Renewables are just really cheap. Unless the government is actively harming them for ideological reasons they get built. Baseload power plants have a harder time making a profit every year.
Are they?
Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system - either batteries or water reservoirs for pumped storage. That also inclides efficiency of storage, and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
Initial cost per unit is low and they're faster to build - that's the reason of their proliferation - and in case of personal use, subsidiaries.
Compared to nuclear - which takes many political terms to build - politicians can reap benefits early. Because nuclear is superior by every metric except:
- high initial costs
- longer lead time
Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
The running costs per produced MW is so high that governments has to promise to effectively pay billions in subsidies to NPP:s both in terms of cheap state-backed loans and contract-for-difference power price because because they would otherwise not be viable.
That's actually not true. Running costs of nuclear power plants are extremely low, some of the lowest of all energy sources.
The reason that NPP operators now require guarantees from governments is to offset the incredibly lopsided benefits offered to intermittent renewables, including subsidies, cheap loans, guaranteed income regardless of demand and priority.
Nobody can effectively compete with the government handing out those kinds of benefits.
If running costs are so low as you claim, why does both the Swedish Government as well as plant owners such as Fortum claim that the only way to be profitable on the market is for the Government to subsidise the cost of running the plants?
Wind or Hydro in Sweden gets no such unique subsidies.
Because markets, as currently implemented for energy in EU, do not adequately include things like intermittency of demand.
If you take a source that has very low per-MWh price but very intermittent, it gets effectively highly prioritized and everyone else is paying price to match up with this wrecking ball. Except, usually, gas turbines which slot very very nicely into the swings in capacity related to wind and solar and thus benefit from them.
That's not true in Scandinavia (can't speak for EU as a whole). For example Nord Pool's market structure and pricing mechanisms are specifically designed to account for the intermittency of production and demand: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Intraday-m...
That's true for the UK and Spain as of 2023[1], but the other major energy markets in the EU incorporate significant capacity mechanisms in their pricing.
Edit: Spain added one in Feb 2025. Haven't looked up the UK yet.
Most of the cost is capex, so you want to run them at full load all the time to recoup investments. That is a bad fit for a market that increasingly rewards flexible generation.
Why should I as a consumer buy electricity from your extremely expensive new built nuclear power when either my own renewables with storage or grid based renewables with storage delivers?
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and doesn’t provide anything a modern grid needs.
You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system. Few countries are at the stage of the renewable rollout where they need to think about storage. Poland can easily double the amount of renewables without additional storage.
> You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system
That depends on the renewable type (e.g. 60% hydro is fine; 60% solar is not, because the sun goes down at night, and there can be extended periods of overcast weather which lower solar production) and what backup sources (like gas peaker plants) are available.
Germany has similar climate to Poland and manages around 60% renewable (and growing) with very little storage. A mix of wind and solar with fossil power plants for backup works reasonably well.
> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.
> Because nuclear is superior by every metric
Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?
> Are they?
Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.
> > and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining.
This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.
Numbers: In poland the solar output in December is 1/5th of July output while demand is ~10% higher. Insolation drops off quickly at higher latitudes so it dominates much more strongly than heating demand even if heating were electrical.
At the global scale this would ideally balance out- more equatorial solar is cheaper in the winter since they don't need air conditioning, so you just send it up north. That's the only really feasible solution to seasonal variation in individual countries- it's totally unreasonable to store 3 months worth of power. Its also important to note that even with 2x or 3x oversupply, solar is cheaper than nuclear currently is.
I find these discussions usually collapse into a sequence of shifting goals.
You quote, and I believe, 5x solar irradiation power difference between December, plus a second-order 10% power consumption difference. Doesn't this mean already a 5.5x difference - if X panels are sufficient in July, then 5.5X would be needed in December? And July itself probably already needs overprovisioning anyway - Polish summers are not guaranteed sunshine. If "July" is overprovisioned 1.5x and we add the 5x for December for a combined 7.5x overprovision, plus batteries, is it still cheaper than nuclear?
