“ And solar was the fastest-growing electricity source for the 20th year in a row.
It now provides 7% of the world's electricity”
replies(6):
All the gnashing about what this or that government policy change will do is just noise compared to this global trend.
Now, their prices have gone down, their generation per unit has gone up, and much more is known about how they behave long-term.
The world has a LOT of power generation. It will take time to replace. But with every time that some existing power generation source shuts down due to age, or expansion occurs somewhere, it will inevitably be done with solar/wind. It's just more cost effective now.
In the end it is not environmental concerns that will cause solar and wind to become commonplace. It's just economics. Slapping down something that generates power for 20-30 years with no input fuel is just way more economically feasible than anything that requires fuel. They still have maintenance costs, but it's nothing by comparison. They can completely undercut other sources of power.
We're close to production of solar and wind exceeding recent growth in energy demand. When that happens it'll start cratering oil and gas demand.
Politicians were also responsible for initially subsidizing solar to usher in the current boom.
Corporations invested heavily in solar production to create the cheap panels that are being installed rapidly.
Just because some politicians and corporations do things we don’t like doesn’t make them in general “the biggest enemy of humanity.”
That is an incredibly large understatement. They have gotten it shamefully and fundamentally wrong year after year.
Even if the current solutions are inadequate, the same was true for PV 20 years ago, it just needed investment in R&D. Investment in R&D of grid storage is at the highest in history, and growing.
The real question is at what relative cost level it turns into an S-curve. Right now renewables are mostly cheaper than non renewables and transitioning to a lot cheaper. A lot might turn into one or more orders of magnitude. Where does it stop? Two? Three?
What's the ultimate cost of a mwh of power? It's probably a lot lower than what people currently pay. Renewables have a bit of upfront cost but the marginal cost of using the equipment is close to zero.
Lower cost of energy opens up new use cases and drives the market up. Basically it causes people to electrify more things. Even things that we currently think of as too costly. As those things get electrified, they get cheaper. And there are people that make the investment and benefit and people that don't and get pushed out of the market.
How Big Projects Get Done describes roads, wind and solar as three of the top five projects types for likelihood to come in on time and on budget.
Why? The first pour and the last pour on making a road are substantially the same. The people working on it get better at doing so as they go. They iterate on the process and reduce waste. Solar and wind are installing the same structures 10, 20, 50 times so they go fast once they start and the scope can be adjusted up or down as long as you have contracts in place.
Building a nuclear plant takes for-fucking-ever, there are a million different tasks to do, and they are built so far apart that getting the same team to build another means a long commute and a different local government to contend with every time. So budgeting is difficult.
Transport is a good example. A long distance truck can take up to 300 gallons of diesel. It will drive quite far on that. But that's over 1000$. A well utilized truck goes through well over 100K$ of fuel per year. That's a lot of money.
Enter electric trucks. Yes they have range limitations (depending on their battery size). But they don't use up 100K $ worth of electricity per year burning over 1M $ of fuel over it's lifespan. Not to mention all the maintenance and parts associated with keeping diesel engines going.
Solar/wind/battery power has essentially no marginal cost. Electric trucks powered by that still have some marginal cost but it's a lot lower than that of a diesel truck. And even at current grid prices (typically determined by the cost of fossil fuels), it's probably earning itself back. What happens when diesel trucks follow the same cost curve that EVs went through? You don't need to be a genius to figure out that there are going to be a lot of truckers and trucking companies that can't afford to stick with diesel for very long when everybody starts decimating their fuel expenses.
That's just trucks. The same kind of economics are happening across pretty much every sector that can feasibly be electrified. It's not all happening at once. But probably in hind sight in a few decades it will have happened very quickly. One moment everybody was mostly burning diesel, petrol, methane, and coal and a few short decades later all of that is gone because it became way too costly to continue doing any of that.
Look at all of that natural habitat plowed through will diesel bulldozers, hauled off with giant diesel trucks, displacing animals and plants and insects. The habitat is permanently ruined.
