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Comment by simloo | Hacker News Reader

Because the price per kWh for renewable sources is artificially low. To give you some examples: Renewables still have various subsidies (e.g. in construction) while non-renewables are taxed, wind power plants in particular have shorter life spans that predicted, and the wings cannot be recycled but the landfill costs are generally not included.

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Landfill costs are close to negligible.

Tax subsidies for renewables, at least in the US, are small compared to the levelized cost difference with nuclear.

If you look at Lazard's levelized cost of energy report, where wind is far cheaper than nuclear, they assume a 20 year lifespan for wind turbines. This is not unreasonable.

I countered this in another reply to you, but the levelized cost of energy is not a good way of comparing intermittent and baseload power sources since it completely ignores the costs associated with intermittency. Nuclear in particular is penalized heavily here. Since wind and solar are very intermittent, they look very cheap when you look at LCOE, but are very expensive in reality.

Of course LCoE is a simplification, but it cannot be ignored if the differences are large enough, as nuclear advocates wish to do. More detailed analysis has to be specific to particular situations. However, as I have also pointed out elsewhere, when optimizations are performed of the best way to produce output for "real" grids with real weather data, using realistic cost projections for 2030, new nuclear is left at 0%. The LCoE advantages of renewables are so great that the cost of dealing with the intermittency, even to 100% renewables, is less than the cost of using nuclear instead.

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