If nuclear gets dismissed as an expensive fantasy, well, at least it has been built and operated at massive scale. I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
You're massively misrepresenting what I'm saying. I am not dismissing nuclear or suggesting overbuilding solar by 5x. I am responding to someone who is dismissing solar now for the fantastical idea that nuclear is cheaper now. Nuclear is good. Nuclear should replace coal. Shutting down reactors that are not unsafe is ridiculous. We should build breeder reactors. Personally I think even many countries that have reactors should build more, and retrofit existing reactors to have much higher ramp rates a la French nuclear. Countries with no nuclear or hydro or geo base like Poland should definitely build nuclear plants.
But many countries have large amounts of nuclear- many enough to supply most nighttime power. And in almost all countries, solar is by far the best and cheapest immediate option, and those countries should be building as much solar as possible until the marginal return of nuclear or storage or infrastructure for imports are cheaper than just building more and more solar.
> I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
No country is even close to a solar oversupply, much less a 2x or 5x. If there is no margin, why would those projects exist?
Overbuilding is significantly cheaper than either months worth of storage or intercontinental HVDC electrical links. It's probably worth building links with Romania, but probably not equatorial North Africa. Instead if you want to hit 100% carbon free, overbuild solar to almost your 5X, mix in a good amount of wind, a couple days of storage and links with Romania or nearby.
IMO 99% is a much better target than 100%: almost all of the benefits for a lot less cost. Idle natural gas plants don't emit carbon.
(And by 100% I mean 99.99%. The grid isn't reliable enough to make more than 99.99% worth the cost).
An ideal side effect of over overbuilding solar 5x for winter is that you could then use that spare solar in the other 3 seasons to make green hydrogen, an energy intensive process, to power retrofitted gas plants. You could store and ship excess gas as well, creating an adhoc "green energy interconnect" with other nations.
Most of Polands heating is probably not electric. But it’s not unreasonable to store months worth of power, many countries have gas reserves in that ballpark. You just have to replace natural gas with a synthetic fuel.
That's just not true, unless you mean resource reserves. Taiwan has the largest NG strategic reserve I know of (11 days) and the US has the largest petroleum reserve in the world at 19 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
Resource reserves are unextracted and not replenished. They are not the same as storage.
This quotes Poland as having 89 days' worth of gas consumption with storage full, Hungary at 133 and Germany at 108. These are actual storage reserves, not untapped resources, at least for Poland.
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining
While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.
> Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load
And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
> You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.
That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine.
> And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation"
They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened!
Even when governments interfere, people will still invest in grid independence, resilience, or just access to cheaper rates. Domestic solar makes sense only because the grid is unreasonably expensive for a lot of people.
Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.
Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
Most inverters don't work without grid synchronization. E.g. you lose electricity from your provider and your batteries / stored energy won't work either.
All new projects need to be A++ energy class rated which require you to use renewable energy, which is likely one of the main reasons for these increases.
There are technical solutions to that and they don't cost a whole lot. A few hundred dollars of electronics guarantee that your home stays online when the grid goes offline. It's something that people find out the hard way and then fix unfortunately instead of just buying the right stuff upfront.
As much as I don’t like the administration, I don’t think this is necessarily true. Subsidies are being removed but I think most renewable has the chance to hold on its own. I do wish more of the markets worked closer to a an actual market like Texas which incentivizes creativity and trying to maximize. Renewables are so cost effective these days that most areas implement them and then natural gas serves as a useful baseload.
A 747 burns ~9 tonnes of kerosene per hour, creating ~29.6 tonnes CO2. The Monroe Power Plant produces 3400 MWe at ~1 kg CO2 per kWh, so ~3400 tonnes CO2 per hour.
It's a little complicated to weigh stratospheric emissions- the CO2 has a larger impact, and while the water droplets and contrails left by planes somewhat counteracts it (by reflecting incoming infrared) it's harder to compare intangibles like mercury emissions from coal. If you just say its all a wash, that plant is equivalent to 120 747s running full speed.
