But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.

And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.

That seems physically unlikely to me. Sure, burying and maintaining cables costs money, but other than that transferring energy in a very fundamental and solid state way is going to be much easier than packaging it up and transporting it with heavy machinery.

This is definitely a case where your argument only works if it is supported by the actual calculation.

But what might happen when they fail - thermal runaway is no joke with lithium-ion, ask any firefighter.

It's unfortunate that "efficiency" has both engineering and economic definitions.

I think you and I are saying the same thing though!

Some deep geothermal projects have failed because the wells wouldn’t stay open. Maybe this generation of companies have solved this problem; let’s wait and see.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

Arguably your edit is more factual. But part of the job of the title in an editorial like this is to tell you what their perspective is.

That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.

With some exceptions for sufficiently remote (or sufficiently always-sunny and not too dense) places that local grids themselves are no longer worth it

Extreme case sometimes used to argue against PV is the Arctic circle. Anywhere in the Artctic circle has to choose between enough batteries to cope with entire days when the sun's below the horizon *or* a transmission line further south where the sun's still up.

Or a different renewable, or nuclear, my point here isn't any particular answer just that there's cases where you might go for something other than PV+battery, and my point before is just about yeeting batteries around.

That said, re-reading the comment I was originally responding too, I may have inferred too much from:

> Right now is likely the time to buy sunny land in the middle of nowhere but near train tracks.

And the previously quoted words "remote generation".

Ember’s report outlines how falling battery capital expenditures and improved performance metrics have lowered the levelized cost of storage, making dispatchable solar a competitive, anytime electricity option globally.

This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.

Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.

Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.

Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.

You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.

"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"

-HN comments

And it only gets worse the more households transition to heatpumps, because the consumption in winter is so lopsided. For example, I heat my home with a heatpump, and I have 10 kWp of solar arrays on my roof. In the last week of July, we consumed 84 kWh and generated 230 kWh (273 %). In the last week of November, we consumed 341 khW and generated 40 kWh (11 %). This means we'd need roughly 10 times as much PV area to match demand (10 roofs?), and huge batteries because most of that consumption is in the evening, at night, and in the morning.

Of course, utility-scale and residential solar behave a bit differently, and it becomes more complicated if wind is factored in. But it shows that you can't just overprovision PV a little to fix the main problem of solar power: that it is most abundant in summer, and most in demand in winter.

This doesn't have have to be by switching consumption; using less is possible: Passivhaus is from Germany, after all. However, you can't do that and keep all your historical protections on buildings and layers-upon-layers of red tape on renovations.

And 8280 GWh the previous June for those wondering roughly how much of this was due to more solar panels being deployed.

Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?

>We were the most admired country in the world

According to who?

And having to do all that continuously, every day, for the life of the plant.

In every single solution you can point out problems. Complaining that "X isn't perfect" is the easiest and laziest thing in the world to do. Assessing the ACTUAL costs and damages IN PROPORTION is more difficult, but actually yields good results.

I love that this is followed by “so go nuclear!”

He’s saying it as a realist.

China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.

You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.

Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.

it seems i'm an outdated dreamer here or do you think "two million metric tons of wind turbine blades will reach the end of their operational lifetime in the United States by 2050" is a low-number? something being recyclable doesn't mean it will be, not that's economical feasible to do it. that's like saying we should produce PET plastic mindlessly just because we can recycle it 100%. ¶ https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssusresmgt.4c00256

> Again offtopic, and also purely a matter of taste; it doesn't affect anything

so clearly you don't have idea about authorizations to build them nor what's actually going on ¶ https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/01/the... ¶ https://www.nature.com/articles/s44358-025-00078-1

> Nice strawman argument from something I never said, and no, there are plenty of other perfectly good transport methods. And yes, recycling batteries is already becoming good business and a great feedstock for 'mining' the materials, and no it does not need to be a big deal, and siting the 'mining' facilities for recycling/recovery is vastly more flexible than siting mining for coal which is obviously necessary wherever the coal happened to form 100 million years ago.

