Hacker News Reader

Comment by myrmidon | Hacker News Reader

To be fair: grid buildout is quite expensive.

A comparison: the giant Dogger Bank offshore wind farm project (multi-GW) cost somewhere in the $10bn range. On the other hand, Germany calculates with >$100bn for grid buildout within the next decade (https://www.netzentwicklungsplan.de/sites/default/files/2023...).

Also, having customers that rely on your grid but buy very little of your power is simply unappealing for operators, so I would assume that their pricing tries to disincentivise as much as possible (=> "they gonna overcharge you for the grid connection").

View on HN

The not-so-hidden costs of collecting extremely diffuse wind / solar is the elephant in the room 10x bill for the supporting grid infrastructure.

Nuclear advocates, like myself, claim drop in replacement nuclear power reactors at existing coal / gas sites would largely obviate this.

Even adding new nuclear power reactors at greenfield sites would constitute a significantly reduced grid build cost, as the power is highly concentrated.

And nuclear is so say that nuclear power reactors employees are routine exposed to less radiation at work than they are at home in their kitchen with granite bench tops.

YIMBY.

I can see that argument applying to wind, but for solar its the opposite because that is really easy to get closer to consumers than a conventional plant ever could be (i.e. on the rooftop).

At this point, I don't believe in a nuclear renaissance, because it seems to me that nuclear power got left behind too far; catching up in cost metrics is already hard enough, but matching growth rates (in "installed TWh/a" of wind/solar) seems virtually impossible by now. The only remaining holdouts (China, US, France, ...) are basically doing it as a hedge and/or to keep/obtain related engineering capabilities (and at the very least an easy path toward weapon-grade material).

It is clear to me that no one "actually believes" in nuclear power (by stating clearly: we are solve gonna current and future energy problems by mainly relying on freshly built nuclear power), so I can only see its relevance dwindling (I'd argue that China comes closest, but even they are much more in the hedging/securing capabilities category than anything else).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com