Private jets consume more like .9-1.5 tonnes per hour, so that's equivalent to ~900 billionaires. That's a bit less than half of them which is probably a lot more than were at the wedding. They also probably parked them instead of leaving them circling in the air.
If there were 90 billionaires who flew 12 hours each way in their private jets, then they probably released around 2.5 hours worth of Monroe Power Plant time over those 90 days- 8458 tonnes. Fun fact, the pilots and flight attendants probably used ~1000 tonnes of CO2 worth of energy etc and exhaled ~25 tonnes of CO2 in that time. 25 tonnes is small compared to the planes (>.3%), but in those 90 days the planes released just .11% as much as the coal plant.
Coal really truly sucks and it's unfair that I can't eat tuna without getting mad hatter disease.
Good, but the main issue in Poland is the usage of cheap coal for individual heating. During winter there are multiple days when you see smog and it's unhealthy to breath outside.
Absolutely. The US shouldn't be expected to kill its economic competitiveness like the United Kingdom has done.
All that happens is that manufacturing moves abroad, and countries like China make the emissions instead, the only result is that energy costs increase with no net reduction in emissions.
My comment was directed to the GP's comment on top before it was deleted:
I'm one of the "left" crowd, and I despise accelerationism in general as a concept, which is what you've described (the GP). But over last decade I've come to understanding that specifically in fighting climate change it is unfortunately the only socially acceptable path. All the green efforts humanity does recently are very good, commendable and do help (a little). But globally all green tech combined does jack shit about actually slowing, or let alone reversing, climate change. It's like an oven in the process of heating up, and we all bicker and argue if the regulator should be lowered from 3 to 2 or to 2.5 setting. Guess what, both options will result in the oven heating up to the maximum possible temperature. Politicians boast about lowering "emissions", a parameter which is impossible to measure by definition, only model and estimate. While all hard direct measurements of temperature or of CO2 show rapid and currently accelerating rise of change.
Humanity has two choices - either rush industrialization and technology in hopes of maybe start fighting climate change (in reality this time, not in promises) in 100-200 years and salvage whatever ecosystem will manage to accidentally survive. Or we do nothing, and then all ecosystem along with us will perish in droughts, famine and wars.
Third path of collectively working on real climate change solutions has been rejected by all collective humanity, so I'm not considering it. Unfortunately it was a tragedy of commons, just on planet scale, and we all lost.
I am all for cheap electricity, but what is"the cheapest electricity at any cost"? Burning lignite and not doing anything about sulfur dioxide? Nuclear power without safety features?
"Cheap" isn't the same as "cheapest", no? And last time I looked, building a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a lot of time (so costly on both dimensions) - what good would be cheap electricity in 10-20 years?
This is the fallacy of trying to reduce everything to a single left-right dimension. HN has always attracted pro-business people as you’d expect for a forum funded by a venture capital firm, but that intersects with other policies in different combinations.
You have a lot of libertarians who might oppose government regulation in various ways but are often staunchly opposed to right-wing abuse of power to pursue political goals or reduce competition. Even business-friendly Europeans or Canadians often see the American healthcare system as bad since it costs more, distorts markets, and makes startups harder to launch.
Climate change is another split since the idea that it’s exaggerated or that mitigations would cause more economic damage than ignoring it are both false so you get a denial position which are outright lies funded by the fossil fuel industry but also more sober positions trying market-friendly approaches to minimize the economic impact of moving away from fossil fuels, and positions on that intersect based on other national traits (e.g. even politically conservative people from countries which don’t produce much oil or have a massive traditional auto industry are far more likely to recognize the self-reliance aspects of renewable power as compatible with their own positions). The climate tech industry is full of startups from people who think decarbonization is a huge opportunity and many of them would be considered right-aligned on business issues but left to the extent that you view accepting the scientific consensus on climate change as a left-wing position.
