Utility installs dwarf residential in most places, but a notable exception is Australia. This probably reflects dysfunctional regulation and regulatory capture by fossil fuel interests there.

The reasons further down explain why utilities are very slow to react and why even after a better choice is available.

But even with your further comparison, you are falling prey to the same bad logic: solar can't be cheaper because we aren't already using it. You are looking at the decisions from 2010 to 2015 to evaluate the situation from 2021.

For changing technology, that's a really bad assumption. If nearly all the market for CPUs is Intel, then AMD comes out with a far better deal than Intel, do you evaluate how much better AMD is by the installed base across all computer? Of course not.

Check out what is being planned for the future. Some of the decisions are not great, because utilities don't yet know that storage is super cheap. But you'll find that in price responsive markets, nearly all new planned generation is wind, solar, and storage. Along with a few new gas plants proposed by people hedging against the dominant tech, or just through inertia.

I get the point, I just don’t think we can justify that level of confidence.

We might be just about to reach a grand unified theory of everything and then science just becomes collecting butterflies or whatever that quote was; or it might turn out that uncovering dark energy reveals 10^80 new kinds of fundamental particles and a way to construct pocket universes we can engineer to extract Big Bang energy levels or dump equivalent levels of entropy.

I wouldn’t want to put money on which; and I say that as someone hopeful for life extension tech that would allow me to wait and find out.

Maybe something like this.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/56/1/jamc-d-...

But it isn’t particularly helpful when trying to explain policy imho.

> Some results were famously silly, such as ... adding the cost of nuclear war to nuclear reactors.

Is that really silly? The incremental increase in the risk of nuclear war for each gigawatt of civilian nuclear power generation might be small, but the costs of a nuclear war could be quadrillions of dollars (for example if it set the world back by 100 years).

Obviously measuring that risk is difficult, but to give an example, imagine that civilian nuclear power were limited to just the countries which currently have nuclear weapons. That would greatly reduce the proliferation risk and the chance of nuclear breakout in countries like Iran.

The urgency of addressing climate change may take precedence over these concerns in the short term, but if we do manage to reach net zero with a mixture of renewables and nuclear energy, then it's not inconceivable that over-provisioning renewables might allow us to phase out nuclear energy later on.

Suppose it would take 50 years to build up that renewable energy capacity, and 10 years to build a new nuclear power station. That would mean the nuclear power station would only be useful for 40 years, which limits the amount of time they'd have to recoup their costs over.

> Conversely we still dont really know how to meet the last 5% of outlier energy demand scenarios.

Hydrogen w. combustion turbines. When a simple cycle turbine power plant is 5% of the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, we can back up the entire grid and not have it be too expensive.

Has Jacobson stopped suing people though

Surely there are studies of LCOE for both when trying to produce baseload capacity. Personally, I suspect nuclear construction costs are dominant, but that should also be addressible through improvements in technology and policy.

If Europe doesn't have the land for cheap energy, industry will move elsewhere.

I don't think they were suggesting getting rid of the the car parks, but rather putting solar over the top of them. Which would also reduce the amount of petrol used to AC the car when you get back in it too (though this effect is probably negligible)

Your typical location might place you on the route bus drivers use to return to a depot or to get to the start of a popular route. Or the time you're out and about might coincide with when a large number of busses are coming into, or going out of, service. For example, if you work offset hours you'd easily see the pre or post rush hour ramp up/down traffic.

Out of service busses also travel faster than in service ones; as you note, you outpace busses on your bike.

Perhaps look up research instead of relying upon personal anecdotal observations by one person in one city, subject to observational biases?

The research is likely to be highly accurate given most public bus operators have very good data about ridership numbers and fuel use per vehicle and route.

On demand routing cannot get 10 passengers per hour. The idea sounds good, but it has been tried and found slow and inefficient https://humantransit.org/2019/08/what-is-microtransit-for.ht... make sure you read his previous series that he links.

ReaRead that, and then quit wasting everyone's time advocating a stupid idea that keeps coming bcback. Good transit advocacy should aim to get people to not drive.

Yup. They should be easier to electrify, too. Mass produced electric passenger vans should be a thing. Considering transit vans are only like $50,000 apiece for 12 seats, they should be pretty dang cheap to acquire, too, compared to the $1 million 30 seat e-buses. Charging infrastructure should be the same as regular electric cars, too, which makes it cheaper and more flexible to deploy.

