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Comment by zbrozek | Hacker News Reader

That's sort of my unsaid point - we've made it politically infeasible to build much of anything in the United States. You can see it in everything from a local planning meeting when someone tries to build a fence or house all the way up to transmission lines and power plants. The process itself kills a huge amount of progress by making it a bad use of lifespan to pursue it.

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Arguably, that is a feature.

I’m not against coal or nuclear, However, if progress, as it is defined here, includes disregarding the opinion of the minority or does not respect the rules then maybe it is not real progress. Progress must include taking into account the constraints of the rules we have set in place.

We are basically making progress, albeit slowly, in trying to solve the issue in a way that is consistent with law and precedent. This includes a lot of debate and rejection, but over a long enough period of time it can be solved.

> I’m not against coal or nuclear

It's $CURRENT_YEAR, we can safely be against coal.

To fight climate change, the US needs renewable energy, and fast. Ironically, we already have it, the US has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1.16 TW of generation capacity in total [2]. We could nearly double our generation capacity today if we could just hook it up.

Unfortunately it takes 10 years to build new transmission lines in the US [3]. Changes are going to need to be made to the process, which may include giving more responsibility and agency to FERC to oversee the review process.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[3] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americ...

Not all of that capacity in the interconnection queues are ready to flip the switch though, correct? Requests can be pre-construction, construction, built/non-operating, and operating [1]

[1] https://www.enverus.com/blog/the-interconnection-queue-an-in...

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