Progress...but they're still consistently the dirtiest country in the region when it comes to energy mix
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly
The history of coal mining in Poland is strong and those families still have an impact on what's happening, even with many mines closing. https://www.politico.eu/article/polish-parties-scramble-for-...
So it is why these changes matter - d/dt has an opportunity to be very high.
Renewables are just really cheap. Unless the government is actively harming them for ideological reasons they get built. Baseload power plants have a harder time making a profit every year.
Are they? Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system - either batteries or water reservoirs for pumped storage. That also inclides efficiency of storage, and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
Initial cost per unit is low and they're faster to build - that's the reason of their proliferation - and in case of personal use, subsidiaries.
Compared to nuclear - which takes many political terms to build - politicians can reap benefits early. Because nuclear is superior by every metric except:
- high initial costs
- longer lead time
Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
It's not just high initial costs, nuclear also has significant running costs, high disposal costs and massive time costs.
> significant running costs
Exactly this.
The running costs per produced MW is so high that governments has to promise to effectively pay billions in subsidies to NPP:s both in terms of cheap state-backed loans and contract-for-difference power price because because they would otherwise not be viable.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-proposes-stat...
That's actually not true. Running costs of nuclear power plants are extremely low, some of the lowest of all energy sources.
The reason that NPP operators now require guarantees from governments is to offset the incredibly lopsided benefits offered to intermittent renewables, including subsidies, cheap loans, guaranteed income regardless of demand and priority.
Nobody can effectively compete with the government handing out those kinds of benefits.
If running costs are so low as you claim, why does both the Swedish Government as well as plant owners such as Fortum claim that the only way to be profitable on the market is for the Government to subsidise the cost of running the plants?
Wind or Hydro in Sweden gets no such unique subsidies.
Because markets, as currently implemented for energy in EU, do not adequately include things like intermittency of demand.
If you take a source that has very low per-MWh price but very intermittent, it gets effectively highly prioritized and everyone else is paying price to match up with this wrecking ball. Except, usually, gas turbines which slot very very nicely into the swings in capacity related to wind and solar and thus benefit from them.
That's not true in Scandinavia (can't speak for EU as a whole). For example Nord Pool's market structure and pricing mechanisms are specifically designed to account for the intermittency of production and demand: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Intraday-m...
That's true for the UK and Spain as of 2023[1], but the other major energy markets in the EU incorporate significant capacity mechanisms in their pricing.
Edit: Spain added one in Feb 2025. Haven't looked up the UK yet.
1: https://www.eurelectric.org/in-detail/capacity-mechanisms/
Those are generally available to anybody providing either carbon neutral power or grid stability. Nuclear can take advantage of those too.
Nuclear generally receives other subsidies too -- like cost overrun protection, insurance, and cleanup waivers.
Running costs are low but not extremely low.
They are vastly undercut by renewables and which is now starting to dig into their capacity factors.
Nuclear power simply is the worst possible fit for modern grids.
"Nuclear power simply is the worst possible fit for modern grids." because it's too stable? Or what do you mean?
Most of the cost is capex, so you want to run them at full load all the time to recoup investments. That is a bad fit for a market that increasingly rewards flexible generation.
Nuclear has the lowest costs per MW out of all options.
Actually, not quite true, according to this:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/large-solar-arrays-batt...
Nuclear also has non-negligible ecological impact outside the power plant due to mining and processing of nuclear fuel.
Why should I as a consumer buy electricity from your extremely expensive new built nuclear power when either my own renewables with storage or grid based renewables with storage delivers?
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and doesn’t provide anything a modern grid needs.
You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system. Few countries are at the stage of the renewable rollout where they need to think about storage. Poland can easily double the amount of renewables without additional storage.
> You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system
That depends on the renewable type (e.g. 60% hydro is fine; 60% solar is not, because the sun goes down at night, and there can be extended periods of overcast weather which lower solar production) and what backup sources (like gas peaker plants) are available.
Germany has similar climate to Poland and manages around 60% renewable (and growing) with very little storage. A mix of wind and solar with fossil power plants for backup works reasonably well.
