We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.
> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
I would nothing more than to enjoy those cheap prices. Here in Sweden (and EU in general), while energy prices has drop in response to renewables, grid fees and energy taxes has increased more than to cover any savings. Grid fees are now the wast majority off the bill, which pays for grid stability and transmissions that is required to operate a much more variable energy production. grid stability and transmissions are primarily a government responsibility, and when cost goes up they forward that costs as grid fees and taxes.
To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.
Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
We can hope/pray/predict that prices will go down in a year or two. I have yet to see any politician or providers give that promise. The government have approved new grid stability power plants (based on natural gas), and those have both investment costs and operational costs that the government want consumers to pay for in the next decade/s. In addition, the hydro power plants that already exist and was built during the 20th century need to either be refitted or removed in order to comply with EU environmental standards (and prevent mass extinction of several endangered species). That will also increase costs for grid stability for the next several decades. On top there are plans for new transmission to even out the difference between the north and south part of the country, and those are predicted to take a decade or so to build. They are not short term projects with short term price hikes.
Look at the market dynamics and volumes. It is like everyone rushing in with home based storage for the ancillary markets being promised a ROI within months.
That lasted... months...
What is your suggestion? Nuclear power does not solve it, and won't be online until the 2040s either way.
There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.
What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.
Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.
A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.
Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.
At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.
When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
Renewables really aren't that cheap unless you view them entirely in isolation. Sun doesn't shine all night and wind doesn't blow continuously, it needs to be viewed with storage to represent a complete picture. Rooftop solar is more expensive than nuclear due to the zero economies of scale, residential storage is staggeringly expensive, and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.
I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.
Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
Rooftop PV in the US now costs around $3/watt including BOS (balance of system) and labor. This means an average 6kW home installation is less than $20k -- without storage. (This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.)
Yes home storage adds more money but a grid-tied PV installation without batteries is very useful in many parts of the country: Using the grid as your "battery" at night, a $20k investment can make your net electricity cost zero or even negative.
A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
$20,000 for a 6kW system with a 15-20% capacity factor that lasts 20 years means you're going to generate a total of 157,000kWh. That's 12.7c/kWh. Before factoring in anything that might happen to it, including damage, cleaning, replacing your inverter. That is not cheap electricity -- the LCOE of nuclear is 9-15c/kWh. That's within spitting distance of Vogtle before you add storage.
Sure the panels may last 30 years, so you can juice the numbers and maybe you live in the middle of Nevada so you can get the upper end of the capacity factor but I mean, my estimate assumes nothing happens to those panels before the year 2055. My estimate also doesn't include financing costs for your car-sized purchase or any changes to your insurance premiums.
If you add a PowerWall for $15,000 that lasts 10-15 years, that doubles the cost despite increasing the capacity factor of the system, once again assuming you have zero issues with it until 2040.
> A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
I'd do it myself and I'd be happy too, because it's neat, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a good deal or that residential solar is a cheap way to get electricity.
I suspect the people who are happy with their financial decision don't understand the difference between opex and capex, and aren't factoring in the opportunity cost of their $20-35,000 investment. If you invest $20,000 in bonds at 5% for 20 years you have $53,000 -- or in the S&P 500 at 9% you have $112,000. Historically electricity prices have grown closer to 2% per year.
Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The LCOE for consumer solar is between $81 and $217 per MWh. This is MUCH more expensive than grid based solar.
>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.
The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
Thanks for the info. I thought maybe they were combining consumer rooftop with them, but didn't take the time to double-check. From the June 2024 report, the consumer rooftop cost range was $122 - $284. The commercial and industrial was $54 to $191. If inflation has caused the Community & C&I to increase that much, it is likely the consumer cost has also noticeably increased unfortunately.
It used to be that panel cost was the most important factor in PV system cost. Now the panels are nearly free and everything else determines the system cost.
> ...and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...
I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.
I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting? What problem are you solving? The final bit of emergency reserves?
> Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidizes so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China.
This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
If the fossil fuel supply chain is disrupted we get an energy crisis within weeks.
What happens if the renewable supply chain is disrupted?
Well.... all existing installations keeps working for decades and in the meantime we need to figure out an alternative. After a couple of years our emergency reserves would start to work harder due to old installations aging out but the impact would be near zero.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it, Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
Which is of course why all western reactors are struggling with cost. You do know that modular reactors has been a talking point for the nuclear industry since the 1950s? That is what the industry generally bounces to when large scale projects balloon in cost. They just never deliver.
> Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting?
The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
> This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.
Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
If you're comparing solar + wind to not(solar + wind), then either you're mainly comparing to fossil fuels, or discussing a world that doesn't exist.
Sure, you like nuclear. You can say "oh, well, if we snap our fingers and magically have the world be different than it is, then nuclear would outperform solar".
Magic doesn't exist, and if you take two people in any country and task them with adding 5GW of reliable generation, one person with nuclear and the other with solar + battery, solar + battery will achieve that goal faster and cheaper every single time, in every country on earth.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today. The only comparison to make is fossil fuels and with that renewables give us major advantages.
For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry. The west quickly diversified from their fossil fuels, but we have not been able to do the same with nuclear energy.
But I don't see you complaining about supply chain issues regarding how Russia absolutely dominates the nuclear energy sector?
> There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the price.
So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty? And don't start talking about all the other stuff we need to build said supply chain and nuclear power plants.
But it is fine when nuclear power does it right?
And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
What are you even attempting to do here? Just muddying the waters because nuclear power evidently does not deliver and you can't bring yourself to accept it?
That person you are arguing with is not arguing with you in good faith. They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach. The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling, and they could not come up with a better idea if things go bad, I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
> They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach.
I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.
> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
That is why we are seeing massive 40 year PPA agreements, the state taking the entire financial- and project risk and similar steps to force the paltry few proposed nuclear projects over the final investment decision line?
Modern nuclear power is absolutely insanely subsidized.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
As a species collective we understand the big picture.
> Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem.
Sure to you because you apparently never had that job.
It's trivial to see you are just reciting from memory and not experience. Waste is a problem in that it is generated and must be handled, transported, stored safely. Perhaps you mean it's not a long term problem once stored?
Good job making it clear you don't understand the problem. Thankfully others do. Please continue to rant online out of the way such that you stay out of the way.
> Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today.
I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
> For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry.
12% come from Russia. [1]
> So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
I feel like environmental implications are relevant to discuss, and I think the topic is relevant.
> You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty?
Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. They have a 96% recovery rate. [2]
> And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
It didn't matter in my original post either which is why it's under "if we're being pedantic."
Like I said, irrelevant compared to the fossil fuel supply chain supplying 80%.
> 12% come from Russia. [1]
Of course ignoring the intermediary steps in the supply chain which Russia controls ~50% of. But Kazakh uranium being processed in Russia is Kazakh!
And this of course ignores that my main point was that Russia is the largest player in the global nuclear technological sector.
Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
> Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. [2]
And now we again "solve" nuclear power by saying that reprocessing works. Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Just make nuclear power even more horrifically expensive! No problem!
> Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
> Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.
Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.
> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?
> Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing.
They do the reprocessing at the Orano La Hague site on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. They also historically reprocessed for Germany there and continue to reprocess for Japan. You can look these things up before you respond, you know. [1]
You truly are out of your depth here. France is considering building a site to reprocess uranium for us in commercial reactors since the only plant available, which they have been using for decades, is in Russia.
> The French government is "seriously" examining plans to build a site on French territory to convert and enrich reprocessed uranium. At present, Russia is the only country in the world that can recycle uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
> ...
> Specifically, to convert its reprocessed uranium (URT), France has no other option but to perform this stage in Russia, the only country with a conversion plant for URT through its public operator Rosatom. The subsequent enrichment stage could be carried out in Russia or the Netherlands.
> That means it’s fully within China’s purchasing power parity advantage sphere, where everything costs 40% less than in the west. That means zero tariffs.
Basically coal is less profitable and more expensive in places that have always been coal counties. The only thing to do in these areas is mine coal, so the concern is that entire regions will be rendered worthless if coal collapses.
Which means local residents cannot sell their homes without taking significant losses, and they probably lose their jobs in coal, which manifests into a poverty trap for the entire town.
And there are hundreds of these towns all through Appalachia.
So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
Anybody who didn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention. There’s been plenty of time to move, retrain, whatever. The government has probably failed these people in one way or another, but these tend to be areas the say they value self-sufficiency and minimal government interference , so…
There are retrains programs dotted all over WV and Appalachia. They cover everything from construction and other trades to IT and more office-focused jobs.
I don't believe in retraining, but tons of immigrants move for better opportunities with very little savings. It's difficult and unfortunate, but it's necessary
From their perspective, this should require no effort; it is forcing them to change which requires effort.
Of course I want the use of coal to stop. But you need to reckon with these kinds of human factors if you want to effect change peacefully.
This is where Clinton failed. Having a documented plan to spend billions (somewhere on the order of 10 years of salary per miner, from numbers I could glean elsewhere in this discussion) doesn't make an impression when you have well-documented sound bites claiming that you intend to put them "out of business".
Why not? It'll probably build character. Also, it's happened all the time? People have been doing it for all of America's history. Tons of famous media is about people moving to the city for a better life.
> To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?
Right! It's a real chicken and egg scenario. It would seem to me that without this infrastructure, it would be very hard to retrain and build new industries. It would really benefit the people of these regions to vote for people who, as a matter of policy, would bring training and infrastructure to them. Unfortunately, the people who most benefit from such policies vote against them [1], so the resources available are insufficient. So the conversation is about poverty reduction through social programs to support people working in a dying industry, rather than growing new industries. The solution, might be to vote for people proposing such resources, which I know is a radical idea, but it's at least something new to try.
They're also in geographically low population areas so counting them and the people employeed in their towns they have a significant sway on some states and the Senate skews things towards low population states through it's inequitable representation AND the outsized power Senate rules give individual Senators.
Plus it's made a few people EXTREMELY rich so they've made their opinions and interests everyone elses problem too.
Every once in a while someone in the Netherlands argues for the district system and they are immediately shut down with "America".
One man one vote. And yes the regions that contribute more to the economy are a priority. They fund everything including the military without which we'd still be a part of Spain.
Yeah I get the idea originally, you had to appease the slave and smaller states to get them to join the plan originally at all, but there's a very, very good reason wherever the US has had the chance to design a new government we have never saddled them with our system. I don't think there's a reasonable hope that it'll get reformed in a clean way though.
If people really cared about coal miners then they could be offered a $1 million redundancy package. It would amount to a tiny fraction of government spending and I'm pretty sure it would be welcomed.
Probably though, like the buses, there's an order of magnitude more work done on the "back end". The machines, logistics, etc etc and everything else that depends on the industry. In the bus drivers example, it could be all the people in NYC who need to take a bus to get to work and would be affected by the sudden disappearance of buses. So it is with many industries.
The thing is, if you’re burning fossil fuels to generate power there’s not much reason to prefer coal over natural gas. The latter is cheaper and cleaner and once pipelines are in place, you don’t need to truck it around.
Coal is dead and it’s not coming back. Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Speaking frankly, the way politicians keep selling the fantasy of it making a comeback is cruel.
> Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Old steel towns had to do this, coal country might look to them for a model on how to leave a dying industry behind. But seeing how they vote, they might not like the answer for what it takes to survive:
Pittsburgh PA - famous former steel town, faced very uncertain economic future after the mills closed, now a booming metropolis with top industry leaders in education, healthcare, sports, finance. What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Cleveland OH - once one of America's great manufacturing hubs, powered by steel mills, car parts, and shipping along Lake Erie. When industry collapsed, Cleveland faced deep decline, job losses, shrinking population, even bankruptcy in the 1970s. But today it's finding new strength as a center of healthcare, research, and culture.
Then you look at places like Youngstown OH. Unlike Pittsburgh or Cleveland, Youngstown struggled to reinvent itself. Population plummeted, tax bases collapsed, and poverty took hold. The city became a symbol of the Rust Belt's hardest struggles. What held it back? Overreliance on steel, limited diversification, and waves of outmigration left too few resources to rebuild. What are they doing today to fix things? Healthcare and education. Should have started a lot sooner.
One more example is Bethlehem PA, another former steel town that now has top industries in healthcare, education, and also some manufacturing.
So that's the model. If you're a dying town with an industry that's shrivveling up due to changing economic conditions, the model to survive is to quickly pivot to healthcare, education, and entertainment, and to invite a bunch of outsiders into your community with open arms.
And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, entertainment, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power, they're attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss of failed post-industrial policy.
> And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power its attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss.
Spot on, from what I’ve seen. Just keep doubling down on what hasn’t worked in hopes that one day it’ll magically manifest a Disney ending and the good old days will return.
What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Just cater to the rich folks! That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure. Rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich. Building prosperity is a difficult ordeal that takes time, sacrifice, a lot of money, and a culture of safety and community.
Sure if you want increase your tax base, step one is to be attractive to people with money.
But healthcare, education, and entertainment are not exclusive to rich people, they're industries that everyone enjoys and can take part in. The doctors, actors, professors, students, athletes, researchers, who come from around the world to live and work in Pittsburgh are not "the rich". They have money, but they're still just regular people.
For example the students who come to Pittsburgh for an education are not wealthy, but they are flush with cash from the government and lenders. They are attracted to Pittsburgh not because it's a good place for the rich, but because it's a good place for students.
Incidentally, good places for students are also good places for the rich. So I agree, rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich.
> That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure.
Did you miss the part where Pittsburgh is thriving? Cleveland is doing okay. Bethlehem is booming. Youngstown... not great but moving in a good direction.
Coal counties are insignificant. Nobody is winning national elections by appealing to them.
The actual motive is to appeal to people who have made coal part of their identity. These are people who have never been anywhere near a coal mine, but have internalized coal as Important and American, and as a way to stick it to those stupid environmentalists.
Yeah. Think this was epitomised by
the DoE tweeting pictures of coal to own the libs. Or as one wag put it the right in 2005: "we shouldn't overregulate energy markets"; the right in 2025: "I'm actually attracted to coal"
In Trump's case you can throw in a personal obsession with hating wind power because you can see it from one of his golf courses.
Generally pathetic that people are trying to retcon this reflexive lib-owning vice-signalling from incredibly stupid people as actual industrial policy.
I think it’s hard for people who aren’t steeped in that world to understand it, because it sounds so ridiculous. The idea of loving pro-coal policies because it upsets environmentalists is hard to accept. It’s natural to think it must really be about economic realities, people's livelihoods, etc.
I have the questionable advantage of having listened to Rush Limbaugh almost every day in the 90s, reading lots of National Review, and taking in various other conservative media. I know the basis for these things, straight from the people pushing them. None of what’s happening is a surprise to me.
> the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA
Wyoming here. Coal country. Everyone thinks this is dumb. Including the folks in Campbell county, our top-producing coal region that has been trying to build a wind farm [1].
Trump’s social media fans in Florida and Texas like this because it feels like owning the libs. (To the extent there may be pecuniary interest, it would be in power producers. Like housing, stopping new power raises prices and profits incumbents.)
Also, that Reddit thread is about coking coal. Not the thermal coal power plants burn. It’s about American steel production shutting down in the face of our trade war. Not this new economic miracle these idiots have spun up.
>So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
I heard that before the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan support in Congress for phasing out the use coal in the US, so it seems quite possible that that bipartisan support will reassemble itself after Trump is gone (because the next President is unlikely to be as populist and as uncaring about climate change as Trump).
This would make sense if it were a single issue. (And then, limited sense - even quite red places like Texas invest in solar because they need it. Coal is a regional issue, not a national one)
If you see it in light of all the other actions taken across the spectrum, you land at best at "desperate dice roll to re-tool the US into a manufacturing power from the 80s", and at worst at "deliberate dismantling of a first-rate world power into a second tier paradise for oligarchs".
It's made a national issue by 1) Senators from coal mining heavy states and the ridiculous setup of the Senate and the outsized power it gives individual Senators unless one party has 60 seats and 2) the amount of wealth it's given a few people (like the Koch brothers) who've used that wealth to buy influence in the GOP.
This message seems to come from a timeline where the people cutting the renewable projects care about electoral outcomes.
But in this timeline, they tried to violently overturn the 2020 election, and they are currently trying to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering states they control as much as possible.
This isn't about earning the political support of people in coal country who vote GOP. If they ever face negative electoral outcomes in the future, their plan is to overturn the election using either force or legal chicanery.
What you claim didn't happen, and can easily disproven with data. Your interpretation of a reasoning of a policy (that didn't happen) is bad faith.
You are wrong about both electricity [1], gas[2] and total energy [3].
Europe was very dependent on energy imports in the past and current policy is the by far most successful attempt in a long at changing it. It will help us for decades to come.
I don't understand your post. Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy while rationalizing that increased gas imports from Russia was good because trade will make us friends [0]. The data supports this (though obviously does not capture the political discourse around Russian gas reliance). I am in agreement that the current, post-Ukraine invasion policy is good.
I guess you’re talking about Germany. Shutting down nuclear reactors and huge imports of Russian gas are two entirely separate things.
Gas imports like explained in the Wikipedia article you linked started in the 70s. There certainly was too much of a reliance on Russia, not enough investment in alternatives like LNG terminals and warnings of partners in the east were ignored with the north stream pipelines. In the end Germany got a lot of economic growth from cheap gas for decades and managed to get off Russian gas very fast. The European nuclear industry on the other hand is still heavily reliant on Russia.
Broad German anti-nuclear sentiment can be traced back mainly to Chernobyl and the exit plan that was followed in western Germany was decided after Fukushima. Eastern German reactors lacked containment and were shut down after the reunification. Contrary to an often heard claim western German nuclear was not replaced by fossil energy sources, but more than compensated by the growth of renewables. You could certainly point out that coal plants should have been shut off first, but that was even less possible politically at the time. In the end you have to shut off nuclear reactors because of growing safety risks caused by material fatigue and new ones have questionable economics.
