dalyons

the wealthy few now have drone armies and control of the social and information sphere. i am not optimistic.

a regular business is not a startup though. A startup implies a much higher ceiling on growth and profit. Worth investing in on a high risk, high multiple of return manner. An SME sized business is not that.

wait what. rectifiers will just seamlessly work on DC? TIL thats wild

If you know the energy system and are not operating off out of date thinking, it absolutely does not. Wind and solar shifted with batteries is munching its way through this night time supply window . On a timeframe of 20 years this obsolete “baseload supply” economic niche will absolutely no longer exist.

Nukes are ruinously expensive all over the world. This isn’t a US thing, or a “darn regulations slowing us down” thing. Nukes are just too expensive, regardless of regulatory regime.

Because they very transparently are personally getting paid by fossil interests. It’s a naked grift, just like everything else this administration does.

yup. not just the minimum - skilled labor costs are very high too.

california adopted part of australia's regulatory framework - required all counties to adopt an instant online permitting for solar, through a unified portal (SB 379). Didnt seem to help costs much.

There's probably more to the regulatory problem than just the permits i guess.

yeah, ive looked into DIY. As you say, even with tarrifs its pretty cheap to buy the panels and inverters. Which makes the installed cost even sillier, > $15k markup for a 2 day job.

i did get a quote with them. Its still 3 times (!) the price my parents paid in australia. not exactly apples to apples, but whats going on?

Sadly nuclear also stays unmatched in cost. It was already way too expensive, and now it has even worse economics on modern grids full of cheap variable sources. It is terribly uncompetitive and that’s why you see roughly none getting built anymore

If that were the only reason, you’d surely be able to find someone who undercut the bloated financed costs and do a straightforward labor and materials install. But no such cheaper options exist

Labor costs even more in Australia, yet total systems are installed for about 1/3rd - 1/4th the cost of the US. It’s not labor.

as a dev that presumably cares about the product i work on, I would look at every other car that somehow manages not to do this obnoxious useless thing, and argue till i'm blue in the face with my compliance folk that its a stupid ask. I might not win, but id sure try.

Im guessing its the opposite - the devs involved in this were probably outsourced (famously legacy car manufacturers do this, its all cobbled together external chunks), and didnt give a shit at all. Closed the jira task for compliance and moved on without a second thought. This is why Subaru and other legacy car companies make such atrocious UX.

even worse! why bother with it at all. really "fuck you thats why" levels of UX design.

do you enjoying having to accept the popup disclaimer literally every single time you start the car? i sure do, love it, what a UX

> It isn't necessarily a kWh of equivalent economic value, emissions reduction or contribution to grid reliability.

A produced accepted kWh is absolutely equivalent in terms of emissions reduction. It is one to one, over an annual timeframe. One renewable kWh in, one fossil out. This is a record of power actually supplied, not instantaneous capacity or whatever. KW is instantaneous, provided kWh is historical.

I think you’re just making different points about economic value or grid reliability. You’re probably right about those things! You are concerned about the grid integration and reliability of solar, which is fair. And those issues may impact the ability of solar to get higher grid kWh contributions than today.

but these points don’t take away from the facts in the article - that solar produced and this displaced more emissions than nuclear in the last year.

Sure, but it takes 10 years to build a new nuke plant, and 30 years to make any money on it. whole night batteries will take less than 40 years :)

It’s already happened. We barely need rare earths for current gen (at production scale) batteries and panels

Effectively nothing at the scale of their grid

No, it doesn’t.

Every kWh hour of solar entering the grid is a kWh of fossil generation that is no longer produced. Batteries just move existing power around. This is not very complicated, I’m not sure why the semantic crusade?

The article is about recorded actual supply contributions over a year, actual kWh, regardless of instantaneous capacity at various times.

Every kWh of produced and accepted(not curtailed) solar power is directly responsible for reducing our emissions

We don’t really have to give these things up now though, renewable energy and EVs can guve us all this for no emissions. We for the first time ever, have the technology.

We just aren’t applying it fast enough for terrible & lazy reasons.

A kWh is a kWh is a kWh in terms of removing a kWh of fossil emissions off the annual totals. Which is the story here.

Solar is now displacing more kWh of fossil emissions per year than nukes, despite whatever complaints you may have.

> It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.

This is an oft repeated point by pro nuclear folk, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.

They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.

A kWh is a kWh. A kWh of either solar or nuke means a kWh of coal or gas was not burnt. Seems like apples to apples to me.

The massive battery buildout in places like California and Australia are seriously eating into these night time windows already, and we’ve really just gotten started. California will exit 26 with roughly ~20% fossil, and still dropping fast every year as batteries move deeper into the night. The opportunity for nuke to sell at higher prices during the night is being eaten fast. Batteries filled with cheap excess daytime solar are cheaper than nukes already, and can be deployed instantly. The niche won’t exist soon, which is why noones building nukes.

(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)

yeah the math doesnt work. On top of the running costs you mentioned, You are trying to pay back the ridiculous capex over a reasonable timeframe (say 30 years). Nukes already have trouble doing that at 100% high power price sales. Saying "oh they can keep selling power but at a fraction of price" is technically true but fatal to the economics of nukes.

It’s not very hard to make solar panels. Almost any country could spin up a plant if they had to. Or buy from a diverse set of other countries.

This oft quoted idea that nukes are only expensive because of incompetent regulations, and if they just got out of poor nuclear a way it would be affordable, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

There are a lot of different regulatory regimes all over the world and nukes are expensive in all of them. The only way to make them cheapish is if the state builds , secures and insures them (eg china) , but that’s just hiding the costs in govt subsidies . And even then chinas % share of nukes continues to decline because they cost more than anything else.

Building expensive power sources (nuclear) is inevitably going to result in raised electrical rates for the working class.