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Comment by 1shooner | Hacker News Reader

It's one thing for power use to hit record highs - I would expect increase to be more or less constant with economic development and/or population growth. The sources from this article state that the mid-continent ISO is actually expecting to _lose_ 3,200MW capacity 'as result of retirements, and the decreased accredited capacity of new resources.'

https://cdn.misoenergy.org/2022%20PRA%20Results624053.pdf

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I would hope that the expansion of renewables would offset the loss of fossil fuel based sources due to retirement. That would be the ideal scenario.

They are not directly interchangeable. Fossil fuels work at night and when it's not windy out.

We use vastly less power at night especially when you remove people specifically using power at night do to lower costs. So for now that’s a non issue.

I should have said "when not sunny", not "at night". Point being - without vastly improved and expanded energy storage, you cannot have a reliable grid powered by renewables. But with nuclear, you can ditch fossil fuels.

Nuclear becomes exponentially more expensive the more you add to the grid and thus the lower it’s capacity factor becomes. France was exporting a lot of nuclear power and importing non nuclear and still fell down to 70% cf when the US was at 90%. One way of looking at that is a .9/.7 - 1 = 30% increase in cost per kWh overall. However compared to 90% for 35% the next 35% cost 60% more per kWh. And aiming for 90% would be even more expensive.

If we want a zero carbon grid nuclear simply isn’t viable on it’s own, it needs massive energy storage or peaking power just like wind and solar.

Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of nuclear base capacity (humming along at ~constant output) and renewable for peaks. Still need vastly more and better storage for that, but not as much as exclusively renewable.

Also, not being in this field, I may have misunderstood you or confused the terminology.

Yeah, but if your extra load is coming from climate change that makes the planet more windy and is at its worst when the sun is out then it matches up nicely with the extra demand.

Yeah, it's nuts that power companies either didn't notice their capacity was decreasing, or they didn't care. Might be time for them to lose their public utility status, and have that passed to someone who can add.

The PDFs below are a little dry, but they have noticed and cared since at least their 2018 forecast. As for the remedy, what exactly does it mean to lose public utility status?

[1] https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20...

[2] https://www.nerc.com/pa/RAPA/ra/Reliability%20Assessments%20...

[3] https://cdn.misoenergy.org//Aligning%20Resource%20Availabili...

They're a state-sponsored monopoly. If they're not competent to maintain enough capacity for the easily-projected demand, go find someone who can and make them the new state-sponsored monopoly.

It'd be ugly, but if no one loses their job nothing will change.

We already have carrots and sticks to ensure reliability. That's what regulation is for. Changing those is a lot easier than changing companies.

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