Looking in absolute terms France is essentially phasing out nuclear power. But can't bring themselves to accept it politically.
They have an enormous fleet nearing end of life and are making political noise over a tiny number of plants they haven’t even taken the final investment decision on.
They are stuck arguing how the mindbogglingly large required subsidies should be financed.
In other words: They are betting on renewables as much as anyone else, they just can't bring themselves to stop wasting money on nuclear power due to political reasons.
It is more representative of the situation over the past 30 years to say that France is not Europe. But even they had plans to cut nuclear energy to 50%. [0]
As you can see in the first link, there was a 472 TWh production of nuclear Nuclear power in 2024, in contrast to your claim that it was phased out. It didn't really changed that much - the absolute change in coal or renewables combinded is larger.
This chart shows that nuclear produced >900 TWh in the EU in the early 2000s and the latest data point is 619 TWh (2023). That's a >30% reduction with a clear trend. I did not claim that every nuclear reactor in Europe was turned off.
I think I agree with you broadly, but to make the counter argument:
A big part of the reason why nuclear power isn’t cost-effective nowadays is because those costs have been at least partially internalized. The US federal government has stopped producing cheap nuclear fuel by disassembling nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely. Plant operators need to pay into a federal disaster insurance pool.
The costs for solar and batteries have come down a whole lot since ~10 years ago during the energiewende. IMO solar is the cost leader in areas where there is decent sun. The U.S. has a lot better sun than Germany.
Solar is the cost leader in most areas with poor sun too. You have to have truly abysmal sun for it to not be the cost leader. Finland has such abysmal sun, Germany doesn't.
I would argue that buying Russian gas was primarily market driven and politics didn't stop it from happening. It was cheaper than American or Qatari gas why should European nations not have bought it?
It the same way that the US got hooked on cheap Chinese imports.
Also renewables make too much sense right now. That's why a lot of dollars are allocated towards them even though subsidies are mostly gone.
Well, for one thing, massive methane leaks in Russian gas infrastructure means that Russian gas ii much worse for the environment than any other source of gas.
The artificial energy supply shortage caused by this prohibition will be a great excuse to invade another oil-rich country. The current administration has already demonstrated Venezuela is next in line.
Mostly Germany, Belgium as well, possibly a few others.
France did shut down superphenix for completely ideological reasons tho.
Also stopped investing in nuclear but that was not really ideological (the nuclear buildup originated in something of a misprediction, and sadly the country didn’t really capitalise on it).
Belgium didn't phase out nuclear. They decided that someone in the future would handle the closure of the nuclear plants, and when the time came and no replacement plant had been built, we just kept the nuclear plants running.
Belgium legislated the phase out of nuclear in 2003 due 2025, opting to neither replace nor postpone closure of nor refurbish its at the time 7 reactors as their lifetimes ran out.
Then it had to postpone the closure of at least two reactors following the second invasion of Ukraine, and this year officially dropped the phaseout and opened the door for new builds (unlikely as they are).
It absolutely did, back in 2003. This was pushed back after the invasion of Ukraine then repealed but Doel 3 and Tihange 2 were shut down under the phaseout plan.
In UK we phased out nuclear by buying power from France who made it in nuclear power stations ... we were World leaders, but now we haven't the expertise to renew our nuclear power so have to rely on foreign companies.
The cost picture already makes sense for onshore wind, which is why if you have a suitable site people do that. If you own a hilltop farm in the UK a bank loan for a wind turbine is a no-brainer for the loan officer - because it's not correlated to farm gate prices unlike other loans you might want e.g. for equipment or buildings so that's a desirable loan to have.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad)
Maybe that was the discussion where you're from, what do i know. Where I'm from we had a honest political debate about nuclear, and the public decided on no. It wasn't because of "ideology". We discussed the safety, the waste challenge, and everything else.
The US (near as I can tell) isn’t even killing them for any concrete reason (any reason given changes), just to be anti-whatever they are.
Which, is similar to the German anti-nuclear approach, to be frank. Burning dirty coal instead of keeping an already existing nuke plant running isn’t a decision based on either environmental or economic reasoning, and that was done a lot.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
what I don't understand is how this was obvious to me 20 years ago as a teenager, but European leaders just somehow thought it was a good idea. Was it just "a lucky guess" on my part? it was just so obvious that when you tolerate and interact with narcissists as if their behaviour was acceptable, they will simply escalate their behaviour. I was also critical of ties with the Chinese government and I was told I was just paranoid/racist. today we suddenly realise oh that was a bad idea, the leopards are chewing on our faces.
I reckon the rich and powerful saw it coming alright and they just figured they'd make bank before it got to the point they'd have to send the kids of poor people to war.
It was also obvious to all my friends when I was a teenager in 2008 that being friends with America was a bad idea. That also turned out to be right.
All we would have had to do was have no allies for the past ~60 years, and we would have never gotten burned. We also would have been entirely irrelavant to international politics, and likely wouldn't have become one of the richest nations on earth.
World politics is like love. It's better to have had a productive alliance that hits a rough patch, than never to have had one at all.
The US grows more acres of corn just for ethanol than the number of acres needed to go 100% solar. We would have _more_ useful farmland if we switched.
If all vehicles in the US were electric US total Electricity demand would rise from about 4,000 TWh to only 4,800 TWh. That’s it. And this is exactly why the U.S. risks losing both the trade war and the AI race to China.
China is going all-in on electrification, and that alone gives it a massive efficiency edge. Layer on top the fact that renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper every year, and the advantage compounds exponentially.
Take heavy equipment as an example: a Caterpillar machine might cost $10 million, while the Chinese electric equivalent is just one-fifth the price and burns only a third of the energy. That’s already nearly half the cost compared to diesel or gas-powered machines before you even count lower maintenance and fuel savings.
The math is simple: electric wins. And renewable compound the victory
all energy including vehicles. The US grows an unfathomable amount of ethanol corn, ~ 30 million acres. Its insanity, its an incredibly inefficient way to get energy.
Climate action and renewables has always been very popular with voters. Since political action has consistently lagged popular support I'd suggest that you'd need to look outside elections to see what is holding the west back on this.
This is just a talking point put about by climate deniers since dealing with climate change is cheaper than the alternative.
It's no different from Fox News headlines saying Medicare for all would cost X billion and not mentioning that business as usual would cost twice that.
An attempt to turn a popular, cheaper option into a scary bogeyman with selective lies.
if you're going to list the strengths of china, one of the biggest ones is unironically having leadership that doesnt get interrupted in massive ways every 4 years. i'm not going to debate the negative parts of that, clearly it is also problematic, but despite the negative aspects it has factually largely contributed to their strength and prosperity
> From December 2024, coal power generation declined for five straight months before ticking up slightly in May and June, mainly to offset weaker hydropower generation due to drought. Coal power generation was flat overall in the second quarter of 2025.
> The chart below shows growth in monthly power generation for coal and gas (grey), solar and wind (dark blue) and other low-carbon power sources (light blue).
> This illustrates how the rise in wind and solar growth is squeezing the residual demand left for coal power, resulting in declining coal-power output during much of 2025 to date.
What they are doing is ensuring energy reliability and phasing out old nasty coal plants in favor of modern ones expected to have peaker like capacity factors.
The numbers I've seen aren't currently far worse, with the US producing slightly more CO2 per capita than China. But the trend is there to make it eventually far worse as we maneuver to be bass-ackwards.
A lot of people on this thread don’t seem to realize that solar and wind now work fine without government subsidies. The Biden-era subsidies have been about accelerating decarbonization, not about propping up the market.
If you let the market choose, it would choose a lot of wind and solar.
> Despite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies).
So the admin just needs to get out of the alway and let the market solve this problem. Not try to centrally manage the economy like the Soviet Union.
The government is actively threatening to block wind and solar projects through permitting denials. The market can’t permit for itself no matter how good the economics are.
Living in northwest Iowa – which is one of the biggest wind energy producing states in the US! – there has been resistance against wind turbines at the local level for my entire life. It's not at all uncommon to see yard signs with slogans like "Say no to turbines" and "Preserve our scenic countryside"¹.
These have always been present – I remember seeing them even as a kid, but they were just symbolic protest² and you'd only see them out on farms that had turbines in view. What's different now is that you'll see these signs in towns, and the people who have these signs in their yard are also winning county supervisor/councilor seats that they use to regulate wind to death. Temporary "pauses" are put on permit requests that get tabled while they "study" new rules endlessly; road and shadow setbacks are being increased; turbine height caps are introduced at levels that prevent the current machines from being upgraded; noise limits, lighting mandates, even county-wide caps on turbine numbers.
I think the trend is still positive in favor of wind in Iowa, but at the local level, there is a concerted effort to bog it down in red tape and kill it.
¹ Never mind that the scenic countryside is actually just amber waves of industrial corn and hog manure lagoons.
² As much as I can recall, I wasn't exactly in tune with local politics as a child.
Yes, but local permitting is a complete shitshow. For example, I should be able to plug in a simple balcony-solar system, but my PUC prohibits the technology.
Yes. Though that’s the current regime most capacity is installed under. And the companies building solar farms have more energy to navigate the process than me/you.
But it just goes to show you being involved in local government, showing up to advocate for green energy projects, etc at local levels is one of the best things you can do.
And remember that you all are part of the market. In my area you can choose what power generation your electricity comes from. Most customers do not bother, unfortunately (less than 10% of Marin Clean Energy customers).
I know, not real-time. Renewable energy credit trading, and such. But you become the demand for clean generation if you choose to do so. It is easy. If you are in Marin, Contra Costa, Napa, or Solano go to https://mcecleanenergy.org/opt-up/
Similar CCA's are all over California and probably beyond.
It's also quite bad for US "allies". My country, Denmark, is (in my own opinion, this hasn't been discussed by the media yet) going to have to bail out Orsted.
The truly free market response to all of this would be to remove the need for approvals, or just rubber stamp all projects with no real review. I don't think that's a great idea. But this is the complete opposite of that. The market wants to build more renewables, and the administration is blocking it.
It's amazing how much leeway many people give this administration for policies that they have a long history of opposing: government ownership of companies (10% of Intel, US Steel's "golden share"), blocking private development of energy production, sending the National Guard to hostilely takeover cities, etc. It's the sort of stuff that they've accused their opponents of wanting to do in deranged, nightmarish worst-case scenarios.
One of the biggest improvements recently is battery tech. Many countries are 10x'ing the GWh of battery capacity in the next couple of years without any real government drive.
This is one thing that actually prevents the power price spikes since the batteries can jump in to cover gaps. I can quote many installations that have completely paid themselves off in 2 years (see hornsdale battery as an example - one year of operation alone, 2020, generated profit of half its initial $90million cost) and while this 2 year payoff will come down as more and more are installed part of the reason the payoff is going down is due to power price costs becoming more and more steady as more batteries are installed.
Even the USA is installing massive amounts of capacity right now. Look at Texas - 3x battery capacity available in 2025 compared to 2024 due to massive installations coming online and they are a state that does not do a lot to support renewables at all. There's no stopping it, it doesn't need subsidies and it's one of the most straightforward capital payoffs available right now.
I actually think the predictions in the article won't come to fruition honestly. The battery installation rise is dominating the investment landscape right now and it's completely flown under the radar without any political controversy (no things such as questionable media trying to claim battery banks are somehow bad for our health and should be stopped) nor are there subsidies required.
I'm all for nuclear power, but those project take years. Even the small modular ones, even if fast tracked. I think it is a misstep to simply cancel current projects, and hope (?) that nuclear will pull it all. Even if it does so, you'll have a big gap in where demand could outpace supply.
> Even the small modular ones, even if fast tracked.
Of which none exists in the west. I love how suddenly we will achieve scale without the middle step of... building hundreds of prototypes to scale up the industry.
Exactly - electricity demand is surging NOW due to datacenter/AI use, and all signs are that this increased demand will continue to grow.
Nuclear is a decent option, but it takes years to bring new capacity online.
There's nothing wrong with investing in nuclear that'll come online in 5+ years time, but at the same time the government should also be green lighting all projects capable of adding capacity more quickly.
Yea all the “this bad thing will happen” discussion misses that the intent has been plain for at least a year now. The administration has plainly said what they would do during the election and they have rather faithfully executed on that plan. This isn’t about fixing things or saving people money it’s about doing what they want to do.
Its about inflicting as much pain in the american public as possible because if you cause indiscriminate damage its bound to also damage their enemies. Its a death cult.
Nah, these people are already rich beyond imagination, they want to be venerated, they have to see their enemies crushed. Money isn't enough for them, they want praise and the peasants haven't praised and honored them enough.
“I know this will be removed” is a pretty transparent attempt to sell the real reason for downvotes (you’re talking utter nonsense) as a made up one that suits your personal narrative.
Don’t be under the mistaken impression that you’re being smart here. It’s very transparent.
It frustrates me that neither party is about energy abundance. The Democrats have clamped down on coal, fracking, nuclear for various largely climate reasons. And now the republicans want to reverse it and restrict renewables mostly in a "turnabout is fair play" kind of way. I wish the current administration had just cut regulations and enabled more fracking or whatever and left it at that.
Taking the environmental hit for lower energy costs is understandable at least, even if those who are more financially stable would prefer not to. But whatever this is makes no sense and is just puerile revenge.
“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
It's just so self fulfilling. Someone is being very stupid. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's him. Possibly it's both of us.
But there is no way out of the conclusion that the country is (at least) a near majority of very stupid people. Not merely mistaken or holding different values, but genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Of course if I'm the stupid one, maybe my reasoning there is also wrong. I know I conflated individuals and groups in a less-than-rigorous fashion.
But either way I feel unable to find a solution to this conundrum. Certainly I can't if I'm stupid. And if a majority of voters are stupid, then it undercuts the principle that enables us to live in the same region together. I am rapidly running out of ideas to continue that.
I think about one third who heard what they wanted to hear in his campaign promises, one third completely against and one third who consider themselves "apolitical".
With any luck the midterm elections will allow sanity to return.
As far as I can tell, those who heard what they wanted in his campaign promises are reasonably satisfied that they are getting it. There's some loss of approval as reality precludes some options, but that happens to everyone.
Nor do I think the "apolitical" will become any less so. I see no reason why the midterms should give radically different results.
Now, it just so happens that historically things swing a bit back at midterms, and given how close things are that's enough to sway the entire power structure.
It's an unfortunate reality of voting: a one-vote margin is no different from unanimity.
Even so I do not expect the overall tone to change any time soon. Those proportions seem fairly durable.
> genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy
Having spent some time in the US, my theory is that things have got so complicated over there (or more precisely nobody is incentivized to make them simple), that it has fried people's minds. They just respond to the last stimulus, having given up trying to make sense of anything, as they attempt to get through each day as best they can.
Healthcare is the obvious example, but I'd say that that is representative of most things in the US, in terms of being a minefield where one foot wrong can wreck your life.
Voting for masses lead to this. Voting with some IQ tests, education or income/wealth background check would at least improve it. not a perfect solution but way better than random people voting all. Everyone needs to driving license or other licences to do things. Voting is more important but no selection????
My opinion is that we should open voting further. If voting works at all, it's only because you don't do any selection on the voter base, and hope some kind of "wisdom of crowds" kicks in.
As far as I'm concerned everyone who lives here should vote. Felons, infants, people in jail, anyone who can pull a lever or an unambiguous gesture. I'd even include fetuses if they could. If the law affects you then you should have a say.
This is undoubtedly a stupid idea. But the current system is clearly broken and I'd be willing to at least try taking the principle seriously.
I disagree with it. But I think it is worth discussing.
We don’t have universal suffrage. The most-successful democracies in history never did. In our day-to-day lives and commerce we weigh opinions based on their source. And the current system isn’t working, in many cases because the majority votes for something stupid.
The current system isn't working because, we know from comparative study of modern democracies, the US has all of the features that contributed maximally to disfunction: strong presidential system, unequal legislative representation, and first-past-the-post single-member-district elections for both houses of the national legislature.
We could fix those peoblems, or we could add additional problems by layering even more broken systems that the US (among others) has tried before and rejected on top of the existing problems.
I don't believe that fixing those problems would solve the underlying issue, which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other. We could alter the rules to try to reduce the effects of it, but I don't expect it to reduce the underlying division that leads us to push the rules to (and past) the breaking point.
Plus, of course, there is little appetite for any given set of fixes. We can easily calculate who will benefit, and because of the division I mentioned, half the people will oppose the change just to avoid losing influence.
I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch, which would at least make some of the existing alliances moot.
> I don't believe that fixing those problems would solve the underlying issue, which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other.
The evidence is very strong that the reduction of the dimensionality of discourse and the polarization are a direct result of those features of the electoral system.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch,
That's not only not a solution, it is not even an actual option. You can't start from anywhere except where you are.
> which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other
They don’t. The only solutions to deep-rooted antipathy are forgiveness and annihilation. We aren’t anywhere close to that, despite what idiots want to manufacture.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch
It's amazing how out of nearly 300 comments here, only one person mentioned how the article is bullshit - Trump can't do much because the overwhelming majority of solar does not rely on federal approval.
They are correct. You will see in the coming years that electricity across the US is going to get substantially more expensive. There are several reasons for this:
1. Data centers, primarily driven by AI. Why? Because they can (and do) negotiate deeply discounted prices AND either don't pay for the connection and required infrastructure or they only pay a portion of it. Who pays for the rest? Consumers. Who subsidizes the discounted electricity? Consumers.