"Volatile" renewables absolutely do help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

As the renewables share of generation has been increasing, the CO2 intensity of electricity generation in Germany has dropped from 542gCO2/kWh in 2000 to 296gCO2/kWh in 2020[1].

Btw, your link brings me to a table on agricultural CO2 emissions?

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/development-o...

Of course interconnection is a big help, but transmission isn't "free" or unlimited, the flows between individual European countries is typically a small fraction (less than 10%) of the national consumption and generation.

And there are cases like Ireland which has its own grid - with very limited external interconnection - and yet achieved 42% renewable share last year.

Techniques/engineering/theory for integrating intermittent sources has advanced considerably in the last ten years.

Agreed.

But assuming no technology advances in this area for 30 years time seems implausible. What has happened with price/efficiency of solar, wind and grid-scale batteries in the last 10 years provides a lesson. None of these were practical even 10 years ago and now they represent 90% of newly installed capacity globally (2020). And this is happening all-over whether with or without government support.

For example, new-build, grid-scale battery storage is now cheaper on an LCOE basis than new build open-cycle ("peaker") natural gas plants. This has only happened recently - about a year ago. I was completely skeptical that this could happen a few years ago.

I urge any/all hackernews readers to read more about _recent_ developments in de-carbonizing energy. It's fascinating and it has become clear to me that we're living through one of the great technology revolutions of human history. It genuinely is a Kodak/smartphone type moment with even bigger implications for human wellbeing.

It's amazing that by being cheap enough, all the disadvantages of a new technology become less relevant. A bit like how the PC displaced "real computers" (i.e. mainframes) even though at the time they were little more than microcontrollers integrated with a terminal.

> Okay, but GP's point was that these bigger turbines need to be spaced further apart instead, so we can place fewer of them.

What will be a problem if our energy consumption increases by an order of magnitude or two, and we take all of it from the wind. Currently, the entire question is about financial ROI.

> but were they ever placed so close together that you couldn't have farmland in between turbines?

Not since the modern turbines were invented. The first ones were placed in somewhat compact lines, with enough spacing between the turbine lines that you could raise a few lines of any crop. (The lines can't be too close anyway, as that would reduce the turbine efficiency and harm financial ROI.)

But why is it important to optimise MW per km2? Seems like premature optimization of something that is not the bottleneck.

Yes. The conclusion has changed!

Electric cars are ridiculously efficient. A 100kwh tesla drives approx 500km. So 50km/day/car needs just 10kwh. The UK also has 2 persons per car (plus additional cats and dogs..)

So just the on-shore book projection is already enough AND only requires a tenth of the turbines.

Lets keep nuclear as well. Invest in efficiency. Lots of hard work ahead.

But we are probably closer to "problem solved" than to "civilization collapse". Cheers.

Which means that nuclear proponents should use the cost of breeder reactors with reprocessing, not burner reactors with a once-through fuel cycle, when calculating the cost of nuclear energy. This will likely increase the cost of energy from nuclear.

I thought fuel pellet cracking was already a tolerated thing. Pressure builds up in fuel rods due to escaped xenon and krypton.

Switching to solid fuel uranium breeders + fluid fuel thorium breeders gets you to around 4 billion years.

Right, but the fuel cost goes up over time as extraction gets harder (eventually requiring entire new types of facilities, which themselves take a decade to build), even as wind and solar continue their exponentially decreasing LCOE cost curve.

The exponentially decreasing cost curve is the part that I think people haven't actually internalized. The arguments on the pro-nuclear side are pretty much the same as they were ten years ago. (right down to 'we'll have thorium in ten years!') But things are very different now: It's like arguing for large scale investment in punch-card sorting machines circe 1960. Yes, the punch-card sorting machines can be used to manage all your bank data, but the digital processing are getting exponentially better with time and have been actually better for a couple years. But the proponents of punch card sorting machines haven't internalized the message yet.

> Saying there is no realistic path to net zero without a reduction in consumption is somewhat funny to me. I don't think it is realistic at all to think that people will accept a reduction in living standards, which is what a reduction in consumption would result in.

I think you’re right. But I think Physics is going to show us the bill at some point and we won’t have a choice. When blackouts will be the norm, people will probably be very angry, but there won’t be much to do.

It is interesting to think about the perspective of e.g. a farmer during the fall of the western Roman Empire. I am certain that none of them wanted it, and it was actually quite violent at times, but there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it.