This is dumb and shouldn't be celebrated.
Solar is fine in already disturbed areas. Stop clearing more land for "green" projects.
The only recent time fossil decreased was during covid, and even then it barely was a dent. To meet our climate goals we'd need something in the same vein as covid... constantly
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
Not really, there is going to be about a 40-year trough in the Chinese economy due to demographics. At some point soon, manufacturing in China won't make sense anymore, (and world wide demand will also decrease due to demographics) so presumably China will be able to decommission a lot of their power generation instead of adding to it. Will they axe their coal? Time will tell, but adding capacity will end, and not too far in the future, either.
You might say “put in a forest”, and I’d agree, but if that’s not going to happen then we might as well have the solar panels.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-solar?t...
We talk more about it but in the facts nothing changes, if anything it's accelerating
It's wild how big companies, certain countries and billionaires are still holding on to nuclear fission (not fusion).
Nuclear reactors:
- take decades to build
- go massively over budget, at least 2x if not more [0]
- are inherently uneconomically: energy companies would never invest/build them on their own, only by lobbying governments for HUGE subsides (in various forms) do they get build
- inherently uninsurable: no private insurance company would insure a plant, again if private companies would need to build/run them on their own, every insurance company would deny them
- deconstructing them takes again billions and decades
- there's still no real-world solution (or even long-term secure storage) for nuclear waste in the world
---
Solar / Wind / Storage
Compare the 60 Billions for 1 single nuclear plant (UK) to what you would get from the same investment in solar (plus battery tech getting cheaper and better for storage). We are talking about differences in the magnitudes.
About the only value nuclear fission has is that's a central power source which gives the entities owning it huge power over the consumers.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/uk-nuclear-plant-hinkley-point-co...
> Phil MacDonald, Ember's managing director, said: "Paired with battery storage, solar is set to be an unstoppable force.
"As the fastest-growing and largest source of new electricity, it is critical in meeting the world's ever-increasing demand for electricity."
> Despite the rise in renewable power, electricity from more polluting fossil fuels crept up by 1.4% last year due to surging demand, meaning emissions from the sector rose too to an all-time high.
> Ember forecasts the growth in clean power will soon outpace the growth in demand, helping to displace fossil fuels from the system.
Is fossil fuel use growing at an increasing rate or decreasing rate? Is non-carbon emitting energy supplies growing at an increasing rate or decreasing?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
With transmutation and the option for recycling it altogether, waste is not an issue. Only the low fission parts of the spent fuel is low-grade active for longer than 1000 years, but this is such a low level of radiation, it is comparable to natural uranium formations and not an issue. The high radiation part of the fuel has lost the dangerous level of radiation in less than 1000 years and can be recycled before. The arenic compounds and other substances as byproduct of copper etc production for the mass of renewables have a much longer shelf life of toxitity. Also, you need more of them.
Decentralized clean solar power, which can be generated on a regional and even private level, makes people independent. Which is a huge treat if you want them dependent.
However we should normalize panels over parking lots. Parking lots are just concrete wastelands, and while lifting the panels up over the cars requires a bit more material it is otherwise basically free real estate in areas with high electricity use (great to minimize grid losses)
- So we need to find secure expensive, leak-free storage only for 1000 years? Most countries cant even plan 5 years ahead.
- No words on generated Energy produced per Dollar.
Your rebuttal is not as significant as you might think.
> Low-carbon supply: by 2040, our Balanced Pathway sees offshore wind grow six-fold from 15 GW of capacity in 2023 to 88 GW by 2040. Onshore wind capacity doubles to 32 GW by 2040 and solar capacity increases to 82 GW
And once you multiply by capacity factor the solar and onshore wind are about equal so solar will be less than a third of modern renewables.
Plus UK wind peaks in the winter.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Itanium_Sales_Foreca...