2. Increased electricity use in an area tends to raise the prices for everyone. We actually saw this in the crypto mining boom (eg [1]). In short, in a region like upstate New York where it otherwise has access to cheap hydro power, the local provider will have a long term power supply contract for a certain amount of electricity. A big increase usually means they now have to buy power on the spot market, which can be much more expensive. This raises the average electricity price for everyone;
3. The administration is pushing a huge expansion in LNG exports. IIRC ~41% of US power generation comes from natural gas. A huge increase in LNG exports will inevitably cause a rise in natural gas prices for all domestic power producers. This is in part driven by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine but natural gas suppliers have seen (and pounced upon) an opportunity to drive up the wholesale price of natural gas;
4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;
5. While all this is happening and we're not really building new power plants (at least not enough to match demand), the administration has cut off renewables, which are key to meeting demand beyond any environmental concerns (which are real and true). Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;
6. Private equity has turned its eye to the guaranteed profits of electricitiy providers [3]. This will do absolutely nothing other than raise prices; and
7. Lip service is given to nuclear but it simply isn't the answer, primarily because the lead time for building a nuclear power plant is about 10-15 years. Plus it's one of the most expensive forms of electricity (in LCOE terms) and having a company safely manage a nuclear power plant in an era where regulation is being gutted doesn't seem like a great idea.
Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without government subsidy. Why not just subsidize renewables instead, particularly solar? Efforts such as small modular reactors to lower costs simply make no sense. Larger reactors are more efficient.
I think by 2030 a significant portion of the population will be paying $0.50/kWh or more for residential electricity.
> Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;
This is so funny to me, because if you listen to anti-solar people, they'll tell you it's a bad idea because it doesn't generate anything at night. Given what you say, even if batteries weren't a thing, it would seem like solar would be an ideal component of any power grid, even if it didn't produce any energy for the nighttime whatsoever.
Solar really is ideal for partial or total residential power generation, for several reasons:
1. The price. It has plummeted in the alst 10-20 years and shows no signs of abating;
2. For many people it can be placed on their roofs so doesn't take up any land or generally require building any new structure. Generally the only planning required is artificial barriers in place to protect electricity providers;
3. It is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves turning a turbine. No moving parts is great for reliability. You do need some infrastructure to convert the panel output to the right voltage (eg an inverter) but that's all commodity tech;
4. Batteries are a largely solved problem for energy storage. You can use golf cart batteries if you really want.
There are problems. We need panel standardization, which I think will come with industry maturity.
Another big issue is lack of regulation for solar companies who use predatory financing on consumers and can actually make selling your home much more difficult. This is a big enough problem that any realtor will tend to advise you not to get solar because of the selling issues. This shouldn't be the case. It's a regulatory problem.
>4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;
Where, in the USA, can an electricity seller increase the price without government approval? Hell, your [2] link is about an entity of the federal government, there are no shareholders.
> Fun fact, people in California are paying nearly twice the price for energy than the rest of the US.
People in California are paying massive amounts for power distribution. The utilities themselves are paying very little for power generation -- for example, they pay 4c/kWh for a solar+batteries plant build in 2022.
> but doesn't put out anywhere near the power of nuclear.
We have > 250GW of solar and 97 GW of nuclear. Nuclear produced 779TWh and solar 303TWh in 2024. They are quite comparable.
> If California wants to do solar, it can! Though it will likely go the way of the rail project, the firefighting org etc
California already has a lot of solar and batteries.
Distribution is a separate line item on your PG&E bill. They have to bill you separately for the cost of electricity and the cost of delivery (maintenance of the grid)
Your energy prices are extremely high for reasons apart from the grid.
There is no “best way.” There are multiple good ways but there is no single “best way.” If someone has told you there is a ”best way” and no other path forward stands a chance then they are selling you something.
No. Texas has more renewables and uses way more total electricity. The fraction of grid electricity in Texas that comes from renewables is less than half of what it is in California.
Your comment reflects energy policy from somewhere around like 1975?
How can I tell someone on hackernews knows absolutely nothing about power generation economics? They say we have to go all in on nuclear. And that's assuming that the poster isn't being completely disingenuous.
Nuclear is expensive, and there are no technologies that will reduce the price in the near term. Solar wind and battery storage is still on a economies of scale price reduction curve that no other form of electricity generation can match.
Not coal, not natural gas, and certainly not nuclear.
If you start building nuclear plants which best case come online in 10 to 12 years, with nuclear technology that already is not economical, by the time they come online that is another 10 or 12 years of battery, solar panel, and wind technology improvement and further economies of scale.
Wind and solar have the ability to be organically grown and expanded. Solar can be placed practically anywhere there's a roof.
Now do I think we should be researching nuclear, researching lftrs, and perhaps funding nuclear power plants to perform peaking in the grid? Sure.
Do I think we should be shutting down existing nuclear power plants not particularly. I'd rather use those than natural gas and coal fired plants for grid balancing.
Right now rooftop solar or residential solar is probably about the price of nuclear. In 10 years it will probably be half the price of nuclear.
Anyway, the overall good news with this typically unhinged Trump announcement is it the economic reality is on the side of alternative energy proponents.
Of course the government can screw things up, boy howdy. Do we know that now. But then Americans will just learn the brutal truth that other economies are going to drop the price of their electricity, which is one of the basic drivers of economic growth and competition.
And the US will be left behind.
Because it's not like we're entering a multipolar highly competitive world right? oh.
To back up your point, here is the plummeting price of renewable energy [1].
The real reason for all this is because people get extremely rich off of fossil fuels and people don't relaly get rich off of renewables. Resource extraction (mining, drilling for oil and gas, etc) is a wealth concentrator.
Oh and it's worth adding that the recent bill reduced royalty payments paid by oil companies [2].
The whole thing is simply yet another form of wealth transfer from ordinary citizens to the mega-wealthy.
> Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources
Wrong, actually. At least in Australia, peak energy is in the late afternoon when everyone comes home, around 6pm. The other peak is in the morning around 7am. These are times when solar is not producing significantly, meanwhile it makes baseload unviable during the day.
I think you're confusing general power usage peak with residential usage peak. Or maybe you're talking about what you've learned 20 years ago (or Australia industry is 20 years late).
As AC use increased, industry switched from oil to electricity, coal to electric arc, and as power grid stabilized, peak usage shifted a lot in the last ~20 years. That's why summer/winter time do not make sense anymore and a lot of European countries are talking about not switching anymore.
It's common to quote the peak "demand" seen by the grid, which ignores rooftop solar which is fulfilling lots of actual demand when it is delivering.
This is especially true in Australia, a world leader in rooftop solar, here's something from AEMO on the topic:
> Both minimum and maximum operational demand are shifting to later in the day, driven by increasing contribution from rooftop PV. Minimum operational demand is expected to occur in the middle of the day by the mid-2020s. Maximum operational demand is expected to shift later in the day by an hour or two, when PV contribution is falling but temperatures are remain high (depending on the region and POE).
The peak demand depends on a number of factors including what city/town it is, the season, the mix of residential/industrial usage, the time of day and the day of the week [1].
Also, if the peak time includes summer afternoon/evenings from 3pm to 9pm (as it does for several cities), a significant portion of that time is in daylight hours. In January in Sydney, sunset is after 8pm. You have lower (or no) power generation from solar at dusk so say 7pm but that's still 4 of the 6 peak hours where solar is impacting peak usage.
Power companies will tend to point to residential peak demand to justify price increases while often just entirely excluding industrial usage that drops off at about the same time.
Also, residential power usage (in Australia) is changing as building standards change (ie Australian houses are notorious for their energy ineeficiency, historically) and the rollout of residential solar. Smart meters, energy efficiency and batteries can really put a dent in peak electricity usage and this will only continue given how comparatively expensive Australian electricity is.
The United States plays an outsized role in shaping global technology trends. If Saudi Arabia wants to delay the shift toward renewable energy, its most effective strategy would be to shape U.S. policy.
> If Saudi Arabia wants to delay the shift toward renewable energy, its most effective strategy would be to shape U.S. policy
Global energy policy, particularly relating to solar, begins and ends in China. They’re the largest variable marginal consumer of energy and producer of solar panels.
China has undeniably emerged as a global leader in renewable energy technology, thanks to its massive investments in solar, wind, and energy storage systems. However, despite China’s dominance in manufacturing and scaling renewable technologies, the world—especially when it comes to cutting-edge innovations—still tends to follow the trends set by the U.S.
Depressingly, the real answer is probably even worse. It’s not like there aren’t rich companies who won’t suffer from the upcoming power crunches and would write big checks to keep them from happening. But that won’t work.
No, the actual answer is that it’s pure ideology: this is about Owning the Libs, pure and simple, irrespective of the collateral damage to the economy. We’re currently being led by vengeance-minded morons who want to destroy anything that has even a tangential connection to liberal politics, and renewables are definitely on that list.
This is what-aboutism and sealioning taken to a disingenious level
Total world oil revenues: $4.2 trillion in 2025, market cap of $7.2 trillion in 2023
Total world solar/wind revenues: estimate $500 billion, so 1/8th. Market cap between $1.02 trillion and $1.51 trillion in 2024.
Oil, gas, and coal have spent: $150 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and has consistently spent over $100 million annually since 2006.
At the state level, hard to get data for. In CA alone, it was estimated $40m in 2024.
For the renewables industry in 2024: $60 million in federal lobbying in 2024. That has increased over the years, unlike oil and gas.
At the state level, renewables spent in CA: $4.68 million on state-level lobbying, or 1/10th.
In conclusion: oil and gas have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince politicians alone to support their cause for years, whereas renewables has been increasing their spend and is only a fraction of it.
Yes, both sides are putting money into it. No, both sides are not equal. FWIW, democrats support oil and gas just fine: under Obama oil and gas exports and refining grew to record highs, just as they did under Trump, and as they did under Biden.
The US is the largest oil exporter in the world. That has happened despite the mix of politicians holding majority of SCOTUS, Congress, and President. That has happened despite the small fraction of spending from renewables.
We prefer renewables because, unlike oil and gas, they aren't rejecting their role in climate impact: renewables do studies to understand them, and they are always far lower than oil and gas, an inconvenient truth the anti-renewable crowd wants to deny because they want to shout a wind turbine killing some birds is somehow equivalent to the millions of birds coal kills every year, along with the cancers it causes in humans, and the climate change, and the dirty business of mining the coal, and the water needed to cool the turbines. Yes, renewables obviously have some environmental impact. Its always less in total.
We prefer renewables because they aren't profitting to TRILLIONS of dollars and poisoning political discourse to spread lies about climate change. We prefer renewables because it means less cases of asthma. It means less control over the world's stage by extractive autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It means less cancer, less pollutants, less damage overall. Less oil spills.
Maybe we prefer renewables because we have a lot of reasons to prefer them, despite the relatively small amounts of cash flows desperately trying to prevent oil and gas from KILLING their industry. Which, btw, oil and gas have now successfully done. Renewables are significantly hampered under this administration.
Almost all fossil fuel power plants in America run on natural gas from the Permian basin in Texas and is almost free, since it's a byproduct of fracking.
My optimistic take is that the left takes this + the slight momentum from books/ideas like Abundance and coalesce into a pro-build anti red-tape yimby party.
That's very optimistic. And yeah, I see how this comment is kind of the equivalent of bringing up Obama or Hillary or something when it's about Trump's bullshit. To be very clear, I hate any efforts to impede energy build out.
The US needs to increase generation by 1% p.a. to accommodate increasing A/C usage due to climate change, by 2% p.a. for AI&blockchain, by 1-2% p.a. for electric cars and other decarbonization efforts. IOW, about 50GW p.a. Or about 10-50 nuclear plants per year, starting now. Not a couple of plants 20 years from now.
OTOH the world builds >1TW of solar panels every year and similar massive numbers of batteries. We have the capacity to do this with solar. We don't with nuclear, even if it was economical.
“Neat” is not how I’d describe the most successful new energy technology in the last few decades. It doesn’t need subsidies, it just needs to not be obstructed.
This isn't about energy policy. It's about trying to find money to fund increased government spending and specifically looking for it in places his base won't object to.
The long term negative impacts on energy aren't even being considered because it's a short term calculus.
So it sounds like you want to shorten the energy gap. Shouldn't you be opposed to any attempts to block new energy, especially projects already underway? Taking away subsides, fine, as long as its applied evenly. But blocking/halting new production helps how?
Solar/wind + battery storage can come online a lot faster and cheaper than nuclear.
We should probably increase the construction of nuclear, but it's extremely expensive and takes 5+ years to bring a plant online, even with regulatory fast tracking. Committing to a batch of plants with the same design would help reduce cost, and maybe decrease the avg time to operations, but it would still take a decade for all the plants to come online.
The solar panel production is now hundreds of gigawatts of nominal capacity added every year. Batteries are not far behind, still ramping up aggressively. Good luck trying to use nuclear to catch up.
If you think solar subsidies are heavy, you might not want to look at how much nuclear power plants are subsidized. Nuclear makes solar look fairly libertarian.
I'm pretty sure residential solar is harder for a utility to handle that commercial/utility-scale. Residential solar was a silly thing to prioritize, given the other options. I mean, it's overall good, but given the (in)competency of the utilities and the state of the grid, we'd be much better off we hadn't been idiots about nuclear for 50 years.
The reason this won't be effective is money. The more they obstruct, be more motivated people with money will be to get around the restrictions. Here greed is our friend.
In the UK the push towards renewable energy has so far been disastrous for energy prices and stability. There have been days in the UK where the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, and we came extremely close to blackouts [0]. We were forced to buy energy for eye watering prices. After the initial shock from the Russia-Ukraine conflict gas prices moved slightly, but electricity prices are not really recovering well and are projected to rise [1] [2].
According to government figures, 11% of electricity costs goes toward green initiatives, and 5% to VAT, which is also earmarked for green initiatives. The government has promised that as we become greener, we should see the prices come down, but the opposite has been true [3]. The green energy sector is currently largely subsidised by fossil fuels, as we transition more and more to green energy, the true costs are realised. Our Energy Secretary (failed prime minister candidate) says:
> Responding to the 6% price cap rise, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it was due to "our reliance on the fossil fuel markets" and added: "We're acting to bring down bills for everyone with our mission for clean, home-grown power that we control."
The irony is that we don't make our own wind turbines or solar panels, so our grid is still precariously dependant on foreign actors. We're breaking away from the likes of Russia to become dependant on China - great. Bare in mind, all of this effort for the UK which produces less than 1% of global emissions, but outsources its manufacturing to Countries such as China that have not even started to attempt to reduce their emissions (recent drops are due to economic collapse).
One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country. Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.
The UK does still need to build more on shore nevertheless.
> One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country.
This is exactly what I'm arguing against. The UK only has two real sources of renewable energy, solar and wind. The articles I linked showed that there were periods where we could barely get the energy we needed - and that included the imports from the EU. There is no real answer currently to storing that energy.
The UK historically had a strategic decentralised reserve of gas which were decommissioned (although articles do not show it). A prior government foolishly turned us into a "on-demand economy" for energy, and we had zero buffer to global prices. Fuels such as gas, diesel, petrol, coal, etc, can be stored for long periods and are very energy dense.
> Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.
Solar panels have a lifetime, the entire fleet will need to be rotated within 10-20 years, but they are currently being purchased directly with tax payer money. The UK has not yet demonstrated that it can incorporate all of these costs at a similar or lower rate. These panels are not manufactured locally, and we are reliant on external countries to produce them. Wind turbines are a similar story.
China has long faked all numbers they publish. They literally paint mountainsides green to fool satellites and get green subsidies [1] [2]. I can't find the article on it now, but they had fields of fake solar panels too. The only figure coming out of China that can be believed is externally measured emissions, and the number continues to go up at an incredible rate [3].
Renewables are the only reason the lights are regularly on in California. Go look at the timeline of large-scale blackouts in California, then compare with the buildout of solar and storage.
Just look at the title.. "Solar executives warn..". Of course they do, their business model is government subsidy. I live in a blue state that has decided to bet on renewables and our electricity rates are skyrocketing. If solar was viable, it would not require forcing tax payers to fund these businesses.
It's not just subsidies, it's also permitting and any other roadblocks they can manage. This isn't just economic or political, it's a weird personal crusade.
Whatever cost it is, I highly doubt it's cheaper to cancel projects that are well underway without recouping any benefits at all, in some cases over the objections of local customers, without an alternative in place with environmental and financial analysis to support it.
Otherwise you're just burning money without an alternative to meet increasing demand (which is likely why costs are increasing and why the additional supply is being built).
But the Biden administration which introduced the IRA subsidies also jacked up tariffs on solar panels, increasing the price of these projects. Would many of these businesses been viable if neither subsidies nor tariffs had been introduced? Given the declining cost of PVs over time, would they have become viable eventually?
Well, not in California where there is both a residential solar mandate assuring new distributed supply and where solar already reaches over 100% of demand at peak; adding new utility-scale solar doesn't make a lot of sense even if it is cheap.
Politics and corruption. The generation cost is low, but the government backed monopoly folds all kinds of distribution, deferred maintenance, fire damage, and political pet projects into the retail price. It sucks.
According to the article Trump is trying to ban new solar developments. Suppliers are building tons of solar but they can't do so if the government makes it illegal.
CPI energy prices have risen for the last 10 years steadily, and is now going parabolic.
Maybe some forms of green energy have helped in some areas and times of day, but they have done nothing to stop the climb.
It's time to try something other than solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices, and may be making it worse (TOU energy plans are becoming the norm because of the broken duty cycle of solar)
If you want to lower costs, why would you prevent the easiest to deploy form of supply? Why would you prevent the market from meeting the demand?
This isn’t about subsidies, it’s about standing in the way of the free market.
And why do you think cost relates to a form of supply? It seems more likely that demand is also much higher (data centers, more air conditioning, etc).