> Has anyone, anywhere ever had political success saying that everyone's living standards must decrease?

None (that I know of). It is already happening, though. Energy production in Europe is plateauing. Standards of living are already stagnating. Just like politicians cannot will away systemic technical problems in the economy or industry, they cannot change the laws of physics.

Our best bet is to use everything we can. Nuclear base production, as much wind and solar as we can, batteries and hydro to smooth out the peaks. We need to go all out. Even then, it would probably take a global industrial effort of the magnitude of the war efforts during WWI and WWII, just to get everything up and running. Let’s not kid ourselves: the world is burning, a mass extinction is under way, and there is already no way we meet our own bar of 1.5°C, and even 2°C requires immediate action.

I don't think you're completely wrong, but it might be more nuanced than that. A decrease in consumption can come from less consumption, but also from more efficient consumption. Better second-hand markets for products that are fine to use a second time, longer-lasting products, less raw material needed perhaps, etc. But yeah I do expect the gains of that to be somewhat limited. Just look at how many people (especially in the USA, but also some Asian ones iirc) have an Apple device as a status symbol. They're probably going to put up with second-hand products as much as they are with Huawei phones. But that's a minority in most countries, i.e. far from everyone.

That depends on the form of consumption. For example, one large form of consumption is commuting from suburbs to the offices on gridlocked roads in SUVs with one person in it.

Everyone universally hates that, and working from home for office workers would greatly reduce consumption (of oil) while increasing living standards.

> In what way is it not a competition?

Nuclear is bottlenecked by the availability of properly trained engineers (and you really need those for such projects). The need in resources would not impact installations of either wind turbines or solar panels.

Nuclear+renewables is not more expensive than all renewables, particularly if you consider the fact that at the moment renewables benefit from an industry that is entirely dependent on subsidised fuel. And that nuclear reactors would be much cheaper per unit if we stopped building only a couple of each class. Also, a nuclear power plant is expensive, but so is the equivalent capacity in wind turbines plus the required storage.

A nuclear baseline mitigates the issues of wind turbines, and wind turbines are a good complement to nuclear. Both are mostly mutually exclusive for political reasons.

> Flamenville 3 - the newest French reactor will cost $22B to build 1.6GW of capacity and will have taken nearly 20 years from the start of construction to deliver a watt. The same amount of money could deliver over 20GW of wind capacity which could be deployed almost instantly as it's an easily parallelizable low-risk, relatively low-tech engineering task relying on mass-production for most of the installation. None of these benefits are available to nuclear reactor construction. Even with a capacity factor of 40% for on-shore wind vs 90%+ for nuclear, nuclear just isn't close.

The same reactor was built on time and on budget in China, and is currently operating. Hinckley point is also going more or less as planned. Areva/Orano’s abysmal performance is more related to their mismanagement than the reactor itself. You also need to factor stuff like storage, and the fact that we have a limited shore length to use.

> I see is a long trail of massively delayed or abandoned projects with incredible cost-overruns (Flamanville, Olkiluoto, V.C. Summer, Vogtle, etc). These failures are hard-engineering failures, nothing to do with politics.

Olkiluoto and Flamanville are all the consequences of mismanagement coupled with politics. They re-designed Olkiluoto whilst it was being built to adapt it to changing regulations, it is obviously a recipe for disaster. Most of Flamanville delays are due to poor quality control and issues with contractors and suppliers, i.e., mismanagement.

The problem with nuclear is that it requires a high initial capital investment, this is not a secret. This is also why private companies are not suited for this: they don’t price national interest and reliability of the energy supply at the scale of a continent. Nuclear programmes that do account for this (like France in the 1970s/1980s and China today) are massively successful.

Look at it this way: no more fossil fuel means that you can divert a sliver of the money that’s being spent on the military to secure oil supply to large infrastructure projects. You could build nuclear power plants with the yearly increase of the US military budget. It is only a matter of strategy.

> Btw, it isn't just nuclear that loses in this regard; bio-fuels, domestic-solar PV, green hydrogen, etc. all fail to compete in the new world of ultra-cheap solar PV and wind.

Well, good riddance to bio-fuels (which cause soil degradation, deforestation and dangerous monocultures) and green hydrogen (which is just greenwashed fossil fuel at the moment and does not make much thermodynamical sense in most scenarios).

Super-cheap wind turbines won’t be super-cheap anymore if they are the only tool we have.