60-80% can be usually be met with a well designed mix of hydro & solar.
You can get to 100% with either hydro or geothermal, but most countries don't have that option.
> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.
> Because nuclear is superior by every metric
Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?
> Are they?
Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.
[1]: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
> > and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining.
This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.
Numbers: In poland the solar output in December is 1/5th of July output while demand is ~10% higher. Insolation drops off quickly at higher latitudes so it dominates much more strongly than heating demand even if heating were electrical.
At the global scale this would ideally balance out- more equatorial solar is cheaper in the winter since they don't need air conditioning, so you just send it up north. That's the only really feasible solution to seasonal variation in individual countries- it's totally unreasonable to store 3 months worth of power. Its also important to note that even with 2x or 3x oversupply, solar is cheaper than nuclear currently is.
[1]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#PVP [2]: https://www.pse.pl/web/pse-eng/data/polish-power-system-oper...
I find these discussions usually collapse into a sequence of shifting goals.
You quote, and I believe, 5x solar irradiation power difference between December, plus a second-order 10% power consumption difference. Doesn't this mean already a 5.5x difference - if X panels are sufficient in July, then 5.5X would be needed in December? And July itself probably already needs overprovisioning anyway - Polish summers are not guaranteed sunshine. If "July" is overprovisioned 1.5x and we add the 5x for December for a combined 7.5x overprovision, plus batteries, is it still cheaper than nuclear?
If nuclear gets dismissed as an expensive fantasy, well, at least it has been built and operated at massive scale. I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
You're massively misrepresenting what I'm saying. I am not dismissing nuclear or suggesting overbuilding solar by 5x. I am responding to someone who is dismissing solar now for the fantastical idea that nuclear is cheaper now. Nuclear is good. Nuclear should replace coal. Shutting down reactors that are not unsafe is ridiculous. We should build breeder reactors. Personally I think even many countries that have reactors should build more, and retrofit existing reactors to have much higher ramp rates a la French nuclear. Countries with no nuclear or hydro or geo base like Poland should definitely build nuclear plants.
But many countries have large amounts of nuclear- many enough to supply most nighttime power. And in almost all countries, solar is by far the best and cheapest immediate option, and those countries should be building as much solar as possible until the marginal return of nuclear or storage or infrastructure for imports are cheaper than just building more and more solar.
> I am not aware of any large scale operating exports of solar energy from equatorial regions to Northern Europe, or similar distance.
No country is even close to a solar oversupply, much less a 2x or 5x. If there is no margin, why would those projects exist?
Overbuilding is significantly cheaper than either months worth of storage or intercontinental HVDC electrical links. It's probably worth building links with Romania, but probably not equatorial North Africa. Instead if you want to hit 100% carbon free, overbuild solar to almost your 5X, mix in a good amount of wind, a couple days of storage and links with Romania or nearby.
IMO 99% is a much better target than 100%: almost all of the benefits for a lot less cost. Idle natural gas plants don't emit carbon.
(And by 100% I mean 99.99%. The grid isn't reliable enough to make more than 99.99% worth the cost).
An ideal side effect of over overbuilding solar 5x for winter is that you could then use that spare solar in the other 3 seasons to make green hydrogen, an energy intensive process, to power retrofitted gas plants. You could store and ship excess gas as well, creating an adhoc "green energy interconnect" with other nations.
Most of Polands heating is probably not electric. But it’s not unreasonable to store months worth of power, many countries have gas reserves in that ballpark. You just have to replace natural gas with a synthetic fuel.
That's just not true, unless you mean resource reserves. Taiwan has the largest NG strategic reserve I know of (11 days) and the US has the largest petroleum reserve in the world at 19 days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
Resource reserves are unextracted and not replenished. They are not the same as storage.
I don't think this is right. Here's the first link I can find: https://www.intellinews.com/how-many-days-of-gas-consumption...