It hasn't lowered it because tech keeps inventing new ways to burn hideous amounts of power; first it was crypto mining on PoW chains now it's AI training. Renewables aren't the problem.
> solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices
Why would the government intervening to ban supply make things better?
This policy is a hand-out to power producers. It constricts supply. It’s Trump copying San Francisco and Los Angeles housing policymakers, except for energy.
They seem to be blaming renewables for rising electricity prices just because they’re there. My point is that fossil fuels account for far more generation, so if you’re going to blame stuff based on their mere presence, blaming fossil fuels makes more sense.
We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc. But killing renewable projects because, uh, farming or whatever?, particularly at a time when the demand for energy is growing faster than ever, seems short sighted at best.
> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now, it has intermittency problems, etc.
You seem to rely on quite outdated information. Renewables are the cheapest source of energy in human history. The recent explosive growth is fueled by pure economics rather than feelgood.
The same thing is happening with storage with the prices plummeting. With the recent auctions landing at $50-60/MWh.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
In many regions unsubsidized renewables + storage are now the cheapest source of energy, undercutting coal and gas. Nuclear power does not even enter the picture due to the absolutely insane costs involved.
I would nothing more than to enjoy those cheap prices. Here in Sweden (and EU in general), while energy prices has drop in response to renewables, grid fees and energy taxes has increased more than to cover any savings. Grid fees are now the wast majority off the bill, which pays for grid stability and transmissions that is required to operate a much more variable energy production. grid stability and transmissions are primarily a government responsibility, and when cost goes up they forward that costs as grid fees and taxes.
To put some numbers down, a quertly bill recent had $1400 usd as grid fees, while the energy consumption came down to $300. Those numbers could be specific to that house, that energy company, but it is a story echoed by more and more people in this region. The consumption cost could be $0/MWh, and the grid fees alone would still be way more expensive compared to the full bill just a couple of years ago.
Generally when organizations has attempted to put a number on "grid fees" it is quite small in the grand scheme of things.
For Australia CSIRO found this number to be €9B. [1] Vastly lower than the subsidies a single large scale new built reactor would need.
[2]: https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost-2024-25-...
In Sweden we have recently seen an explosion on costs for ancillary services as new markets has been added which needs to be built out. But they have lowered in cost after a year or two. The same will happen for the most recent markets.
Then Sweden has a problem with low population density, large grid and high wages which makes labor intensive infrastructure like the grid cost more.
We can hope/pray/predict that prices will go down in a year or two. I have yet to see any politician or providers give that promise. The government have approved new grid stability power plants (based on natural gas), and those have both investment costs and operational costs that the government want consumers to pay for in the next decade/s. In addition, the hydro power plants that already exist and was built during the 20th century need to either be refitted or removed in order to comply with EU environmental standards (and prevent mass extinction of several endangered species). That will also increase costs for grid stability for the next several decades. On top there are plans for new transmission to even out the difference between the north and south part of the country, and those are predicted to take a decade or so to build. They are not short term projects with short term price hikes.
Why should a politician provide that promise?
Look at the market dynamics and volumes. It is like everyone rushing in with home based storage for the ancillary markets being promised a ROI within months.
That lasted... months...
What is your suggestion? Nuclear power does not solve it, and won't be online until the 2040s either way.
There are no easy solutions or free lunch, only true costs. Nuclear has its benefits and drawbacks (most which don't need to be repeated). Hydro power is a great natural resource, except for that extinction aspect and flooding risks. Solar and wind is great for use cases where that production variation matches the consumption and human behavior. Natural gas and other fossil fuels should just not be used in the grid, and the arguments in favor of continued use are simply wishful thinking or malicious.
What is simple is that the energy bill is going up in a speed that is much faster than inflation, while the cost of production of energy is going down. As such, the production cost of energy is a poor indicator for the price that users of energy is paying. If we want cheap energy than what we need to care about is the true cost of energy delivering, since that is what the energy bill will reflect. That include the cost of production, the time and place of production, the cost of maintaining grid stability, transportation, and market inefficiencies.
Home storage works, but gatekeeps reliable power to the relatively wealthy. You need days of it at minimum for any reasonable long term plan. Seasonal storage is the problem, nightly storage is pointless to discuss.
Just dumping external costs onto the grid as a whole is not where I want to see society going - said as someone who could easily fill an entire shed full of whole home battery storage.
A reliable and cheap power grid is so much taken for granted in developed areas of the world it astounds me. Dismantling it in favor of everyone being their own little power generation and storage island is just going to continue to create have and have nots.
Of course no one really seems to bring forth the costs to industry when they talk about this stuff. Cheap power inputs are the wealth of a society. You don’t get to be rich without it. Asking every factory to co-locate generation to their metal stamping fab or whatever is ridiculous.
At this point I think many places have gone so many decades putting their head into the sand and making this an ideology that there is actually no solution. I fully expect to see wide scale rolling blackouts in many developed economies in the next 20 years.
When I see some actual numbers that are not just financial engineering or parasitism I will start to change my views on the subject. It’s fraud and grifters all the way down the stack.
Renewables really aren't that cheap unless you view them entirely in isolation. Sun doesn't shine all night and wind doesn't blow continuously, it needs to be viewed with storage to represent a complete picture. Rooftop solar is more expensive than nuclear due to the zero economies of scale, residential storage is staggeringly expensive, and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.
I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.
Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
Rooftop PV in the US now costs around $3/watt including BOS (balance of system) and labor. This means an average 6kW home installation is less than $20k -- without storage. (This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.)
Yes home storage adds more money but a grid-tied PV installation without batteries is very useful in many parts of the country: Using the grid as your "battery" at night, a $20k investment can make your net electricity cost zero or even negative.
A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
$20,000 for a 6kW system with a 15-20% capacity factor that lasts 20 years means you're going to generate a total of 157,000kWh. That's 12.7c/kWh. Before factoring in anything that might happen to it, including damage, cleaning, replacing your inverter. That is not cheap electricity -- the LCOE of nuclear is 9-15c/kWh. That's within spitting distance of Vogtle before you add storage.
Sure the panels may last 30 years, so you can juice the numbers and maybe you live in the middle of Nevada so you can get the upper end of the capacity factor but I mean, my estimate assumes nothing happens to those panels before the year 2055. My estimate also doesn't include financing costs for your car-sized purchase or any changes to your insurance premiums.
If you add a PowerWall for $15,000 that lasts 10-15 years, that doubles the cost despite increasing the capacity factor of the system, once again assuming you have zero issues with it until 2040.
> A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
I'd do it myself and I'd be happy too, because it's neat, but that doesn't mean I'm getting a good deal or that residential solar is a cheap way to get electricity.
I suspect the people who are happy with their financial decision don't understand the difference between opex and capex, and aren't factoring in the opportunity cost of their $20-35,000 investment. If you invest $20,000 in bonds at 5% for 20 years you have $53,000 -- or in the S&P 500 at 9% you have $112,000. Historically electricity prices have grown closer to 2% per year.
Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The LCOE for consumer solar is between $81 and $217 per MWh. This is MUCH more expensive than grid based solar.
https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
>...This does not include government subsidies. Where they're still available the price decreases further.
The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof. Also, in almost all cases, the home installation doesn’t have enough battery power to actually last through inclement weather and so is free riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much, further than a dollar spent subsidizing wealthy homeowners who install panels on their roof.
>...A vast number of US homeowners have installed such a system and are very happy they did so.
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run.
That price you quote is for Community and Commericial and Industrial solar e.g. big box store roofs or on warehouses and factories.
They seem to have stopped showing home solar prices since 2024:
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Thanks for the info. I thought maybe they were combining consumer rooftop with them, but didn't take the time to double-check. From the June 2024 report, the consumer rooftop cost range was $122 - $284. The commercial and industrial was $54 to $191. If inflation has caused the Community & C&I to increase that much, it is likely the consumer cost has also noticeably increased unfortunately.
https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Thats kinda crazy given panels are something like $0.15/watt. Literally only 5% of your total quote.
It used to be that panel cost was the most important factor in PV system cost. Now the panels are nearly free and everything else determines the system cost.
Lazard has retrofit household rooftop solar at roughly the same cost as nuclear.
Those are US numbers, Australian rooftop solar is 3 or 4 times cheaper.
And Lazard separately lists Commercial and Industrial rooftop solar which is much cheaper.
> ...and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.
That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...
I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.
I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting? What problem are you solving? The final bit of emergency reserves?
> Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidizes so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China.
This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
If the fossil fuel supply chain is disrupted we get an energy crisis within weeks.
What happens if the renewable supply chain is disrupted?
Well.... all existing installations keeps working for decades and in the meantime we need to figure out an alternative. After a couple of years our emergency reserves would start to work harder due to old installations aging out but the impact would be near zero.
> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it, Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.
Which is of course why all western reactors are struggling with cost. You do know that modular reactors has been a talking point for the nuclear industry since the 1950s? That is what the industry generally bounces to when large scale projects balloon in cost. They just never deliver.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
But somehow if we magically handout another trillion in tax money to the nuclear industry they will fix it this time!!
> If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction
With the minor caveat that you can't even drive the pump from the electricity final electricity you get out due to the volumes involved.
I love how the solution to horrifically expensive new built nuclear power is an even more economically infeasible technical solution.
Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
> Which is why I also added that the costs for storage are absolutely plummeting?
The only storage that matters at scale is pumped hydro, and the cost for that is not "plummeting" at all because it's built out. Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar. The gap must be made up by either peaker natgas plants (which are costly, non-renewable and emit some carbon dioxide) or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
> Battery storage is a toy, it won't cover a prolonged (can last multiple weeks over vast geography) winter-time dip in wind plus solar.
I love how the talking point has switched from "storage can't even cover an hour" a couple of years ago to now apparently having trouble with "multiple weeks". How quickly reality shifts.
When we're talking about emergency reserves, because that is what you are trying to paint as the end of the world, then who the fuck cares where it comes from?
Having that problem means that close to 99% of our entire energy system is renewable. The final piece is trivial to solve with synfuels, biofuels, hydrogen or whatever when it is deemed necessary.
In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc. is enough to run the entire grid without any other energy source for 16 days.
That is trivially repurposed as our car fleet is switched to BEVs.
Or just use whatever aviation and the shipping industry settles on as they decarbonize.
> or, more sensibly, nuclear baseload.
This tells me you don't have the slightest clue how the grid works and are reasoning backwards from attempting to justify a trillion dollar handout to the nuclear industry.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
> In the US the ethanol produced used as a gasoline mix in etc.
Just so we're clear ethanol produced from corn is almost the same carbon intensity as the gasoline, and it's worse for the climate when you factor in the land use changes. [1] The whole program was just a giveaway to corn farmers from the Dubyah administration. Even the rosiest image painted by the renewables industry association says it's 26% less carbon intensive (but they neglect land use). Ethanol is basically fossil fuel with extra steps.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e...
Was the carbon emitted from burning this ethanol sequestered in the ground or was it already in the air and is just cycling the same amount of carbon involved the atmosphere?
You can look at the linked study, it's a complicated topic but this is net carbon add. It's a combination of the fossil fuel based fertilizers, tractor fuel, moving the corn around, processing the corn into starch, fermenting the starch and moving the end product to blending sites. It also includes carbon released due to changes in land use.
Which means: Nearly all emissions can be replaced with carbon neutral transport and energy sources as we decarbonize society.
> Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity
With nuclear power, there's no such thing as 'too much'. It's economically optimal to produce flat out ("baseload") because continued production really is "too cheap to meter", as the saying goes. The cost is pretty much all in the plant itself, which is why a lot of research into next-gen nuclear is about building smaller and cheaper plants.
> But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed
Yes? That's how a "baseload" source works. And we should not pretend that intermittent renewable sources aren't going to have the exact same issue, only to a far greater extent (especially as they scale out to "99%" of the system). You can address this by not putting all your eggs in the intermittent basket.
So what happens when you stick two French grids next to each other and you can't rely on your neighbors fossil fuel plants to absorb your over production by throttling down?
The cost for nuclear skyrockets. Do you dare calculating what running Vogtle at say a 40% capacity leads to? We're talking ~40 cents per kWh for the electricity now.
You do know that the nuclear industry has been talking "small" and "scale" since the 1950s? It is what they bounce to when large scale projects balloon in cost and fail to deliver.
Here's a history refresher:
The Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors
Economics killed small nuclear power plants in the past—and probably will keep doing so
https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-forgotten-history-of-small-nuc...
How will you solve the "cold spell" with your nuclear grid? Just ignore it and pretend nuclear power only solves "base" while keep drumming on the "renewable intermittency!!!" drum?
That does not sound very logical.
> ...The cost for nuclear skyrockets.
The cost for the nuclear plants themselves is exactly the same, it's just no longer offsetting expensive non-renewable sources. Intermittent renewables run into this issue to a far greater extent as they scale out, because their variable cost is higher.
Renewables mix very well with storage, especially due to their near zero marginal cost.
Why should I fill my storage with horrifically expensive nuclear electricity when renewables deliver? That is the question you need to answer.
If you've decided to build a nuclear plant already (and there are plenty of reasons for such a choice - for one thing, it adds diversity to the mix when combined with intermittent renewables) that energy is no longer "horrifically expensive", it's already paid for. If you're worried about "producing too much" (which could happen with either nuclear or renewables), putting it in storage makes sense.
Again, you don't seem to comprehend how the grid works.
Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid. Both renewable power and nuclear power competes for the most inflexible portion of the grid. A fight renewables win hands down and nuclear power is forced to throttle down.
What happens when nuclear power is forced to throttle down? It becomes more expensive due to being nearly 100% CAPEX.
Like I said, Vogtle costs 20 cents/kWh running at full tilt. Somewhere at 40 cents/kWh running half the time.
Take a look at South Australia:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
Do you notice how many instances last week renewables supplied 100% of the grid load? Mind that this is late winter in Australia.
What do you do with your nuclear plant all those hours? Shut it down? Bid negative to make renewables shut down?
In Australia old traditional base load coal plants are forced to become peakers or be decommissioned. That is the reality today. In South Australia coal plants were phased out in 2016.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
Which again leads us back to the question:
Why should I fill my storage with Vogtle electricity at 20 cents/kWh when I can instead buy renewable electricity at a fraction of the cost?
> Nuclear power does not add diversity to a heavily renewable grid.
A heavily renewable grid is in trouble whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A heavily nuclear grid is in trouble whenever demand happens to exceed the limited amount of baseload it can provide. These events tend to be uncorrelated, so one can expect that adding some nuclear to a heavily renewable grid (and vice versa) will save a lot on costly "grid stabilization" services from peaker plants and/or grid-level storage.
A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense. But its "baseload" profile seems to provide an attractive bundle of bulk supply plus some amount of stabilization compared to a "99%" intermittent renewable mix. Why shouldn't we try to reduce the high variable costs of storage and peaker plants to whatever extent turns out to be feasible?
Renewables are far better at throttling than nuclear or any other technology.
It's maybe the most consistently misinterpreted fact in the renewables debate.
I put this down to years of headlines about negative prices "caused by" solar, and when you go and look at the stats, there's always fossil plants running for contractual or operational reasons.
But also to a bizarre fear of negative numbers.
Running nuclear full out and using low or even negative prices when required to incentivize people to shift demand to match supply is a far saner, cheaper, cleaner way to run a grid, yet we have people celebrating the opposite.
You of course have not heard about storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
> These events tend to be uncorrelated,
Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
It does not seem like you did dare to look at the South Australian example. Again:
How will you run your nuclear plant in a grid that daily is ran to 100% by renewables?
> A nuclear plant is not, strictly speaking, going to supply energy at literal zero or negative prices the way some renewables do, because it can throttle down when that makes economic sense.
Now you are making up something because you can't accept that nuclear power does not solve the problem at hand.
I already gave you the link:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...
There you have a coal plant shutting down daily with all the thermal stresses and cycles coupled with that because otherwise they would have to bid negative.
In Europe we see nuclear plants voluntarily time and time again withdrawing from the grids due to sustained low prices.
You try to shift words and meanings to step around the question of who pays. But all you do is force people to spend 20 cents/kWh, excluding transmission costs, on horrifically expensive nuclear power.
You reason like an engineer trying to design an imaginary perfect system not seeing the forest for the trees, or caring the slightest about the cost to the end user.
That can be a fun thought exercise, but reality will laugh you out of the room.
> storage? The technology that is absolutely exploding globally in recent years.
How is storage "exploding globally" when the bulk of long-term grid storage is still provided by pumped hydro, a technology that's built out? Short-term high-flow storage can be interesting in combination with any inflexible source (either nuclear or intermittent renewables - for one thing, it can solve the "plant has to shut down and restart every day" point you mention) but is only a small part of the problem.
> Dunkelflautes and cold spells are often correlated. A mild January sun coupled with an arctic high pressure extending south.
The point is that the correlation may be imperfect enough that nuclear can meaningfully contribute to addressing that problem, whereas extending intermittent renewables to "99%" of the grid cannot. (To be sure, there's also some limited upside from diversifying the geography of renewable sources, but that doesn't extend to anywhere near "99%".) If a shortfall remains, it can be made up by some combination of rarely-operated peaker plants with cheaper CAPEX, plus some demand response/load shedding, especially from industry.
You seem to rely on very outdated information? Is this why you are so hellbent on wasting trillions on dead end handouts to the nuclear industry?
In terms of GW battery storage has already over taken pumped hydro. In terms of GWh we are a few years out.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-about-to-over...
Now you want to have a nuclear plant to solve for the "when cold weather and dunkelflautes" does not correlate use case?
Do you realize how far into "emergency reserves" you have receded because you can't accept the reality of modern new built nuclear power?