So it's not the emissions that are stagnant, it's the per capita imports of emissions which are roughly flat.
They have a separate graph which reflects "consumption" based emissions:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Usually, but not always. You can have many days or weeks, e.g. in mid-winter of overcast weather and very little wind. This is a real problem for renewable energy sources, they're not comprehensively viable unless supplemented by alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.
https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...
This is on top of an LCOE that is 5x that of solar or wind power and the need for catastrophe insurance to be provided essentially for free by the taxpayer on top of that.
(Fukushima cost about $1 trillion to clean up, the liability cap for US plants is about $250 million because otherwise private insurers who understand the risks better than you or I WILL NOT shoulder the liability)
The cost of nuclear can be dragged down by taking various risks that the people getting that sweet free catastrophe insurance would probably be happy with.
The countries most talking about net-zero are indeed reducing their emissions. China is meanwhile trying to catch up to the standard of living of their Western counterparts, driving up emissions massively (while still having great per-capita values, there are just a lot of Chinese that previously lived on basically nothing)
> To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
Even if we stopped right now we'd need to be back to ~2000 co2 emissions by 2030, that's in 5 years. Even if we had 5 years of covid with the same restrictions as we had in peak 2020 we wouldn't reach that point...
I do not want to start a whole political tirade so the following is meant more as humor:
Wouldn't that be ironic. Trump's actions help curb global climate change and bankrupts billionaires.
But, storage is already growing at a pace similar to solar because it's cheaper than the alternatives.
This model posits 97% carbon free generation in Australia with 5 hours of storage using actual real world weather data:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
>You can have many days or weeks
Maybe cite actual data.
>alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.
Nuclear isnt a peaker. Or rather, it can theoretically be used as a peaker but burning literal $100 notes may be more cost effective in the long run than using it as a peaker.
Batteries and pumped storage are cost effective peakers. I find it's better when modeling renewable energy generation scenarios to try not to pretend they dont exist.
Meanwhile, 1kW of solar with 1kWh of storage can be had for $1k on Amazon, yields 1-2MWh per year and pays for itself within the decade, with costs still trending down. Yes, fully getting rid of fossil gas is an ongoing challenge, but a much easier one than ramping up nuclear reactor build rates by a factor of 1000 or so...
Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives.
If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity.
Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2].
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546...
[2] https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-b...
I have another question then, does the planet care about "per capita" or about "total" emissions ?
Every few years they come up with the same fucking graph were the solid line goes straight up until "now" and the dotted line magically decreases in the close future and reach 0 in 50+ years, when none of us will be alive and accountable. meanwhile: https://climatanthropocene.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/co...
Nobody is going to put a $30K battery into a Ford Lightning. After 10 years that battery is probably $3K. If it isn't and you're unhappy with the ~80% battery capacity it has after 10 years of usage, you sell it on to somebody who is happy with ~80%. You don't spend more than the truck is worth replacing the battery.
My feeling is that these over-water panels generating a not-insignificant amount of power are an ideal compromise between the sprawl of the built environment of (Taizhou, China) and the natural ecosystem.
Thats the question this guy asked, using actual weather data to power his models instead of carbon industry fluff.
Unfortunately the instinctive skeptical reaction to this is not "here's an alternative model and alternative data" but "here's even more FUD".
If you look at which is growing faster you see that renewables appear to be growing faster relative to fossil fuels.
It's absorbing a third of California's generation at solar peak and then delivering a third of demand in the evening.
The future is here, just not everywhere yet.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ustr-biden-tariff-increase-...
You're confusing pumped storage with river dams. The geography for pumped storage is abundant, river dams not so much.
>Battery storage is entirely speculative so far.
In 2012 maybe. These days grid level battery plants are deployed routinely.
>Whilst nuclear is a proven baseload source
At 5x the cost per kwh, according to lazard.
Baseload also means "requires peakers". That means gas or...batteries.