... please, just do a quick research on the amount of batteries that actually are recycled, not if they can be recycled. do you think building biometallurgical or pyrometallurgy/hydrometallurgy facilities is cheap and easy to build a bunch of them so we compass the decentralized nature of wind and solar generation? there's a high cost of transporting dead batteries, which requires fossil fuel and if done through roads, will contribute much more to their actual state of the worst offender of micro-plastic producers/polluters worldwide. i will just point some papers on the problem of recycling vehicle batteries (which is so small on scale compared to what we are discussing); https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/11/3/94 ¶ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492... ¶ https://www.sciencemagazinedigital.org/sciencemagazine/21_ma...

> Again, only citing multiple studies showing that, and again, you entirely miss the point, which is not that you'd necessarily do it in every case, but that the point of coal being even the economical option has long passed, nevermind the environmental catastrophe it creates.

seriously. am i arguing with ChatGPT? one thing is to re-purpose unused coal facilities, the other is to claim is economically feasible to substitute them with solar. we aren't living in a happy place where we just substitute stuff arbitrarily based on emergent tech ¶ https://www.sunhub.com/blog/repurposing-coal-mines-solar-ene... ¶ https://www.renewableinstitute.org/abandoned-coal-mines-coul... ¶ https://www.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/file/PNNL-SA-...

> Instead of spending your energy scoffing at things you obviously know nothing about, perhaps go read up on it and learn something.

i remember once doing volunteer for a farm based on the system of a Swiss guy who came to Brazil to execute his hypothesis. really neat. a pioneer on "regenerative agriculture". but if i actually had to became his proletariat for the rest of my life and know i would retire with a low salary and the consequences of intensive physical labor those organic places required, i wouldn't think it's revolutionary. people on GMO farms have a greater prognosis. rural exodus is an ongoing social phenomena because a thing... with that said i was quite happy to know someone i worked with invested millions USD on solar technology on their farm. really neat move. but would much better a local generator for the whole region... but our global situation doesn't seem to care much about long-term solutions, that are expensive and slower to build. every average enthusiast seems more worried about short term gains and trusting "green technology news headlines" than actually evaluating everything with skepticism

i'm all for development and implementation of greener solutions. that's why i don't even have a driver license. i don't like coal (my country doesn't even use it) but i'm not a blind upper class north American that thinks buying high-tech photovoltaics or wind turbines is the panacea nor these don't leak lead on China or India

Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.

> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.

> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.

> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

We win or we learn.

  > Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.

So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.

I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).

Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.

Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.

I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.

> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?

> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?

Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.

This is trivially false if the cost of solar generation (and battery storage) further drops by 5x to 10x.

Additionally that implies the overprovisioned power is worthless in the summer, which does not have to be the case. It might make certain processes viable due to very low cost of energy during those months. Not trivial as those industries would have to leave the equipment using the power unused during winter months, but the economics could still work for certain cases.

Some of the cases might even specifically be those that store energy for use in winter (although then we're not looking at the 'pure' overprovisioning solution anymore).

Significantly longer than that and you go from prediction to speculation, and it is unwise to base a country's energy policy on speculation.

Mostly yes. Once you're at utility-scale, installation and maintainance should scale 1:1 with number of panels. Inverters and balancing systems should also scale 1:1, although you might be able to save a bit here if you're willing to "waste" power during peak insolation.

But think about it this way: If it was possible to reduce non-panel costs by a factor of 5 simply by building 5x larger solar plants, the operating companies would already be doing this. With non-panel costs around 65%, this would result in 65% * (1 - 1/5) = 52% savings and give them a huge advantage over the competition.

> 2. Vertically mounted bifacial PV […] 3. Battery […] costs are dropping

I agree that intra-day fluctuations will be solved by cheaper panels and cheaper batteries, especially once sodium-ion battery costs fall significantly. But I'm specifically talking about seasonal storage here.

> Also, please address the matter of using the overprovisioned power in summer.

I'm quite pessimistic about that. Chemical plants tend to be extremely capital-intensive and quickly become non-profitable if they're effectively idle during half of the year. Underground thermal storage would require huge infrastructure investments into distribution, since most places don't already have district heating.

Sorry, very busy today so I can't go into all details, but I still wanted to give you an answer.

Fortescue only piloted athe the world's first ammonia dual-fuel vessel late last year, give them time to bed that in and advance.