Your link says "battery storage and pumped hydro will have complimentary roles to play - batteries focusing on the flexibility and speed and ability to provide system services, and pumped hydro on dealing with longer storage requirements, such as extended periods of low wind and solar output." It acknowledges that battery electric storage is short-term only, meant to smooth out daily peaks.
At current costs batteries are best suited for daily cycling. A few years ago batteries were best suited for multiple cycles per day on the ancillary markets.
Given the recent auctions in China we are starting to see batteries where a cycle every second or third day is enough.
It is essentially optimistic technobabble for the technology losing out about a potential issue coming in 10-15 years as we decarbonize.
Please do explain why we should lock in a solution for that today instead of solving it with the technology at hand when we get there.
The final few percentage points of reserves are almost all that matters to reliable grid operation. This can mean many things including load shedding even.
If you decided fuel costs were exactly zero for emergency reserves you would still have those being by far the largest cost contributor to the grid as a whole. Building plants that can basically cover your entire peak load and letting them sit idle is insanely expensive and would be the most subsidized form of generation on earth.
Not building them would be horrifically irresponsible.
I’ve always been talking about seasonal storage as the actual problem that matters with intermittent generation. A week long power outage for a region is a society killer if it happens with any regular frequency.
The only time I’ve ever brought up nightly storage is in the context of upper middle class folks using the grid as a free nightly battery and outsourcing their costs onto poor people - then commonly bragging about it. I would love to see net metering killed once a local grid gets above a certain inflection point of solar generation, and then only hourly market based pricing offered to anyone who wants to remain grid-tied. The market dynamics would then sort themselves out.
The rooftop solar subsidies only make sense to bootstrap an industry.
We should have been building all forms of power generation and storage over the past few decades instead of relying on inertia from the responsible generations of people that came before us. That inertia is rapidly running out, and cheap tricks like efficiency gains are no longer low hanging fruit.
As previously stated though - residential usage is not that interesting as a whole. Industrial usage is and commonly glossed over in these discussions.
Grid-tied BEVs are a laughable solution. It ignores any sort of human agency. When the grid goes down, people are not going to keep their only form of transportation plugged in for the common good. If anything they will top it off and keep it so until grid stability returns further straining a creaky grid. Again, it only solves the relatively easy problem of residential reliability and only for relatively wealthy folks.
You do know that essentially all grids even today has emergency reserves? You call it "extremely wasteful" but that already exists.
Generally they are older plants, often staying online through capacity markets or other mechanisms.
The question you need to answer is:
How will you force me with a home battery and rooftop solar to buy your 20 cent per kWh excluding transmission costs nuclear power?
> This seems like hand wringing over a nothing burger? Compare the dynamics with fossil fuels:
I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
> Or you know, just diversify renewable supply chains?
That's happening about as fast as seawater extraction. There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the environmental price.
Regardless fuel costs for nuclear plants are roughly zero, about $0.0015/kWh, and there is more than enough uranium on land. And of course reprocessing spent fuel is a totally viable solution; most of France's uranium is closed loop. The entirety of the cost is in building and financing, which can be solved with policy changes.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
If you're comparing solar + wind to not(solar + wind), then either you're mainly comparing to fossil fuels, or discussing a world that doesn't exist.
Sure, you like nuclear. You can say "oh, well, if we snap our fingers and magically have the world be different than it is, then nuclear would outperform solar".
Magic doesn't exist, and if you take two people in any country and task them with adding 5GW of reliable generation, one person with nuclear and the other with solar + battery, solar + battery will achieve that goal faster and cheaper every single time, in every country on earth.
> I'm not comparing to fossil fuels, so it's not really relevant.
Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today. The only comparison to make is fossil fuels and with that renewables give us major advantages.
For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry. The west quickly diversified from their fossil fuels, but we have not been able to do the same with nuclear energy.
But I don't see you complaining about supply chain issues regarding how Russia absolutely dominates the nuclear energy sector?
> There's good reasons why, at least for wind the extraction and processing of rare earths is an environmental catastrophe and only China is willing to pay the price.
So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty? And don't start talking about all the other stuff we need to build said supply chain and nuclear power plants.
But it is fine when nuclear power does it right?
And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
What are you even attempting to do here? Just muddying the waters because nuclear power evidently does not deliver and you can't bring yourself to accept it?
That person you are arguing with is not arguing with you in good faith. They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach. The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling, and they could not come up with a better idea if things go bad, I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
> They are in the "base load" camp, despite knowing full well we need an "all of the above" approach.
I support renewables. I think it's important we understand the whole picture, and think we should construct them even if they're expensive and imperfect. However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
> The subsidies that both nuclear and fossil fuel industries have received since the 50's is mind boggling.
Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production. The renewables industry has historically and also continues to receives significant subsidies. So does the fossil fuel industry.
> I guess just bury the waste somewhere and and go live elsewhere.
Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem. Yes, you can put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
That is why we are seeing massive 40 year PPA agreements, the state taking the entire financial- and project risk and similar steps to force the paltry few proposed nuclear projects over the final investment decision line?
Modern nuclear power is absolutely insanely subsidized.
> Nowhere in the world is nuclear subsidized per unit of production.
Not true. Basically every nuclear plant ever built has been, if not directly financed by government, backed a guarantee to purchase every MWh produced at a fixed (or index linked to inflation) price. Hinkley Point C - under construction in the UK - are guaranteed £92.50 per MWh produced (in 2012 prices index linked to inflation - so already this has risen to £133.81/MWh and the project is still years from operation). This guarantee lasts 35 years once the plant becomes operational. For comparison, current wholesale prices in the UK are roughly half this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_powe...
As a species collective we understand the big picture.
> Nuclear waste is not now and has never been a real problem.
Sure to you because you apparently never had that job.
It's trivial to see you are just reciting from memory and not experience. Waste is a problem in that it is generated and must be handled, transported, stored safely. Perhaps you mean it's not a long term problem once stored?
Good job making it clear you don't understand the problem. Thankfully others do. Please continue to rant online out of the way such that you stay out of the way.
> However people seem to think that they're basically free and completely harmless to the environment while neither is true.
Who is making this claim? You are arguing with straw men. What do you think you are contributing here?
> Nuclear power is irrelevant in our energy systems today.
I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
> For the nuclear supply chain we still have not been able to sanction the Russian industry.
12% come from Russia. [1]
> So now suddenly we are hand wringing about rare earth extraction consequences. You seem to change topics faster than I can follow.
I feel like environmental implications are relevant to discuss, and I think the topic is relevant.
> You do know that the uranium supply is also extremely nasty?
Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. They have a 96% recovery rate. [2]
> And now suddenly seawater extraction did not matter?
It didn't matter in my original post either which is why it's under "if we're being pedantic."
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...
[2] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
> I dunno, it's been producing 20% of US power for decades. Same as renewables. Seems relevant.
Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-stacked...
Like I said, irrelevant compared to the fossil fuel supply chain supplying 80%.
> 12% come from Russia. [1]
Of course ignoring the intermediary steps in the supply chain which Russia controls ~50% of. But Kazakh uranium being processed in Russia is Kazakh!
And this of course ignores that my main point was that Russia is the largest player in the global nuclear technological sector.
Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
> Sure, but you need very little of it due to energy density, and reprocessing is a viable alternative as demonstrated by France. [2]
And now we again "solve" nuclear power by saying that reprocessing works. Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Just make nuclear power even more horrifically expensive! No problem!
> Which falls to 7.6% when counting the useful energy and not staring yourself blind on the electricity grid.
Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
> Like I said. The evidence is that Europe despite over 3 years of war in Ukraine still has not been able to sanction any part of the Russian nuclear industry.
France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
> Despite reprocessing producing massive quantities of nasty byproducts and more expensive Uranium.
Are you able to quantify this are compared to renewables or are we just assuming? Remember in terms of costs, it's basically entirely construction -- fuel costs almost nothing. So even if reprocessing is relatively expensive, adding cost there won't really change nuclear energy prices.
> Wind and solar is less than 7% combined on that graph, so either wind and solar aren't relevant and nuclear isn't relevant, or they're both relevant.
Renewables are relevant given their trajectory and that they make up ~90% of new installations due to being the by far best option today.
Grid infrastructure has a lifespan of a couple decades. We are seeing a complete disruption of the grid, but it will take a couple of decades for everything to shake out as the existing fleet of fossil and nuclear plants ages out.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
> France is practically closed loop, and France is 55% of Europe's nuclear generation.
Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing. But relying on Russia for your energy supply chain is fine as long as it is nuclear power?
> Renewables are relevant given their trajectory
How convenient.
> Of course forgetting how France uses Russia for this reprocessing.
They do the reprocessing at the Orano La Hague site on the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. They also historically reprocessed for Germany there and continue to reprocess for Japan. You can look these things up before you respond, you know. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site
You truly are out of your depth here. France is considering building a site to reprocess uranium for us in commercial reactors since the only plant available, which they have been using for decades, is in Russia.
> The French government is "seriously" examining plans to build a site on French territory to convert and enrich reprocessed uranium. At present, Russia is the only country in the world that can recycle uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
> ...
> Specifically, to convert its reprocessed uranium (URT), France has no other option but to perform this stage in Russia, the only country with a conversion plant for URT through its public operator Rosatom. The subsequent enrichment stage could be carried out in Russia or the Netherlands.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/986020/france-considers-a-plan...
Why is it that you nuclear cultist just keep making stuff up because you can't deal with reality?
OK but what are the prices at which storage auctions land OUTSIDE of China?
> That means it’s fully within China’s purchasing power parity advantage sphere, where everything costs 40% less than in the west. That means zero tariffs.
Something like $70-80 per MWH.
https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/grid-storage-at-66...
Archive: https://archive.is/UXcdL
It's not at all convincing. Recent announced deals in Portugal are over 1000 EUR per MWH which doesn't make any economic sense at all.
Everything you are saying means that the government can keep their damn claws off of it, because its entirely self economically viable
I am speculating, but I think the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA.
Coal is in a scary place right now in the US, see this as an example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1mmqwd3/i_live_in...
Basically coal is less profitable and more expensive in places that have always been coal counties. The only thing to do in these areas is mine coal, so the concern is that entire regions will be rendered worthless if coal collapses.
Which means local residents cannot sell their homes without taking significant losses, and they probably lose their jobs in coal, which manifests into a poverty trap for the entire town.
And there are hundreds of these towns all through Appalachia.
So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
Anybody who didn’t see this coming hasn’t been paying attention. There’s been plenty of time to move, retrain, whatever. The government has probably failed these people in one way or another, but these tend to be areas the say they value self-sufficiency and minimal government interference , so…
> move
To where, with what savings?
> retrain
To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?
There are retrains programs dotted all over WV and Appalachia. They cover everything from construction and other trades to IT and more office-focused jobs.
What office focused jobs?
I don't believe in retraining, but tons of immigrants move for better opportunities with very little savings. It's difficult and unfortunate, but it's necessary
People probably should not be forced to behave like desperate immigrants within the borders of their own country though
people also shouldnt be forced to bend over backwards to ensure these couple villages never have to change their coal mining ways.
From their perspective, this should require no effort; it is forcing them to change which requires effort.
Of course I want the use of coal to stop. But you need to reckon with these kinds of human factors if you want to effect change peacefully.
This is where Clinton failed. Having a documented plan to spend billions (somewhere on the order of 10 years of salary per miner, from numbers I could glean elsewhere in this discussion) doesn't make an impression when you have well-documented sound bites claiming that you intend to put them "out of business".
Why not? It'll probably build character. Also, it's happened all the time? People have been doing it for all of America's history. Tons of famous media is about people moving to the city for a better life.
Clinton had promised a large pile of cash to do this. Voters preferred Trump's lie that he would save the jobs.
> To do what, in this area, with what existing infrastructure?
Right! It's a real chicken and egg scenario. It would seem to me that without this infrastructure, it would be very hard to retrain and build new industries. It would really benefit the people of these regions to vote for people who, as a matter of policy, would bring training and infrastructure to them. Unfortunately, the people who most benefit from such policies vote against them [1], so the resources available are insufficient. So the conversation is about poverty reduction through social programs to support people working in a dying industry, rather than growing new industries. The solution, might be to vote for people proposing such resources, which I know is a radical idea, but it's at least something new to try.
https://medium.com/hillary-for-america/the-future-of-america...
Here's the plan she had specifically for coal communities [1].
[1] https://static.politico.com/b8/90/cbbc9c59413089d87e8d6340f1...
There are only about 45,000 coal miners in the entire US. That's a tiny number.
They're also in geographically low population areas so counting them and the people employeed in their towns they have a significant sway on some states and the Senate skews things towards low population states through it's inequitable representation AND the outsized power Senate rules give individual Senators.
Plus it's made a few people EXTREMELY rich so they've made their opinions and interests everyone elses problem too.
Every once in a while someone in the Netherlands argues for the district system and they are immediately shut down with "America".
One man one vote. And yes the regions that contribute more to the economy are a priority. They fund everything including the military without which we'd still be a part of Spain.
Yeah I get the idea originally, you had to appease the slave and smaller states to get them to join the plan originally at all, but there's a very, very good reason wherever the US has had the chance to design a new government we have never saddled them with our system. I don't think there's a reasonable hope that it'll get reformed in a clean way though.
There are approximately twice as many yoga instructors. It's unfortunate Big Yoga doesn't have the same political pull.
If people really cared about coal miners then they could be offered a $1 million redundancy package. It would amount to a tiny fraction of government spending and I'm pretty sure it would be welcomed.
More people drive buses in NYC than are coal miners in the whole America.
Probably though, like the buses, there's an order of magnitude more work done on the "back end". The machines, logistics, etc etc and everything else that depends on the industry. In the bus drivers example, it could be all the people in NYC who need to take a bus to get to work and would be affected by the sudden disappearance of buses. So it is with many industries.
At the same time there are hundreds of towns in low-lying areas that are being rendered worthless by the climate change.
Where can I find a list of these towns?
[dead]
At the speed at which coal has been declining, and will continue to decline now due to economics, it’s not going to take 50 years. Maybe 10 at most.
The thing is, if you’re burning fossil fuels to generate power there’s not much reason to prefer coal over natural gas. The latter is cheaper and cleaner and once pipelines are in place, you don’t need to truck it around.
Coal is dead and it’s not coming back. Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Speaking frankly, the way politicians keep selling the fantasy of it making a comeback is cruel.
> Areas in which it served as the pillar of the economy need to figure something else out. I say this as someone hailing from one such area.
Old steel towns had to do this, coal country might look to them for a model on how to leave a dying industry behind. But seeing how they vote, they might not like the answer for what it takes to survive:
Pittsburgh PA - famous former steel town, faced very uncertain economic future after the mills closed, now a booming metropolis with top industry leaders in education, healthcare, sports, finance. What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Cleveland OH - once one of America's great manufacturing hubs, powered by steel mills, car parts, and shipping along Lake Erie. When industry collapsed, Cleveland faced deep decline, job losses, shrinking population, even bankruptcy in the 1970s. But today it's finding new strength as a center of healthcare, research, and culture.
Then you look at places like Youngstown OH. Unlike Pittsburgh or Cleveland, Youngstown struggled to reinvent itself. Population plummeted, tax bases collapsed, and poverty took hold. The city became a symbol of the Rust Belt's hardest struggles. What held it back? Overreliance on steel, limited diversification, and waves of outmigration left too few resources to rebuild. What are they doing today to fix things? Healthcare and education. Should have started a lot sooner.
One more example is Bethlehem PA, another former steel town that now has top industries in healthcare, education, and also some manufacturing.
So that's the model. If you're a dying town with an industry that's shrivveling up due to changing economic conditions, the model to survive is to quickly pivot to healthcare, education, and entertainment, and to invite a bunch of outsiders into your community with open arms.
And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, entertainment, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power, they're attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss of failed post-industrial policy.
> And that is the main problem these dying coal regions have, because looking at how they vote, embracing healthcare, education, and diversity is the last thing they want to do. You look at what the people who they voted for are doing with their power its attacking healthcare, attacking education, and attacking diversity sometimes violently, but always unrelentingly. So the Pittsburgh model is off the table, and they'll have to find another way from the abyss.
Spot on, from what I’ve seen. Just keep doubling down on what hasn’t worked in hopes that one day it’ll magically manifest a Disney ending and the good old days will return.
What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.
Just cater to the rich folks! That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure. Rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich. Building prosperity is a difficult ordeal that takes time, sacrifice, a lot of money, and a culture of safety and community.
Sure if you want increase your tax base, step one is to be attractive to people with money.
But healthcare, education, and entertainment are not exclusive to rich people, they're industries that everyone enjoys and can take part in. The doctors, actors, professors, students, athletes, researchers, who come from around the world to live and work in Pittsburgh are not "the rich". They have money, but they're still just regular people.
For example the students who come to Pittsburgh for an education are not wealthy, but they are flush with cash from the government and lenders. They are attracted to Pittsburgh not because it's a good place for the rich, but because it's a good place for students.
Incidentally, good places for students are also good places for the rich. So I agree, rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich.
> That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure.
Did you miss the part where Pittsburgh is thriving? Cleveland is doing okay. Bethlehem is booming. Youngstown... not great but moving in a good direction.
Coal counties are insignificant. Nobody is winning national elections by appealing to them.
The actual motive is to appeal to people who have made coal part of their identity. These are people who have never been anywhere near a coal mine, but have internalized coal as Important and American, and as a way to stick it to those stupid environmentalists.
Yeah. Think this was epitomised by the DoE tweeting pictures of coal to own the libs. Or as one wag put it the right in 2005: "we shouldn't overregulate energy markets"; the right in 2025: "I'm actually attracted to coal"
In Trump's case you can throw in a personal obsession with hating wind power because you can see it from one of his golf courses.