When french nuclear plants go down for maintenance the country chews through ungodly amounts of gas. Some of their plants have capacity factors of like ~80% - not much better than high performing wind farms.
- a call to action
- dump and pump stock market scheme
how many HN users, say top 5000 commenters and people with craziest CVs and or income will profit of that? it would be stupid not to, right?
Current grid storage technology is a few breakthroughs away, we just don't know when it will happen but given the amount poured into R&D for it, the willingness of governments, and technological hurdles that are orders of magnitude lower than fusion I don't see why we can't expect it to become reality in the next 10 years.
As I said, it's lagging the curve of solar adoption, China has invested a lot in solar for their own power needs as an oil-poor country, their options are renewables and uranium, with the EV industry booming in China, solar being widely adopted, I don't see why they couldn't be at the forefront of grid storage as well in a few years (5-10).
Indeed, it's becoming very obvious that the US is slowly turning into a resource curse nation. Sad.
Of course US tariffs are only going to make those Chinese panels cheaper for the EU and the rest of the world, which will then be less reliant on US-sourced fossil fuels. In the long run, putting up a wall in front of the your beachfront property is not going to protect your house when the tide comes in.
This means that solar power output is much more seasonal, and most critically, power consumption in Northern Europe is highest during the winter months. I expect this is not the case for Australia.
A counterpoint: the recent quick growth has been fueled by panels getting cheaper. They used to be the majority of the cost. But that's not true anymore. The cost will soon be mainly installation (i.e. labor) and space. Neither are amenable to drastic further decreases.
Fortunately we've already reached the point where it's the cheapest option, so that it will continue to replace other power sources even if it does get much cheaper anymore.
You can argue about whether tariffs are good or bad, but in any case there's a vast difference between "target[ing] strategic product categories" and bluntly hitting entire ccTLDs.
> But [solar at 7%] remains eclipsed by wind, which grew to 8% last year, and nuclear to 9%.
Which is a bit mangled but seems to be suggesting nuclear grew to 9%.
Nuclear did grow slightly in absolute terms, but in percentage terms it hit a 45 year low as the total grew faster and so the share shrunk.
Assuming the number of humans don't drastically change from year to year, those are roughly proportional.
If per capita emissions drop by 2% and the population increases by 1%, it's still a win.
Solar is about to get hit with tariffs, but stockpiles give buyers opportunities - https://electrek.co/2025/04/08/solar-hit-tariffs-but-stockpi... - April 8th, 2025
Domestic supply chain looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790553 (courtesy u/jax)
> According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr), and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+ of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.
> Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).
> In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]
(citations in their comment)
Battery systems installed in the last 5 years in America are 15 times more powerful than all the fission reactors built in the same time. Meanwhile, US reactor capacity is now lower than it was in 1990. One of these power sources is "speculative" and the other is a rapidly-growing, practical and economical way to store and distribute energy.
Global BESS deployments soared 53% in 2024 - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-soar... - January 14, 2025 ("Storage installations in 2024 beat expectations with 205GWh installed globally, a staggering y-o-y increase of 53%. The grid market has once again been the driver of growth, with more than 160GWh deployed globally, of which 98% was lithium-ion.")
China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA - July 9, 2024
China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D - April 12, 2024
Global BESS deployments to exceed 400GWh annually by 2030, says Rystad Energy - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e... - June 15, 2023
Citations:
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/#batteries-e...
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
But the larger issue is that this is driven by international emissions, so whatever the US does is essentially irrelevant to that outcome.
edit to respond to dead comment:
The Chinese wasted way more money on Solyndra's than the US did. Most of their solar power startups were failures too. Yet now they dominate because they subsidized more than one and didn't give up after one failed.
Put differently: Unless you have a plan to change the number of people on Earth (please don't) or the amount of power required per person (potentially viable), then proportional and absolute are essentially equivalent.