This quotes Poland as having 89 days' worth of gas consumption with storage full, Hungary at 133 and Germany at 108. These are actual storage reserves, not untapped resources, at least for Poland.
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining
While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.
> Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load
And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
> You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.
That's besides the point! The window of highest demand completely covers the window of solar. You can build a LOT of solar before storage starts becoming cheaper than just building more solar. You only need storage if it's ALL solar- you can have a majority of your power supplied by solar with hardly any storage! There this idea that if you overbuild solar that power will have nowhere to go, or something- you can just turn it off. You use backup power for the non-shining hours and you're totally fine.
> And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
In fact I did[1]. Page 117: "In fact, in most of the network nodes analyzed, there is no correlation between voltage stability and the amount of solar generation or the amount of coupled synchronous generation"
They had 2.3 seconds of inertia, more than the regulated 2 seconds. Power sloshing through interconnects caused plant ramp rates to be overwhelmed one-by-one, causing the cascading failure, because they had no buffering. If they were all solar or wind plants, the failure would not have happened!
[1]: https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D4D1FAQGcyyYYr...
Even when governments interfere, people will still invest in grid independence, resilience, or just access to cheaper rates. Domestic solar makes sense only because the grid is unreasonably expensive for a lot of people.
Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.
Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
> people will still invest in grid independence
Most inverters don't work without grid synchronization. E.g. you lose electricity from your provider and your batteries / stored energy won't work either.
All new projects need to be A++ energy class rated which require you to use renewable energy, which is likely one of the main reasons for these increases.
There are technical solutions to that and they don't cost a whole lot. A few hundred dollars of electronics guarantee that your home stays online when the grid goes offline. It's something that people find out the hard way and then fix unfortunately instead of just buying the right stuff upfront.
Island mode is a trivial option adding negligible cost when building a home solar and battery system.
Meanwhile in America, oil and coal is becoming king again. Climate change you say? Oh well, "thoughts and prayers".
Even America is building far more renewables than fossil fuel or nuclear, despite the deck being stacked against them.
As much as I don’t like the administration, I don’t think this is necessarily true. Subsidies are being removed but I think most renewable has the chance to hold on its own. I do wish more of the markets worked closer to a an actual market like Texas which incentivizes creativity and trying to maximize. Renewables are so cost effective these days that most areas implement them and then natural gas serves as a useful baseload.
At the same time the admin has undercut and gutted many climate tracking projects [0] so it's really not hard to see the underlying intentions.
[0] for instance https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessmen...
I think the point is that it looks like economics beat ecologics and renewables are getting built.
How many days worth of coal burning does 90 days of billionaire jets travelling to Bezos wedding count as?
A 747 burns ~9 tonnes of kerosene per hour, creating ~29.6 tonnes CO2. The Monroe Power Plant produces 3400 MWe at ~1 kg CO2 per kWh, so ~3400 tonnes CO2 per hour.
It's a little complicated to weigh stratospheric emissions- the CO2 has a larger impact, and while the water droplets and contrails left by planes somewhat counteracts it (by reflecting incoming infrared) it's harder to compare intangibles like mercury emissions from coal. If you just say its all a wash, that plant is equivalent to 120 747s running full speed.
Private jets consume more like .9-1.5 tonnes per hour, so that's equivalent to ~900 billionaires. That's a bit less than half of them which is probably a lot more than were at the wedding. They also probably parked them instead of leaving them circling in the air.
If there were 90 billionaires who flew 12 hours each way in their private jets, then they probably released around 2.5 hours worth of Monroe Power Plant time over those 90 days- 8458 tonnes. Fun fact, the pilots and flight attendants probably used ~1000 tonnes of CO2 worth of energy etc and exhaled ~25 tonnes of CO2 in that time. 25 tonnes is small compared to the planes (>.3%), but in those 90 days the planes released just .11% as much as the coal plant.
Coal really truly sucks and it's unfair that I can't eat tuna without getting mad hatter disease.
Nice, I appreciate the analysis!