Generally pathetic that people are trying to retcon this reflexive lib-owning vice-signalling from incredibly stupid people as actual industrial policy.
I think it’s hard for people who aren’t steeped in that world to understand it, because it sounds so ridiculous. The idea of loving pro-coal policies because it upsets environmentalists is hard to accept. It’s natural to think it must really be about economic realities, people's livelihoods, etc.
I have the questionable advantage of having listened to Rush Limbaugh almost every day in the 90s, reading lots of National Review, and taking in various other conservative media. I know the basis for these things, straight from the people pushing them. None of what’s happening is a surprise to me.
> the real motive for cancelling renewables is to appeal to coal counties in the USA
Wyoming here. Coal country. Everyone thinks this is dumb. Including the folks in Campbell county, our top-producing coal region that has been trying to build a wind farm [1].
Trump’s social media fans in Florida and Texas like this because it feels like owning the libs. (To the extent there may be pecuniary interest, it would be in power producers. Like housing, stopping new power raises prices and profits incumbents.)
Also, that Reddit thread is about coking coal. Not the thermal coal power plants burn. It’s about American steel production shutting down in the face of our trade war. Not this new economic miracle these idiots have spun up.
[1] https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/...
Everyone thinks this is dumb.
Dumb enough to make them reconsider voting Republican in the future? I doubt it.
>So renewable energy will always be a political issue over the next 50 years, because entire towns and regions depend on its political outcome.
I heard that before the first Trump administration, there was bipartisan support in Congress for phasing out the use coal in the US, so it seems quite possible that that bipartisan support will reassemble itself after Trump is gone (because the next President is unlikely to be as populist and as uncaring about climate change as Trump).
This would make sense if it were a single issue. (And then, limited sense - even quite red places like Texas invest in solar because they need it. Coal is a regional issue, not a national one)
If you see it in light of all the other actions taken across the spectrum, you land at best at "desperate dice roll to re-tool the US into a manufacturing power from the 80s", and at worst at "deliberate dismantling of a first-rate world power into a second tier paradise for oligarchs".
It's made a national issue by 1) Senators from coal mining heavy states and the ridiculous setup of the Senate and the outsized power it gives individual Senators unless one party has 60 seats and 2) the amount of wealth it's given a few people (like the Koch brothers) who've used that wealth to buy influence in the GOP.
This message seems to come from a timeline where the people cutting the renewable projects care about electoral outcomes.
But in this timeline, they tried to violently overturn the 2020 election, and they are currently trying to rig the 2026 election by gerrymandering states they control as much as possible.
This isn't about earning the political support of people in coal country who vote GOP. If they ever face negative electoral outcomes in the future, their plan is to overturn the election using either force or legal chicanery.
What you say is spectacular and completely wrong.
What you claim didn't happen, and can easily disproven with data. Your interpretation of a reasoning of a policy (that didn't happen) is bad faith.
You are wrong about both electricity [1], gas[2] and total energy [3].
Europe was very dependent on energy imports in the past and current policy is the by far most successful attempt in a long at changing it. It will help us for decades to come.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
[2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/where-does-t...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
I don't understand your post. Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy while rationalizing that increased gas imports from Russia was good because trade will make us friends [0]. The data supports this (though obviously does not capture the political discourse around Russian gas reliance). I am in agreement that the current, post-Ukraine invasion policy is good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
I guess you’re talking about Germany. Shutting down nuclear reactors and huge imports of Russian gas are two entirely separate things.
Gas imports like explained in the Wikipedia article you linked started in the 70s. There certainly was too much of a reliance on Russia, not enough investment in alternatives like LNG terminals and warnings of partners in the east were ignored with the north stream pipelines. In the end Germany got a lot of economic growth from cheap gas for decades and managed to get off Russian gas very fast. The European nuclear industry on the other hand is still heavily reliant on Russia.
Broad German anti-nuclear sentiment can be traced back mainly to Chernobyl and the exit plan that was followed in western Germany was decided after Fukushima. Eastern German reactors lacked containment and were shut down after the reunification. Contrary to an often heard claim western German nuclear was not replaced by fossil energy sources, but more than compensated by the growth of renewables. You could certainly point out that coal plants should have been shut off first, but that was even less possible politically at the time. In the end you have to shut off nuclear reactors because of growing safety risks caused by material fatigue and new ones have questionable economics.
> Europe absolutely spent many years phasing out nuclear energy
Germany is not Europe. Over 70% of electricity in France is nuclear and they have plans to build at least 6 EPR2 plants.
Looking in absolute terms France is essentially phasing out nuclear power. But can't bring themselves to accept it politically.
They have an enormous fleet nearing end of life and are making political noise over a tiny number of plants they haven’t even taken the final investment decision on.
They are stuck arguing how the mindbogglingly large required subsidies should be financed.
In other words: They are betting on renewables as much as anyone else, they just can't bring themselves to stop wasting money on nuclear power due to political reasons.
It is more representative of the situation over the past 30 years to say that France is not Europe. But even they had plans to cut nuclear energy to 50%. [0]
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/01/24/france-...
As you can see in the first link, there was a 472 TWh production of nuclear Nuclear power in 2024, in contrast to your claim that it was phased out. It didn't really changed that much - the absolute change in coal or renewables combinded is larger.
This chart shows that nuclear produced >900 TWh in the EU in the early 2000s and the latest data point is 619 TWh (2023). That's a >30% reduction with a clear trend. I did not claim that every nuclear reactor in Europe was turned off.
Yes, you did.
>We phased out nuclear power plants
your words. simple past tense.
All energy policies are ideology driven, but you make it sound like nuclear isn’t ideology driven. That’s just nonsense.
- Nuclear waste has non-zero cost that aren’t factored in.
- Nuclear risks are externalized, not factored in.
- Nuclear power is heavily subsidized.
- Solar power industry in Germany on particular was destroyed for ideological reasons.
- Solar has much more capacity than nuclear for many years now: https://www.smard.de/page/home/topic-article/211972/212382/e...
I think I agree with you broadly, but to make the counter argument:
A big part of the reason why nuclear power isn’t cost-effective nowadays is because those costs have been at least partially internalized. The US federal government has stopped producing cheap nuclear fuel by disassembling nuclear weapons. Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely. Plant operators need to pay into a federal disaster insurance pool.
> Nuclear plants need to pay for the cost of storing their spent fuel on site indefinitely.
I highly doubt that. If you multiply annual costs with the timeframe needed (millions of years) you get absurdly high numbers.
What about nuclear between 10 years ago and 50 years ago? Same reasons to not use it?
The costs for solar and batteries have come down a whole lot since ~10 years ago during the energiewende. IMO solar is the cost leader in areas where there is decent sun. The U.S. has a lot better sun than Germany.
Solar is the cost leader in most areas with poor sun too. You have to have truly abysmal sun for it to not be the cost leader. Finland has such abysmal sun, Germany doesn't.
I would argue that buying Russian gas was primarily market driven and politics didn't stop it from happening. It was cheaper than American or Qatari gas why should European nations not have bought it?
It the same way that the US got hooked on cheap Chinese imports.
Also renewables make too much sense right now. That's why a lot of dollars are allocated towards them even though subsidies are mostly gone.
Well, for one thing, massive methane leaks in Russian gas infrastructure means that Russian gas ii much worse for the environment than any other source of gas.
The artificial energy supply shortage caused by this prohibition will be a great excuse to invade another oil-rich country. The current administration has already demonstrated Venezuela is next in line.
Did France really phase out nuclear, or do you mean the rest of Europe?
Mostly Germany, Belgium as well, possibly a few others.
France did shut down superphenix for completely ideological reasons tho.
Also stopped investing in nuclear but that was not really ideological (the nuclear buildup originated in something of a misprediction, and sadly the country didn’t really capitalise on it).
Belgium didn't phase out nuclear. They decided that someone in the future would handle the closure of the nuclear plants, and when the time came and no replacement plant had been built, we just kept the nuclear plants running.
Belgium legislated the phase out of nuclear in 2003 due 2025, opting to neither replace nor postpone closure of nor refurbish its at the time 7 reactors as their lifetimes ran out.
Then it had to postpone the closure of at least two reactors following the second invasion of Ukraine, and this year officially dropped the phaseout and opened the door for new builds (unlikely as they are).
Belgium did not. My code currently help deploying updates on 3 nuke plants in belgium, so hopefully I'd know.
> Belgium did not.
It absolutely did, back in 2003. This was pushed back after the invasion of Ukraine then repealed but Doel 3 and Tihange 2 were shut down under the phaseout plan.
I think it's primarily Germany that phased it out? Seems like the grandparent is overgeneralizing.
In UK we phased out nuclear by buying power from France who made it in nuclear power stations ... we were World leaders, but now we haven't the expertise to renew our nuclear power so have to rely on foreign companies.
The cost picture already makes sense for onshore wind, which is why if you have a suitable site people do that. If you own a hilltop farm in the UK a bank loan for a wind turbine is a no-brainer for the loan officer - because it's not correlated to farm gate prices unlike other loans you might want e.g. for equipment or buildings so that's a desirable loan to have.
Europe didn't phase our nuclear plants. It was only Germany and Italy. Finland, France and UK kept building.
The obstacle to clean energy has always been humans. We'll get our due soon enough.
"Europe" certainly didn't do that. Some countries in Europe did.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad)
Maybe that was the discussion where you're from, what do i know. Where I'm from we had a honest political debate about nuclear, and the public decided on no. It wasn't because of "ideology". We discussed the safety, the waste challenge, and everything else.
Killing solar because “farming” is an unfathomable level of mind-bogglingly nonsensical.
Of course making sense does not in any way matter to this administration, and Trump hates wind turbines because of his dumb golf course, but still…
The US (near as I can tell) isn’t even killing them for any concrete reason (any reason given changes), just to be anti-whatever they are.
Which, is similar to the German anti-nuclear approach, to be frank. Burning dirty coal instead of keeping an already existing nuke plant running isn’t a decision based on either environmental or economic reasoning, and that was done a lot.
Pendulum swings, etc, etc.
> There are good reasons to question renewable energy: the cost picture doesn't make sense right now
What? Did renewables get more expensive for some reason? Solar and wind have been cheaper than coal for years.
Attacking renewables is the ideological move because anything good is bad. It’s just weaponized ignorance.
> We tried ideology driven energy policy in Europe and it hasn't gone well. We phased out nuclear power plants (because nuclear = bad) while doubling down on Russian gas dependency (because trade = peace). Clearly this has gone poorly and it will take Europe a decade to strengthen its energy sovereignty again.
what I don't understand is how this was obvious to me 20 years ago as a teenager, but European leaders just somehow thought it was a good idea. Was it just "a lucky guess" on my part? it was just so obvious that when you tolerate and interact with narcissists as if their behaviour was acceptable, they will simply escalate their behaviour. I was also critical of ties with the Chinese government and I was told I was just paranoid/racist. today we suddenly realise oh that was a bad idea, the leopards are chewing on our faces.
I reckon the rich and powerful saw it coming alright and they just figured they'd make bank before it got to the point they'd have to send the kids of poor people to war.
It was also obvious to all my friends when I was a teenager in 2008 that being friends with America was a bad idea. That also turned out to be right.
All we would have had to do was have no allies for the past ~60 years, and we would have never gotten burned. We also would have been entirely irrelavant to international politics, and likely wouldn't have become one of the richest nations on earth.
World politics is like love. It's better to have had a productive alliance that hits a rough patch, than never to have had one at all.
as it happens I was completely wrong about the US, I did not expect them to fall to Moscow that easily.
To be fair, the French got it right - they have their own nuclear deterrent and their own weapons manufacturing.
Still, farming is pretty important and we must strike a balance.
The US grows more acres of corn just for ethanol than the number of acres needed to go 100% solar. We would have _more_ useful farmland if we switched.
100% solar on electricity, or all energy usage including vehicles? Vehicles use a lot of energy.
If all vehicles in the US were electric US total Electricity demand would rise from about 4,000 TWh to only 4,800 TWh. That’s it. And this is exactly why the U.S. risks losing both the trade war and the AI race to China.
China is going all-in on electrification, and that alone gives it a massive efficiency edge. Layer on top the fact that renewables and batteries keep getting cheaper every year, and the advantage compounds exponentially.
Take heavy equipment as an example: a Caterpillar machine might cost $10 million, while the Chinese electric equivalent is just one-fifth the price and burns only a third of the energy. That’s already nearly half the cost compared to diesel or gas-powered machines before you even count lower maintenance and fuel savings.
The math is simple: electric wins. And renewable compound the victory
all energy including vehicles. The US grows an unfathomable amount of ethanol corn, ~ 30 million acres. Its insanity, its an incredibly inefficient way to get energy.
So just for context about 10% of solar in the US depends on NEPA approval [1]
Then 4% relies on Federal lands [2]
1 -https://www.rff.org/publications/reports/how-long-does-it-ta...
2 - https://www.nrel.gov/news/detail/program/2025/vast-federal-l...
conversely, china has installed more solar than the US has in total capacity - every year for the past several years
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...
https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
Amazing what you can do when you don’t have elections.
Edit: I’m 100% for renewables. Unfortunately half my country is against them and they won last time.
Climate action and renewables has always been very popular with voters. Since political action has consistently lagged popular support I'd suggest that you'd need to look outside elections to see what is holding the west back on this.
Popular in the abstract, unpopular if you ask how much voters are willing to spend or sacrifice for it.
This is just a talking point put about by climate deniers since dealing with climate change is cheaper than the alternative.
It's no different from Fox News headlines saying Medicare for all would cost X billion and not mentioning that business as usual would cost twice that.
An attempt to turn a popular, cheaper option into a scary bogeyman with selective lies.
Popular but I guess not a top concern with voters for one thing. Also the influence of money on US politics is anti-progress.
Solar and Wind are some of the most popular forms of energy generation
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/06/05/americans-vie...
Representative democracy in name only, for it is neither.
the central committee is actually trying to slow it down
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/07/07/china-moves-to-curb-s...
i dont think that the US, without elections, would suddenly go on a renewables building spree.
the same interests that prevent it today would still exist
Amazing what you can do when the ruling class hasn’t spent the last 40 years undermining education and gutting services.
gestures broadly at things I have no control over and things I wish didn’t happen
if you're going to list the strengths of china, one of the biggest ones is unironically having leadership that doesnt get interrupted in massive ways every 4 years. i'm not going to debate the negative parts of that, clearly it is also problematic, but despite the negative aspects it has factually largely contributed to their strength and prosperity
They're still massively using coal and using more and more of it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
The Chinese coal usage in absolute terms has recently started to decrease due to the massive renewable build out.
In other words: China is building enough renewables to both cover the grid expansion and offset existing coal usage.
> Chinese coal usage in absolute terms has recently started to decrease
That's not what the data I had linked above seems to indicate (2023 to 2024 it went from 5.7 to 5.8 TWh)
And it keeps building coal power plants: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants, though the article is also optimistic that China is at/about to reach peak coal.
And it's also funding coal power plants abroad, thought the scale doesn't seem that big compared to their domestic production: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Con...
The data is comparing 2024 to 2025.
> From December 2024, coal power generation declined for five straight months before ticking up slightly in May and June, mainly to offset weaker hydropower generation due to drought. Coal power generation was flat overall in the second quarter of 2025.
> The chart below shows growth in monthly power generation for coal and gas (grey), solar and wind (dark blue) and other low-carbon power sources (light blue).
> This illustrates how the rise in wind and solar growth is squeezing the residual demand left for coal power, resulting in declining coal-power output during much of 2025 to date.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-china-is-still-bu...
What they are doing is ensuring energy reliability and phasing out old nasty coal plants in favor of modern ones expected to have peaker like capacity factors.
https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-new-coal-plants-2027
Well, they are making more stuff
So they're evil and their progress is meaningless because it isn't immediately perfect?
The US is far, far worse than China.
The numbers I've seen aren't currently far worse, with the US producing slightly more CO2 per capita than China. But the trend is there to make it eventually far worse as we maneuver to be bass-ackwards.
I liked this comment looking at CO2/kWh instead of per capita
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44990464
A lot of people on this thread don’t seem to realize that solar and wind now work fine without government subsidies. The Biden-era subsidies have been about accelerating decarbonization, not about propping up the market.
If you let the market choose, it would choose a lot of wind and solar.
> Despite facing macro challenges and headwinds, utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation on an unsubsidized basis (i.e., without tax subsidies).
So the admin just needs to get out of the alway and let the market solve this problem. Not try to centrally manage the economy like the Soviet Union.
1 - https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...
The government is actively threatening to block wind and solar projects through permitting denials. The market can’t permit for itself no matter how good the economics are.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-a...
Exactly right.
But keep in mind most solar is built on private lands only needing local/state approval. With the biggest builders red states like Texas.
Living in northwest Iowa – which is one of the biggest wind energy producing states in the US! – there has been resistance against wind turbines at the local level for my entire life. It's not at all uncommon to see yard signs with slogans like "Say no to turbines" and "Preserve our scenic countryside"¹.
These have always been present – I remember seeing them even as a kid, but they were just symbolic protest² and you'd only see them out on farms that had turbines in view. What's different now is that you'll see these signs in towns, and the people who have these signs in their yard are also winning county supervisor/councilor seats that they use to regulate wind to death. Temporary "pauses" are put on permit requests that get tabled while they "study" new rules endlessly; road and shadow setbacks are being increased; turbine height caps are introduced at levels that prevent the current machines from being upgraded; noise limits, lighting mandates, even county-wide caps on turbine numbers.
I think the trend is still positive in favor of wind in Iowa, but at the local level, there is a concerted effort to bog it down in red tape and kill it.
¹ Never mind that the scenic countryside is actually just amber waves of industrial corn and hog manure lagoons.