And they should be set just high enough that the industry remains competitive while not allowing for price gouging. We know companies will seek to maximize their prices. So if a foreign competitor is selling for 8% cheaper, then tariffs should be no more than 9%. We know from experience that manufactures will sell at the same price as foreign competition and will pocket the difference.
They should also be gradually reduced over time. The goal is to have domestic industries become globally competitive. And that necessarily means that companies need to strive to improve efficiency so they can match or beat the prices of global competitors. If that can't happen, then maybe those companies need to go away.
The reason tariffs are bad in the long term is A) it incentivize global competition to become even more efficient; B) it encourages domestic industries to be non-competitive. So the industry being favored by tariffs will never grow into a global power.
So tariffs on solar panels are fine, so long as they come with other incentives to spur domestic consumption (to drive efficiency gains) and a plan to lower those tariffs over time.
Blanket tariffs are pretty much never good, the only good reason to institute blanket tariffs on a country is as a prelude to direct conflict. As it will provide a market incentive for consumers to replace goods from that country with a more expensive alternative.
After all, a blanket tariff on all the goods coming from a country is a type of economic sanction. So a country who puts tariffs on the goods of every other country in the world is effectively feeling the impact of the first phase of conflict, when allies come together and enact trade barriers with a country. And why to countries band together to push economic sanctions on an adversary? To hurt their economy.
So TL;DR: Biden solar tariffs - well thought out and likely productive. Trump tariffs - pushing yourself in the face.
The headline was clearly written to tell a story - that renewables are winning. According to what metric? If the goal is to reduce dependence of fossil-fueled carbon emissions (remember that pesky detail?) then renewables are evidently failing at their core objective. It's observable truth but a very uncomfortable one, as shown by the number of people downvoting - most would rather shift the goalpost than admit failure.
And to further qualify that: The capacity is increasing rapidly (but we will need it)
Not that, but a "first adopter curse" AKA path dependence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
> Solar power has doubled in just three years, according to thinktank Ember, but rising electricity demand from air conditioning, AI and electric vehicles means electricity from fossil fuel sources still grew.
This is beyond burying the lede. This is an intentionally misleading headline. Holding ourselves accountable to the real goal (reducing CO2) is the only way to succeed - as soon as we start fudging the goalpost and claiming victory, we're no longer doing credible science communication.
BTW. I was talking about semis, not pickup trucks which is not really a common vehicle class in Europe where I live. People that use vehicles for work tend to use vans and trailers instead.
In any case, diesel engines get a lot of servicing (and unplanned down time) before they reach their 1 million miles. And the engine has many parts that need regular attention & replacing. An electrical motor is basically going to be fine with little to no attention until its end of life. Batteries do degrade depending on the chemistry. But decent LFP batteries are available now with many thousands of cycles before they start degrading. Other than that, the whole drive train just features a lot less moving parts that can break or wear out. Things like brakes, suspension, hydraulics, etc. of course work the same way and still need servicing.
And again, if you are burning > 100K$ fuel per year, replacing the battery once every few years is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. And this wouldn't come as a surprise either if you run a fleet of these things. You'd plan and budget for that to happen.
And it's not like the old batteries are a complete write off. They have a lot of residual value. Even if they are completely dead, which they typically aren't, they would still contain a lot of valuable minerals (like a couple of hundred kilos of lithium), lots of copper, etc.
With battery cost now dipping below 100$/kwh and actually trending towards 50$/kwh, we're talking about component cost of 25-50K$ for a half mwh battery for the manufacturer. The real price would be higher of course (labor, various suppliers taking a cut, electronics and other stuff) but over time that should get closer to the cost price than is the case today. And that cost price will come down further.
I feel like you think you're making some clever gotcha, but what you're saying is, let's continue doing what we're doing right now.
They are in operation on a number of large trucks.
And they've started building massive battery storage plants, which will likely substantially replace their coal plants over the next decade.
You get more watts per human labor hour with our abundant natural gas reserves. No matter how cheap you drive labor, it will still be more economical to use that labor to drill wells.
