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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).

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If anything's good about renewables is that they can be quite small scaled. I think it's cool that I can be an energy producer just with my roof, plus decentralized generation = better security.

There is plenty more good about renewables. Being the cheapest source of power that has ever existed is good, too.

Speed of deployment + complexity (bugger all) + safety of deployment (passive product v product that can root entire ecosystems) + ongoing maintenance means solar>nuclear any day.

Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.

That depends on which renewable you're talking about.

Wind and solar both. Which of those is cheaper varies with circumstance.

Yes, wind and PV solar... but there are many other types of renewables. The rest are still more expensive than natural gas currently.

Is there any nuclear facility that's privately owned that didn't get massive subsidies/loan guarantees from a government?

At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.

Define externalities. Is a balanced grid part of the externalities, ie the work needed to make sure that supply can always match that of demand?

The grid can be balanced by the application of market forces. (If there's an electrical shortage, prices go up. If there's a surplus, prices go down. The incentives are all there to encourage producers to produce power during shortages.)

I was thinking more about pollution or nuclear waste management. A coal plant that just buys coal at market prices and sells electricity at market prices isn't paying for externalities unless they're taxed on CO2 and particulate emissions.

You could balance it that way but people don't like it when there is a power out, nor do they like when a electrical shortage causes prices to rice 10-20x that of normal prices. At that point people will vote on politicians that will fix the problem using tax money to bail out the situation, similar to how people expect government to fix the problem when banks crashes.

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