² As much as I can recall, I wasn't exactly in tune with local politics as a child.
Yes, but local permitting is a complete shitshow. For example, I should be able to plug in a simple balcony-solar system, but my PUC prohibits the technology.
Yes. Though that’s the current regime most capacity is installed under. And the companies building solar farms have more energy to navigate the process than me/you.
But it just goes to show you being involved in local government, showing up to advocate for green energy projects, etc at local levels is one of the best things you can do.
And remember that you all are part of the market. In my area you can choose what power generation your electricity comes from. Most customers do not bother, unfortunately (less than 10% of Marin Clean Energy customers).
I know, not real-time. Renewable energy credit trading, and such. But you become the demand for clean generation if you choose to do so. It is easy. If you are in Marin, Contra Costa, Napa, or Solano go to https://mcecleanenergy.org/opt-up/
Similar CCA's are all over California and probably beyond.
> lot of people on this thread don’t seem to realize that solar and wind now work fine without government subsidies
This isn’t about subsidies. Orsted, for example, is being blocked on national security grounds using environmental regulation [1].
Power producers are in on a fix.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
Yes it’s about naked obstructionism now.
Which is horrible for the US economy as it insulates our companies from market pressure, preventing them from adapting.
It's also quite bad for US "allies". My country, Denmark, is (in my own opinion, this hasn't been discussed by the media yet) going to have to bail out Orsted.
The truly free market response to all of this would be to remove the need for approvals, or just rubber stamp all projects with no real review. I don't think that's a great idea. But this is the complete opposite of that. The market wants to build more renewables, and the administration is blocking it.
It's amazing how much leeway many people give this administration for policies that they have a long history of opposing: government ownership of companies (10% of Intel, US Steel's "golden share"), blocking private development of energy production, sending the National Guard to hostilely takeover cities, etc. It's the sort of stuff that they've accused their opponents of wanting to do in deranged, nightmarish worst-case scenarios.
Ah yes Republicans, the party of strong environmental regulations and impeding business.
"You betrayed everything you believe in, and for what?"
"To own the libs."
One of the biggest improvements recently is battery tech. Many countries are 10x'ing the GWh of battery capacity in the next couple of years without any real government drive.
https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...
This is one thing that actually prevents the power price spikes since the batteries can jump in to cover gaps. I can quote many installations that have completely paid themselves off in 2 years (see hornsdale battery as an example - one year of operation alone, 2020, generated profit of half its initial $90million cost) and while this 2 year payoff will come down as more and more are installed part of the reason the payoff is going down is due to power price costs becoming more and more steady as more batteries are installed.
Even the USA is installing massive amounts of capacity right now. Look at Texas - 3x battery capacity available in 2025 compared to 2024 due to massive installations coming online and they are a state that does not do a lot to support renewables at all. There's no stopping it, it doesn't need subsidies and it's one of the most straightforward capital payoffs available right now.
I actually think the predictions in the article won't come to fruition honestly. The battery installation rise is dominating the investment landscape right now and it's completely flown under the radar without any political controversy (no things such as questionable media trying to claim battery banks are somehow bad for our health and should be stopped) nor are there subsidies required.
I'm all for nuclear power, but those project take years. Even the small modular ones, even if fast tracked. I think it is a misstep to simply cancel current projects, and hope (?) that nuclear will pull it all. Even if it does so, you'll have a big gap in where demand could outpace supply.
> Even the small modular ones, even if fast tracked.
Of which none exists in the west. I love how suddenly we will achieve scale without the middle step of... building hundreds of prototypes to scale up the industry.
Everyone talks like it is already done.
Exactly - electricity demand is surging NOW due to datacenter/AI use, and all signs are that this increased demand will continue to grow.
Nuclear is a decent option, but it takes years to bring new capacity online.
There's nothing wrong with investing in nuclear that'll come online in 5+ years time, but at the same time the government should also be green lighting all projects capable of adding capacity more quickly.
1) Elect stooge 2) Sabotage 3) PROFIT!
This is a feature, not a bug.
Yea all the “this bad thing will happen” discussion misses that the intent has been plain for at least a year now. The administration has plainly said what they would do during the election and they have rather faithfully executed on that plan. This isn’t about fixing things or saving people money it’s about doing what they want to do.
Its about inflicting as much pain in the american public as possible because if you cause indiscriminate damage its bound to also damage their enemies. Its a death cult.
I don't think they think about the other side much at all. It's all about enriching themselves, end of story.
Nah, these people are already rich beyond imagination, they want to be venerated, they have to see their enemies crushed. Money isn't enough for them, they want praise and the peasants haven't praised and honored them enough.
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“I know this will be removed” is a pretty transparent attempt to sell the real reason for downvotes (you’re talking utter nonsense) as a made up one that suits your personal narrative.
Don’t be under the mistaken impression that you’re being smart here. It’s very transparent.
Exactly right. HN is generally right-wing but I think it aspires to be more intelligent right-wing than dumb.
Think more Bloomberg News than Fox News (or, for UK folk, more FT than DM).
Exactly, see Enron. Once you control the production and can manipulate the price you then extract obscene profits.
The scale of stupid and unnecessary from this administration is bizarre.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho was smart enough to rely on people smarter than him. But Trump and Co just aren't that smart...
It frustrates me that neither party is about energy abundance. The Democrats have clamped down on coal, fracking, nuclear for various largely climate reasons. And now the republicans want to reverse it and restrict renewables mostly in a "turnabout is fair play" kind of way. I wish the current administration had just cut regulations and enabled more fracking or whatever and left it at that.
Taking the environmental hit for lower energy costs is understandable at least, even if those who are more financially stable would prefer not to. But whatever this is makes no sense and is just puerile revenge.
“We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”
It's just so self fulfilling. Someone is being very stupid. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's him. Possibly it's both of us.
But there is no way out of the conclusion that the country is (at least) a near majority of very stupid people. Not merely mistaken or holding different values, but genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy.
Of course if I'm the stupid one, maybe my reasoning there is also wrong. I know I conflated individuals and groups in a less-than-rigorous fashion.
But either way I feel unable to find a solution to this conundrum. Certainly I can't if I'm stupid. And if a majority of voters are stupid, then it undercuts the principle that enables us to live in the same region together. I am rapidly running out of ideas to continue that.
I think about one third who heard what they wanted to hear in his campaign promises, one third completely against and one third who consider themselves "apolitical".
With any luck the midterm elections will allow sanity to return.
As far as I can tell, those who heard what they wanted in his campaign promises are reasonably satisfied that they are getting it. There's some loss of approval as reality precludes some options, but that happens to everyone.
Nor do I think the "apolitical" will become any less so. I see no reason why the midterms should give radically different results.
Now, it just so happens that historically things swing a bit back at midterms, and given how close things are that's enough to sway the entire power structure. It's an unfortunate reality of voting: a one-vote margin is no different from unanimity.
Even so I do not expect the overall tone to change any time soon. Those proportions seem fairly durable.
I think you will be disappointed but we'll see.
> genuinely incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy
Having spent some time in the US, my theory is that things have got so complicated over there (or more precisely nobody is incentivized to make them simple), that it has fried people's minds. They just respond to the last stimulus, having given up trying to make sense of anything, as they attempt to get through each day as best they can.
Healthcare is the obvious example, but I'd say that that is representative of most things in the US, in terms of being a minefield where one foot wrong can wreck your life.
Voting for masses lead to this. Voting with some IQ tests, education or income/wealth background check would at least improve it. not a perfect solution but way better than random people voting all. Everyone needs to driving license or other licences to do things. Voting is more important but no selection????
Then the people who create the test gets to choose the voters.
My opinion is that we should open voting further. If voting works at all, it's only because you don't do any selection on the voter base, and hope some kind of "wisdom of crowds" kicks in.
As far as I'm concerned everyone who lives here should vote. Felons, infants, people in jail, anyone who can pull a lever or an unambiguous gesture. I'd even include fetuses if they could. If the law affects you then you should have a say.
This is undoubtedly a stupid idea. But the current system is clearly broken and I'd be willing to at least try taking the principle seriously.
The pre-Civil-Rights South is not what comes to mind when I think of beacons of enlightenment and freedom.
Ah yes, segregation at the polles. The true definition of freedom and democracy.... Give me a break.
> segregation at the polles
I disagree with it. But I think it is worth discussing.
We don’t have universal suffrage. The most-successful democracies in history never did. In our day-to-day lives and commerce we weigh opinions based on their source. And the current system isn’t working, in many cases because the majority votes for something stupid.
The current system isn't working because, we know from comparative study of modern democracies, the US has all of the features that contributed maximally to disfunction: strong presidential system, unequal legislative representation, and first-past-the-post single-member-district elections for both houses of the national legislature.
We could fix those peoblems, or we could add additional problems by layering even more broken systems that the US (among others) has tried before and rejected on top of the existing problems.
None of this is an argument for or against playing with the notion of one (citizen, non-felon, adult) person one vote.
I don't believe that fixing those problems would solve the underlying issue, which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other. We could alter the rules to try to reduce the effects of it, but I don't expect it to reduce the underlying division that leads us to push the rules to (and past) the breaking point.
Plus, of course, there is little appetite for any given set of fixes. We can easily calculate who will benefit, and because of the division I mentioned, half the people will oppose the change just to avoid losing influence.
I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch, which would at least make some of the existing alliances moot.
> I don't believe that fixing those problems would solve the underlying issue, which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other.
The evidence is very strong that the reduction of the dimensionality of discourse and the polarization are a direct result of those features of the electoral system.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch,
That's not only not a solution, it is not even an actual option. You can't start from anywhere except where you are.
> which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other
They don’t. The only solutions to deep-rooted antipathy are forgiveness and annihilation. We aren’t anywhere close to that, despite what idiots want to manufacture.
> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch
This is meaningless at best, stupid at worst.
we are seeing what democracy leads to. Intel stake bought via democracy? lol. give me a break
It's amazing how out of nearly 300 comments here, only one person mentioned how the article is bullshit - Trump can't do much because the overwhelming majority of solar does not rely on federal approval.
Idiots who ignore evidence cause avoidable harm to selves and others. Again.
Enjoy having brown outs to keep data centers running guys.
Lots of states are still supporting renewables, that’s the great thing about a republic.
Exactly. Solar / wind on land, on private property rarely needs Federal approval
Even stats I find are from a friendlier permitting regime. And now I bet all the money will be poured into projects not needing federal approval.
And we might hope something good comes out of the nuclear this admin wants to build. The US has a lot of room for approval there.
They are correct. You will see in the coming years that electricity across the US is going to get substantially more expensive. There are several reasons for this:
1. Data centers, primarily driven by AI. Why? Because they can (and do) negotiate deeply discounted prices AND either don't pay for the connection and required infrastructure or they only pay a portion of it. Who pays for the rest? Consumers. Who subsidizes the discounted electricity? Consumers.
2. Increased electricity use in an area tends to raise the prices for everyone. We actually saw this in the crypto mining boom (eg [1]). In short, in a region like upstate New York where it otherwise has access to cheap hydro power, the local provider will have a long term power supply contract for a certain amount of electricity. A big increase usually means they now have to buy power on the spot market, which can be much more expensive. This raises the average electricity price for everyone;
3. The administration is pushing a huge expansion in LNG exports. IIRC ~41% of US power generation comes from natural gas. A huge increase in LNG exports will inevitably cause a rise in natural gas prices for all domestic power producers. This is in part driven by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine but natural gas suppliers have seen (and pounced upon) an opportunity to drive up the wholesale price of natural gas;
4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;
5. While all this is happening and we're not really building new power plants (at least not enough to match demand), the administration has cut off renewables, which are key to meeting demand beyond any environmental concerns (which are real and true). Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;
6. Private equity has turned its eye to the guaranteed profits of electricitiy providers [3]. This will do absolutely nothing other than raise prices; and
7. Lip service is given to nuclear but it simply isn't the answer, primarily because the lead time for building a nuclear power plant is about 10-15 years. Plus it's one of the most expensive forms of electricity (in LCOE terms) and having a company safely manage a nuclear power plant in an era where regulation is being gutted doesn't seem like a great idea.
Not a single nuclear power plant has been built without government subsidy. Why not just subsidize renewables instead, particularly solar? Efforts such as small modular reactors to lower costs simply make no sense. Larger reactors are more efficient.
I think by 2030 a significant portion of the population will be paying $0.50/kWh or more for residential electricity.
[1]: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/when-crypt...
[2]: https://cleanenergy.org/news/tva-executes-the-largest-electr...
[3]: https://jacobin.com/2025/08/private-equity-minnesota-power-t...
> Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources;
This is so funny to me, because if you listen to anti-solar people, they'll tell you it's a bad idea because it doesn't generate anything at night. Given what you say, even if batteries weren't a thing, it would seem like solar would be an ideal component of any power grid, even if it didn't produce any energy for the nighttime whatsoever.
Solar really is ideal for partial or total residential power generation, for several reasons:
1. The price. It has plummeted in the alst 10-20 years and shows no signs of abating;
2. For many people it can be placed on their roofs so doesn't take up any land or generally require building any new structure. Generally the only planning required is artificial barriers in place to protect electricity providers;
3. It is the only form of direct power generation. Everything else involves turning a turbine. No moving parts is great for reliability. You do need some infrastructure to convert the panel output to the right voltage (eg an inverter) but that's all commodity tech;
4. Batteries are a largely solved problem for energy storage. You can use golf cart batteries if you really want.
There are problems. We need panel standardization, which I think will come with industry maturity.
Another big issue is lack of regulation for solar companies who use predatory financing on consumers and can actually make selling your home much more difficult. This is a big enough problem that any realtor will tend to advise you not to get solar because of the selling issues. This shouldn't be the case. It's a regulatory problem.
>4. The dam has really broke on contraining price hikes for pure profit purposes (eg [2]). If you look at the finances of any private electricity utility, you'll see that simply increasing shareholder profits is probably the biggest single factor in electricity price hikes;
Where, in the USA, can an electricity seller increase the price without government approval? Hell, your [2] link is about an entity of the federal government, there are no shareholders.
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> Fun fact, people in California are paying nearly twice the price for energy than the rest of the US.
People in California are paying massive amounts for power distribution. The utilities themselves are paying very little for power generation -- for example, they pay 4c/kWh for a solar+batteries plant build in 2022.
> but doesn't put out anywhere near the power of nuclear.
We have > 250GW of solar and 97 GW of nuclear. Nuclear produced 779TWh and solar 303TWh in 2024. They are quite comparable.
> If California wants to do solar, it can! Though it will likely go the way of the rail project, the firefighting org etc
California already has a lot of solar and batteries.
Distribution is a separate line item on your PG&E bill. They have to bill you separately for the cost of electricity and the cost of delivery (maintenance of the grid)
Your energy prices are extremely high for reasons apart from the grid.
Sure, but it's not high because PG&E is paying 4c/kWh for battery shifted solar power.
There is no “best way.” There are multiple good ways but there is no single “best way.” If someone has told you there is a ”best way” and no other path forward stands a chance then they are selling you something.
OK, but Texas has a higher percentage of renewables than California, and is half the cost, so maybe it’s something else…
No. Texas has more renewables and uses way more total electricity. The fraction of grid electricity in Texas that comes from renewables is less than half of what it is in California.
You’re right, my bad.
Your comment reflects energy policy from somewhere around like 1975?
How can I tell someone on hackernews knows absolutely nothing about power generation economics? They say we have to go all in on nuclear. And that's assuming that the poster isn't being completely disingenuous.
Nuclear is expensive, and there are no technologies that will reduce the price in the near term. Solar wind and battery storage is still on a economies of scale price reduction curve that no other form of electricity generation can match.
Not coal, not natural gas, and certainly not nuclear.
If you start building nuclear plants which best case come online in 10 to 12 years, with nuclear technology that already is not economical, by the time they come online that is another 10 or 12 years of battery, solar panel, and wind technology improvement and further economies of scale.
Wind and solar have the ability to be organically grown and expanded. Solar can be placed practically anywhere there's a roof.
Now do I think we should be researching nuclear, researching lftrs, and perhaps funding nuclear power plants to perform peaking in the grid? Sure.
Do I think we should be shutting down existing nuclear power plants not particularly. I'd rather use those than natural gas and coal fired plants for grid balancing.
Right now rooftop solar or residential solar is probably about the price of nuclear. In 10 years it will probably be half the price of nuclear.
Anyway, the overall good news with this typically unhinged Trump announcement is it the economic reality is on the side of alternative energy proponents.
Of course the government can screw things up, boy howdy. Do we know that now. But then Americans will just learn the brutal truth that other economies are going to drop the price of their electricity, which is one of the basic drivers of economic growth and competition.
And the US will be left behind.
Because it's not like we're entering a multipolar highly competitive world right? oh.
> How can I tell someone on hackernews knows absolutely nothing about power generation economics? They say we have to go all in on nuclear.
The comment says nothing of the sort.
> The best way forward, factoring in current and future energy use, is nuclear.
They have wrote it, just read it in "0.5x" mode rather than "2x".
This does not mean the same thing.
To back up your point, here is the plummeting price of renewable energy [1].
The real reason for all this is because people get extremely rich off of fossil fuels and people don't relaly get rich off of renewables. Resource extraction (mining, drilling for oil and gas, etc) is a wealth concentrator.
Oh and it's worth adding that the recent bill reduced royalty payments paid by oil companies [2].
The whole thing is simply yet another form of wealth transfer from ordinary citizens to the mega-wealthy.
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-plummeting-cost-of-rene...
[2]:https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/21/trump-administratio...
