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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Good thing everybody lives in Arizona and Sahara, and nobody lives in Sweden, Canada, or even in Seattle! /s

Sadly, sun is not universally abundant.

The Netherlands is about as sunny as Seattle, and it's possible to break even after a few years with a decent-sized solar array on your roof.

Jeesh, how expensive is power there? It would take me almost 15 years to get my money back on a solar/battery combo that is big enough to generally supply my electricity needs if I was at 100%.

Your payback would be a lot faster without a battery I think. At least that is the case where I live (US/East).

Currently paying around €90 for ~250KWh per month. That is about 4 times what I used to pay in South Africa 5 years ago.

In Belgium we're at €0,50/kwh We're ordering 36 panels and 10kw battery tomorrow.

The only sad thing is that we can't utlize the battery when we lose netpower. Huawei has an addition, but it only gives an outlet on the battery. I wanted inline, like my ups.

But HVDC lines are. The longest one in operation today is ~2200 km.

I wonder how their upkeep and bulging expense (especially across difficult terrain) compares to that of the small nuclear power plant described here. We could determine the distance when the HVDC line still makes more sense.

For true "wilderness" your total addressable market is like a million people. Sweden and Norway have abundant hydro power so they actually export power from north to south. So reduce that to tens of thousands.

For southern scandinavia it is already connected through HVDC to Central Europe and more are being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Circle

Nobody knows what this reactor is going to cost yet, the first one has not been completed ..

True, but consider that most of southern Asia, Oceania, Africa and central America the sun is abundant. That covers a lot of people.

Now we just need a bunch of these reactors to power the desalination plants to support all the folks living in the desert.

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