet doesn't mean it's not possible, especially for a grid with equipment lifetimes measured in multiple decades. Once it makes sense to build a VRE only grid it will take several decades for it to happen.
> Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
Nuclear was completely overbuilt, based on bad over predictions for energy demand, leading to excess orders, then the only plants still being under construction being the ones that were poorly managed, leaving a distinctly bad financial taste in the utilities' mouths. They had to be bribed by state legislatures in South Carolina and Georgia to let them pre-bill ratepayers and also put ratepayers on the hook for overages on construction for new reactors, which everyone expected and which happened disastrously.
It's really unclear that nuclear is ever going to be cheap when its main costs are high skilled construction labor, concert and steel. None of those inputs are getting cheaper and the only chance at making logistics and management better seem to be small modular reactors, which are inherently cost inefficient due to losing the scale advantages of 1GW reactors.
It's no longer 1970, and the costs and technology of the modern economy are fundamentally doffeeent. We have learned so much, and I hope that we have learned tha nuclear doesn't fit with our advanced technology of the 21st century.

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