> Power usage spikes during the day. Well guess what? That's when solar power production happens. So adding significant solar power production to your electricity mix will decrease the baseline power needed from other sources
Wrong, actually. At least in Australia, peak energy is in the late afternoon when everyone comes home, around 6pm. The other peak is in the morning around 7am. These are times when solar is not producing significantly, meanwhile it makes baseload unviable during the day.
I think you're confusing general power usage peak with residential usage peak. Or maybe you're talking about what you've learned 20 years ago (or Australia industry is 20 years late).
As AC use increased, industry switched from oil to electricity, coal to electric arc, and as power grid stabilized, peak usage shifted a lot in the last ~20 years. That's why summer/winter time do not make sense anymore and a lot of European countries are talking about not switching anymore.
It's common to quote the peak "demand" seen by the grid, which ignores rooftop solar which is fulfilling lots of actual demand when it is delivering.
This is especially true in Australia, a world leader in rooftop solar, here's something from AEMO on the topic:
> Both minimum and maximum operational demand are shifting to later in the day, driven by increasing contribution from rooftop PV. Minimum operational demand is expected to occur in the middle of the day by the mid-2020s. Maximum operational demand is expected to shift later in the day by an hour or two, when PV contribution is falling but temperatures are remain high (depending on the region and POE).
You're wrong.
The peak demand depends on a number of factors including what city/town it is, the season, the mix of residential/industrial usage, the time of day and the day of the week [1].
Also, if the peak time includes summer afternoon/evenings from 3pm to 9pm (as it does for several cities), a significant portion of that time is in daylight hours. In January in Sydney, sunset is after 8pm. You have lower (or no) power generation from solar at dusk so say 7pm but that's still 4 of the 6 peak hours where solar is impacting peak usage.
Power companies will tend to point to residential peak demand to justify price increases while often just entirely excluding industrial usage that drops off at about the same time.
Also, residential power usage (in Australia) is changing as building standards change (ie Australian houses are notorious for their energy ineeficiency, historically) and the rollout of residential solar. Smart meters, energy efficiency and batteries can really put a dent in peak electricity usage and this will only continue given how comparatively expensive Australian electricity is.
[1]: https://localelectricianssydney.com.au/electricity-peak-off-...
Luddites having their fun. I wish them to fail soon.
Maybe the silver lining is the US will updating its ailing nuclear infrastructure, which lags behind other countries.
At least he’s talking about nuclear now and not the pipe dream of coal generation
Yeah, here in TN we're getting a new type of "small" nuclear power plant by 2030, sponsored by Google / Kairos Power.
Eh, careful what you wish for. They’re masters at doing this sort of thing in a way that makes it everyone else’s problem too.
I'm guessing the US/foreign oil companies paid enough bribe for Trump to do this?
Right, our energy policy is practically being directed by Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
https://democracyforward.org/work/uncovering-trumps-ties-to-...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-franchis...
This doesn't stand up against any scrutiny. Natural gas primarily comes from the Permian basin of Texas as a byproduct of fracking. It's almost free.
You know we're an exporter of fossil fuels not importer right?
The United States plays an outsized role in shaping global technology trends. If Saudi Arabia wants to delay the shift toward renewable energy, its most effective strategy would be to shape U.S. policy.
> If Saudi Arabia wants to delay the shift toward renewable energy, its most effective strategy would be to shape U.S. policy
Global energy policy, particularly relating to solar, begins and ends in China. They’re the largest variable marginal consumer of energy and producer of solar panels.
China has undeniably emerged as a global leader in renewable energy technology, thanks to its massive investments in solar, wind, and energy storage systems. However, despite China’s dominance in manufacturing and scaling renewable technologies, the world—especially when it comes to cutting-edge innovations—still tends to follow the trends set by the U.S.
> the world—especially when it comes to cutting-edge innovations—still tends to follow the trends set by the U.S.
How are you measuring this?
Probably not just paid, but constantly keep paying for preferential treatment.
Depressingly, the real answer is probably even worse. It’s not like there aren’t rich companies who won’t suffer from the upcoming power crunches and would write big checks to keep them from happening. But that won’t work.
No, the actual answer is that it’s pure ideology: this is about Owning the Libs, pure and simple, irrespective of the collateral damage to the economy. We’re currently being led by vengeance-minded morons who want to destroy anything that has even a tangential connection to liberal politics, and renewables are definitely on that list.
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Interested in this. Source please as I couldn’t find anything.
This is what-aboutism and sealioning taken to a disingenious level
Total world oil revenues: $4.2 trillion in 2025, market cap of $7.2 trillion in 2023
Total world solar/wind revenues: estimate $500 billion, so 1/8th. Market cap between $1.02 trillion and $1.51 trillion in 2024.
Oil, gas, and coal have spent: $150 million on federal lobbying in 2024, and has consistently spent over $100 million annually since 2006.
At the state level, hard to get data for. In CA alone, it was estimated $40m in 2024.
For the renewables industry in 2024: $60 million in federal lobbying in 2024. That has increased over the years, unlike oil and gas.
At the state level, renewables spent in CA: $4.68 million on state-level lobbying, or 1/10th.
In conclusion: oil and gas have been consistently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince politicians alone to support their cause for years, whereas renewables has been increasing their spend and is only a fraction of it.
Yes, both sides are putting money into it. No, both sides are not equal. FWIW, democrats support oil and gas just fine: under Obama oil and gas exports and refining grew to record highs, just as they did under Trump, and as they did under Biden.
The US is the largest oil exporter in the world. That has happened despite the mix of politicians holding majority of SCOTUS, Congress, and President. That has happened despite the small fraction of spending from renewables.
We prefer renewables because, unlike oil and gas, they aren't rejecting their role in climate impact: renewables do studies to understand them, and they are always far lower than oil and gas, an inconvenient truth the anti-renewable crowd wants to deny because they want to shout a wind turbine killing some birds is somehow equivalent to the millions of birds coal kills every year, along with the cancers it causes in humans, and the climate change, and the dirty business of mining the coal, and the water needed to cool the turbines. Yes, renewables obviously have some environmental impact. Its always less in total.
We prefer renewables because they aren't profitting to TRILLIONS of dollars and poisoning political discourse to spread lies about climate change. We prefer renewables because it means less cases of asthma. It means less control over the world's stage by extractive autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia. It means less cancer, less pollutants, less damage overall. Less oil spills.
Maybe we prefer renewables because we have a lot of reasons to prefer them, despite the relatively small amounts of cash flows desperately trying to prevent oil and gas from KILLING their industry. Which, btw, oil and gas have now successfully done. Renewables are significantly hampered under this administration.
Almost all fossil fuel power plants in America run on natural gas from the Permian basin in Texas and is almost free, since it's a byproduct of fracking.
And unlike solar they work 24/7.
My optimistic take is that the left takes this + the slight momentum from books/ideas like Abundance and coalesce into a pro-build anti red-tape yimby party.
That's very optimistic. And yeah, I see how this comment is kind of the equivalent of bringing up Obama or Hillary or something when it's about Trump's bullshit. To be very clear, I hate any efforts to impede energy build out.
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The US needs to increase generation by 1% p.a. to accommodate increasing A/C usage due to climate change, by 2% p.a. for AI&blockchain, by 1-2% p.a. for electric cars and other decarbonization efforts. IOW, about 50GW p.a. Or about 10-50 nuclear plants per year, starting now. Not a couple of plants 20 years from now.
OTOH the world builds >1TW of solar panels every year and similar massive numbers of batteries. We have the capacity to do this with solar. We don't with nuclear, even if it was economical.
“Neat” is not how I’d describe the most successful new energy technology in the last few decades. It doesn’t need subsidies, it just needs to not be obstructed.
This isn't about energy policy. It's about trying to find money to fund increased government spending and specifically looking for it in places his base won't object to.
The long term negative impacts on energy aren't even being considered because it's a short term calculus.
So it sounds like you want to shorten the energy gap. Shouldn't you be opposed to any attempts to block new energy, especially projects already underway? Taking away subsides, fine, as long as its applied evenly. But blocking/halting new production helps how?
Solar/wind + battery storage can come online a lot faster and cheaper than nuclear.
We should probably increase the construction of nuclear, but it's extremely expensive and takes 5+ years to bring a plant online, even with regulatory fast tracking. Committing to a batch of plants with the same design would help reduce cost, and maybe decrease the avg time to operations, but it would still take a decade for all the plants to come online.
The solar panel production is now hundreds of gigawatts of nominal capacity added every year. Batteries are not far behind, still ramping up aggressively. Good luck trying to use nuclear to catch up.
Like any project you need both.
> Trump admin are fast tracking nuclear
No he isn’t. Input prices have gone up due to tariffs. (And helping nuclear, which I support, doesn’t require blocking solar and wind.)
That said, I would be curious for a source of new nuclear projects that were announced in 2025 and have done something beyond tweeting about it.
Does anybody that comments in this sub read lazards lcoe annual report?
Anybody?
Nuclear is expensive. Solar and wind are cheaper than Fossil fuels.
It's honestly been like this for 4 or 5 years now.
If you think solar subsidies are heavy, you might not want to look at how much nuclear power plants are subsidized. Nuclear makes solar look fairly libertarian.
Well, they're stupid if they think attacking renewables permitting will lower energy prices. How does building less solar and wind help?
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If the Sun is 100% offline then we're all dead anyway.
Generally we can rely on there being a day though. Can even predict sunrise and sunset.
When i go outside, sometimes there are clouds between the Sun and myself
When I go outside on a cloudy day I can still see clearly because there's still electromagnetic radiation from the Sun reaching the Earth.
Utility companies:
We don't want to do solar or wind because it's too much of a bother to the adapter grid for it.
Okay fine. We'll put it on residential solar so they don't even need the utility company most of the time
Utility company: please don't allow that government
I'm pretty sure residential solar is harder for a utility to handle that commercial/utility-scale. Residential solar was a silly thing to prioritize, given the other options. I mean, it's overall good, but given the (in)competency of the utilities and the state of the grid, we'd be much better off we hadn't been idiots about nuclear for 50 years.
The reason this won't be effective is money. The more they obstruct, be more motivated people with money will be to get around the restrictions. Here greed is our friend.
> more they obstruct, be more motivated people with money will be to get around the restrictions
Or you build the power plant and data centre somewhere with a stable economy. No tariffs on importing model weights.
In the UK the push towards renewable energy has so far been disastrous for energy prices and stability. There have been days in the UK where the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow, and we came extremely close to blackouts [0]. We were forced to buy energy for eye watering prices. After the initial shock from the Russia-Ukraine conflict gas prices moved slightly, but electricity prices are not really recovering well and are projected to rise [1] [2].
According to government figures, 11% of electricity costs goes toward green initiatives, and 5% to VAT, which is also earmarked for green initiatives. The government has promised that as we become greener, we should see the prices come down, but the opposite has been true [3]. The green energy sector is currently largely subsidised by fossil fuels, as we transition more and more to green energy, the true costs are realised. Our Energy Secretary (failed prime minister candidate) says:
> Responding to the 6% price cap rise, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said it was due to "our reliance on the fossil fuel markets" and added: "We're acting to bring down bills for everyone with our mission for clean, home-grown power that we control."
The irony is that we don't make our own wind turbines or solar panels, so our grid is still precariously dependant on foreign actors. We're breaking away from the likes of Russia to become dependant on China - great. Bare in mind, all of this effort for the UK which produces less than 1% of global emissions, but outsources its manufacturing to Countries such as China that have not even started to attempt to reduce their emissions (recent drops are due to economic collapse).
[0] https://watt-logic.com/2025/01/09/blackouts-near-miss-in-tig...
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crkep1vx3mro
One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country. Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.
The UK does still need to build more on shore nevertheless.
> One difference with renewables and traditional fuel sources is that once renewable infrastructure is built you don’t need to continually import from another country.
This is exactly what I'm arguing against. The UK only has two real sources of renewable energy, solar and wind. The articles I linked showed that there were periods where we could barely get the energy we needed - and that included the imports from the EU. There is no real answer currently to storing that energy.
The UK historically had a strategic decentralised reserve of gas which were decommissioned (although articles do not show it). A prior government foolishly turned us into a "on-demand economy" for energy, and we had zero buffer to global prices. Fuels such as gas, diesel, petrol, coal, etc, can be stored for long periods and are very energy dense.
> Maintenance is definitely an issue and on going expansion and upgrades as well. I do think long term renewables wouldn’t have the same issues as oil dependency on another country though.
Solar panels have a lifetime, the entire fleet will need to be rotated within 10-20 years, but they are currently being purchased directly with tax payer money. The UK has not yet demonstrated that it can incorporate all of these costs at a similar or lower rate. These panels are not manufactured locally, and we are reliant on external countries to produce them. Wind turbines are a similar story.
> China that have not even started to attempt to reduce their emissions (recent drops are due to economic collapse).
This is completely incorrect, and it makes me wonder if the rest of your comment is too.
China has long faked all numbers they publish. They literally paint mountainsides green to fool satellites and get green subsidies [1] [2]. I can't find the article on it now, but they had fields of fake solar panels too. The only figure coming out of China that can be believed is externally measured emissions, and the number continues to go up at an incredible rate [3].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/14/china
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-mine-spray-painted-r...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china
Intermittent renewables are what is making the grid less reliable and energy more expensive. A truly Orwellian article this piece from cnbc
Renewables are the only reason the lights are regularly on in California. Go look at the timeline of large-scale blackouts in California, then compare with the buildout of solar and storage.
Just look at the title.. "Solar executives warn..". Of course they do, their business model is government subsidy. I live in a blue state that has decided to bet on renewables and our electricity rates are skyrocketing. If solar was viable, it would not require forcing tax payers to fund these businesses.
> If solar was viable, it would not require forcing tax payers to fund these businesses.
This is not true. Solar and wind are already cheaper than fossil fuel generation for new capacity. Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-and-solar-en...
So then removing the subsidies shouldn't be an issue?
It's not just subsidies, it's also permitting and any other roadblocks they can manage. This isn't just economic or political, it's a weird personal crusade.
If it was only the subsidies, but it's not.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/us-orders-orsted-ha...
It shouldn’t. Trump is using environmental regulation to block projects. It’s crazy seeing the GOP embrace San Francisco’s last decade of policy.
"'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party."
Whatever cost it is, I highly doubt it's cheaper to cancel projects that are well underway without recouping any benefits at all, in some cases over the objections of local customers, without an alternative in place with environmental and financial analysis to support it.
Otherwise you're just burning money without an alternative to meet increasing demand (which is likely why costs are increasing and why the additional supply is being built).
If fossil fuels were viable, they would not require the right to put toxic substances into my lungs without compensation.
But the Biden administration which introduced the IRA subsidies also jacked up tariffs on solar panels, increasing the price of these projects. Would many of these businesses been viable if neither subsidies nor tariffs had been introduced? Given the declining cost of PVs over time, would they have become viable eventually?
It doesn't. Solar is ridiculously cheap and requires no subsidy at all to be profitable.
If this is happening (which frankly I doubt) it's just corruption.
If this were true, then wouldn’t every electricity supplier be building tons of solar, regardless of what the government does?
93% of new energy generation is renewable.
Nobody wants a new coal or nuclear plant in their back yard.
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/12/nx-s1-5319056/trump-clean-ene...
> wouldn’t every electricity supplier be building tons of solar, regardless of what the government does?
They are. And it’s undercutting the owners of pricier plants. Hence Trump using environmental regulation to block more solar.
Land of the free, home of the brave gets funnier and funnier.
Well, not in California where there is both a residential solar mandate assuring new distributed supply and where solar already reaches over 100% of demand at peak; adding new utility-scale solar doesn't make a lot of sense even if it is cheap.
If solar is "ridiculously cheap" (per GGP) and California has abundant supply of it, why does electricity in major cities in California (see e.g. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS49B72610) cost several times what it does in Toronto, Ontario (https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect... , and note these prices are in CAD)?
Politics and corruption. The generation cost is low, but the government backed monopoly folds all kinds of distribution, deferred maintenance, fire damage, and political pet projects into the retail price. It sucks.
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As JumpCrisscross said, they really are. Look at solar deployments across the planet.
They do need planning permission of course and that's where they can be blocked.
I see that now, thanks. So much for all that freedom.
According to the article Trump is trying to ban new solar developments. Suppliers are building tons of solar but they can't do so if the government makes it illegal.
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CPI energy prices have risen for the last 10 years steadily, and is now going parabolic.
Maybe some forms of green energy have helped in some areas and times of day, but they have done nothing to stop the climb.
It's time to try something other than solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices, and may be making it worse (TOU energy plans are becoming the norm because of the broken duty cycle of solar)
If you want to lower costs, why would you prevent the easiest to deploy form of supply? Why would you prevent the market from meeting the demand?
This isn’t about subsidies, it’s about standing in the way of the free market.
And why do you think cost relates to a form of supply? It seems more likely that demand is also much higher (data centers, more air conditioning, etc).
The price of a commodity is the marginal cost. The marginal electricity provider in the US is natgas.
It hasn't lowered it because tech keeps inventing new ways to burn hideous amounts of power; first it was crypto mining on PoW chains now it's AI training. Renewables aren't the problem.
> CPI energy prices
What does this mean?
> solar and wind, which are demonstrably not lowering energy prices
Why would the government intervening to ban supply make things better?
This policy is a hand-out to power producers. It constricts supply. It’s Trump copying San Francisco and Los Angeles housing policymakers, except for energy.
Why put the blame on renewables instead of on fossil fuels, which have been the majority for that entire time?
> Why put the blame on renewables instead of on fossil fuels, which have been the majority for that entire time?
I can't even begin to understand your logic here.
They seem to be blaming renewables for rising electricity prices just because they’re there. My point is that fossil fuels account for far more generation, so if you’re going to blame stuff based on their mere presence, blaming fossil fuels makes more sense.