Coal was always dying, especially in the US, because of economic concerns. It's a stupid source of energy.
The fact that anyone in the US even thinks of coal is absurd. There are maybe 60k coal miners in the US. It hasn't mattered in decades.
Still there are lots of carve outs for the way extraction equipment and other capital costs are accounted for in tax law that are effectively direct subsidies to the oil industry. These won't end the practice of fossil energy use like ending the big ones would, but any little bit helps. Would also be nice to stop leasing out government land to do this incredibly destructive thing with it -- at least make drillers own the land or lease it from a private owner.
[1]: https://www.carsguide.com.au/oversteer/phantograph-scania-tr...
Tom Scott video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg
Kurzweil 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYpoKYY1uy4
researchgate 2018 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Exponential-growth-in-so...
some 2024 data https://www.linkedin.com/posts/paulfbrowning_exponential-pv-...
and on it goes at about 25% per year. That would have it covering all our needs in about 15 years.
For comparison with Hinkley C the UKs new nuclear reactor the site was selected in 2010 and the latest is "£41.6–47.9 billion in 2024 prices, with Unit 1 planned to become operational in 2029 to 2031."
Probably not, if your definition of "much further" is an increase from 30% or something.
As a data point, one Australia State uses 70% renewables, average, over a year: https://www.energymining.sa.gov.au/industry/hydrogen-and-ren... It's a mixture of wind and solar. Unlike other places that have a high percentage of renewable generation they do not have hydro of any sort.
The renewables have replaced coal and gas generation. They are at 70% because renewables were cheaper than fossil 20 years ago, because they have no coal or gas - it's all imported. The transition was purely driven by cost. The costs were higher than any other state in Australia, so they started earlier.
The most costly part right now is the remaining 30%, which is supplied by gas peakers. You can guess what might happen in the future from this: https://reneweconomy.com.au/i-could-never-find-a-business-ca... Some quotes to save you reading that link:
- “The reality is that you can’t buy a gas turbine for the next four to five years,” David Scaysbrook, the founder and co-head of Quinbrook Infrastructure Investors, one of the world’s biggest energy investors ... “They’re all sold out,” he says. And the price has also soared. “They are nearly four times the cost of what it was two years ago.”
- the rising cost of gas – it is about three times higher than it was a decade ago – has made the business case even more complicated (FYI: Australia is the worlds largest gas exporter - the problem isn't availability).
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm just not buying the 7% figure as the evidence stands.
>In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They’re now running around 50% (https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants)
Is this a problem worth solving?
Is it a problem worth giving any amount of thought to at all, when the alternative is killing people both directly through pollution and indirectly through climate change?
What you actually need is mass production, and a regulatory environment that facilitates the same, e.g. by putting most of the certification in the design phase and then making production certification limited to the matter of whether what was built follows the certified spec.
The ideal would be to limit the on-site construction to common fungible commodities like pouring concrete and have any reactor-specific components mass produced in a factory. Then the same factory can be producing components for reactors whether they're going up in New York or Seattle or London and you get your economies of scale.
Covering the incremental evening demand peak is one thing. Converting fuel oil and natural gas-based heating to electric and then covering the nighttime winter heating load in northern latitudes is something else entirely.
It shows solar PV as 6.91% of global electricity generation last year:
Gas boilers are now the leading source of NOx pollution in London since they've made so much progress on traffic sources.
Whereas heat pumps powered by nuclear reactors work pretty well, if you could get the cost of nuclear reactors under control by getting mass production going.
I dunno how it will all play out but given how "overhead" costs keep rising it's possible that private solar & storage costs drop low enough that its cheaper than grid power in many places despite being much less efficient from first principles.
Physics vs beauracracy.
From my perspective, prices for full "off grid" setup dictate the maximum that utilities can charge, basically the main thing keeping them honest at this point. The other thing to price in would be the likelihood of new taxes / fees or bans on local generation if it looks like the grid will hit a death spiral.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...