The typical answer to Climate Change isn't "thoughts and prayers" but "go fck yourself"
Why is this downvoted? It is an accurate observation of the politics.
Because it's shallow and ragebaity. If anyone wants to discuss that topic, there's so many quality articles these days to submit and talk about.
Edit: I snarkily replied to an imagined comment, not the one that was actually written...
The parent post says America, not Africa though.
Oh wow, I stand corrected. No idea how I could have misread that.
Good, but the main issue in Poland is the usage of cheap coal for individual heating. During winter there are multiple days when you see smog and it's unhealthy to breath outside.
No paywall: https://archive.is/5A0kr
The original analysis of renewables in Poland in June 2025: https://www.forum-energii.eu/en/monthly-magazine-1
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Absolutely. The US shouldn't be expected to kill its economic competitiveness like the United Kingdom has done.
All that happens is that manufacturing moves abroad, and countries like China make the emissions instead, the only result is that energy costs increase with no net reduction in emissions.
My comment was directed to the GP's comment on top before it was deleted:
I'm one of the "left" crowd, and I despise accelerationism in general as a concept, which is what you've described (the GP). But over last decade I've come to understanding that specifically in fighting climate change it is unfortunately the only socially acceptable path. All the green efforts humanity does recently are very good, commendable and do help (a little). But globally all green tech combined does jack shit about actually slowing, or let alone reversing, climate change. It's like an oven in the process of heating up, and we all bicker and argue if the regulator should be lowered from 3 to 2 or to 2.5 setting. Guess what, both options will result in the oven heating up to the maximum possible temperature. Politicians boast about lowering "emissions", a parameter which is impossible to measure by definition, only model and estimate. While all hard direct measurements of temperature or of CO2 show rapid and currently accelerating rise of change.
Humanity has two choices - either rush industrialization and technology in hopes of maybe start fighting climate change (in reality this time, not in promises) in 100-200 years and salvage whatever ecosystem will manage to accidentally survive. Or we do nothing, and then all ecosystem along with us will perish in droughts, famine and wars.
Third path of collectively working on real climate change solutions has been rejected by all collective humanity, so I'm not considering it. Unfortunately it was a tragedy of commons, just on planet scale, and we all lost.
I am all for cheap electricity, but what is"the cheapest electricity at any cost"? Burning lignite and not doing anything about sulfur dioxide? Nuclear power without safety features?
Nuclear is cheap with safety features. In fact, it's the safest energy source we have.
"Cheap" isn't the same as "cheapest", no? And last time I looked, building a nuclear power plant is very expensive and takes a lot of time (so costly on both dimensions) - what good would be cheap electricity in 10-20 years?
> The left brigade here
Where did all those people come from all of a sudden? Has Bluesky shut down or something? It's been insufferable recently
HN has always been a fairly left leaning site, no?
This is the fallacy of trying to reduce everything to a single left-right dimension. HN has always attracted pro-business people as you’d expect for a forum funded by a venture capital firm, but that intersects with other policies in different combinations.
You have a lot of libertarians who might oppose government regulation in various ways but are often staunchly opposed to right-wing abuse of power to pursue political goals or reduce competition. Even business-friendly Europeans or Canadians often see the American healthcare system as bad since it costs more, distorts markets, and makes startups harder to launch.
Climate change is another split since the idea that it’s exaggerated or that mitigations would cause more economic damage than ignoring it are both false so you get a denial position which are outright lies funded by the fossil fuel industry but also more sober positions trying market-friendly approaches to minimize the economic impact of moving away from fossil fuels, and positions on that intersect based on other national traits (e.g. even politically conservative people from countries which don’t produce much oil or have a massive traditional auto industry are far more likely to recognize the self-reliance aspects of renewable power as compatible with their own positions). The climate tech industry is full of startups from people who think decarbonization is a huge opportunity and many of them would be considered right-aligned on business issues but left to the extent that you view accepting the scientific consensus on climate change as a left-wing position.
Only if your POV is from the far right