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Comment by tokioyoyo | Hacker News Reader

You know, this gets brought up every time, and I scratch my head as China and some other countries are just mass implementing any possible energy source. There's no one solution to the problem that will keep being the best solution. You just build, maintain, then build more and more and more and more and more to generate more energy. We shouldn't be debating "what is the most efficient" and only build that, because with that attitude, we just end up building nothing.

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I really cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience. I guess because it has something for someone of any political stripe to dislike (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables and storage - take your pick!) but in a few years when we’re all paying twice the electrical rates we’re paying today, we will probably wish we hadn’t been so doctrinaire.

> cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience

Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)

All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.

(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)

Everyone wants to be "right", and prove others "wrong". It feels like building things have gotten very expensive, and margins are not that high, so it would only pay for itself in decades. Everyone is scared for committing to those numbers, and just keep running in circles until some magical thing is invented. Crazy stuff.

Yeah, it is dumb to require battery storage for new solar. We can use gas peaker plants like we always have. China is using coal peaker plants.

We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.

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