Yes, waste is an issue. We only recently got the first permanent storages and their viability is to be tested.
Dropping barrels in the ocean was just kind of recently disallowed. Nuclear waste processing still drops contaminated water into oceans and rivers.
Water is a brilliant radiation absorber. But you can be sure this radiation will at some point reach the food chain. These are insurmountable costs and other technologies don't have these problems, toxicity of materials is different from ratiation from decaying materials.
Perhaps there is a place for nuclear power, but its problems should not be ignored or downplayed as well as its costs.
Yes, there are going to be places like Nuorgam in Finland where a population of 200 may turn out to be non-economical to put on the same suitably upgraded HVDC grid as everyone else, but they're also not getting e.g. a dedicated nuclear reactor any time soon.
Yes, that does still leave oil and gas in such places. Or would, if the oil and gas remained economical to supply internationally when the majority of users worldwide stop using it. Biofuels (e.g. wood in a fireplace) is still a thing, even if not fantastic for either health or environment. I have no idea if we're going to see other long-term chemistry-based solutions, people keep talking about ammonia but it's too far out of my knowledge to argue for or against.
[0] I'm 52° north and for the last 6 months was wearing T-shirts indoors for an average of 17 kWh per day (for everything: heating, hot water, appliances, tech) even though there were a few times I accidentally left a huge window open for hours. It's very well insulated and has a heat pump.
[1] Longer days closer to the equator. North tip of Lapland has 52 days without sunrise in winter[2], but it's just a question of "how much money and what's the cheaper alternative" for a grid connection that ultimately ends up in the Sahara where the winter solstice day length is 10 hours[3].
[2] https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2023/what-polar-night-exp...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Tataouine+sunrise+21+De...
Transmission losses are subject to engineering, and can be as low as you're willing to spend money to get them — as in, if the world all suddenly (magically and unrealistically) decided to be friends, you could put a girdle around the world with only 1 Ω resistance using existing manufacturing capacity[2].
[0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Tarifa+Spain+sunrise+21...
[1] https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2023/what-polar-night-exp...
[2] ~ 12 months global aluminium production, but you could do it
Rail at best connects major cities, and a few minor ones. It is largely at capacity for the industries it serves, and moving retail freight to big box stores simply isn't possible. There are no knobs to turn or levers to pull to change that.
US freight railroads used to carry a larger variety of goods and serve a larger variety of customers than they do today. They were never in the business of delivering finished goods directly to retail stores, but they did transport a large amount of single-carload and less-than-carload deliveries between factories and warehouses. This is why if you visit older industrial areas you will see train tracks everywhere, including in the middle of the street and sometimes directly into buildings.
When the trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, trucking companies undercut railroads on low-volume high-profit routes, leaving the railroads to focus on low-value bulk goods like coal. The total volume of freight actually went up, but both revenue per unit and gross revenue fell. The railroads struggled to justify the cost of maintenance on now less busy lines, so they abandoned many of them and neglected the maintenance on others. That made it impossible to win back the lost business from the trucking industry even as the cost of trucking skyrocketed. Everyone is now worse off except for the owners of the trucking companies.
As for Switzerland, they invented a special kind of shipping container and that can be loaded/unloaded from a train or truck with no need for a crane. This allows them to make carload and intermodal deliveries without building any new infrastructure.
On 21 December, the day is about 77 minutes longer in Miami than in NYC, and panels in Miami aren't going to be covered in snow.
> Can you create a long distance transmission line from New York to Brazil?
Yes. $$$.
Spend enough (production is high enough for this, yes I have checked, it's just how much money you want to spend) and it could be from NYC to Perth Australia.
> Even if you could in theory, probably not in practice, and even regardless of the technical factors nobody is going to want that kind of cross-border dependency for something as important as heating.
Also true. Unfortunately.
