Base generation was a cost optimization. Planners noticed that load never dropped below a specific level, and that cheapest power was from a plant designed to run 100% of the time rather than one designed to turn on and off frequently. So they could reduce cost by building a mix of base and peaker generation plants.
In 2025, that's no longer the case. The cheapest power is solar & wind, which produces power intermittently. And the next cheapest power is dispatchable.
To take advantage of this cheap intermittent power, we need a way to provide power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. Which is provided by storage and/or peaker plants.
That's what we need. If added non-dispatchable power to that mix than we're displacing cheap solar/wind with more expensive mix, and still not eliminating the need for further storage/peaker plants.
If non-dispatchable power is significantly cheaper than storage and/or peaker power than it's useful in a modern grid. That's not the case in 2025. The next cheapest power is natural gas, and it's dispatchable. If you restrict to clean options, storage & geographical diversity is cheaper than other options. Batteries for short term storage and pumped hydro for long term storage.
Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working.
Unlike a fossil plant when the supply of fuel is disrupted.
They will, albeit slowly.
Ukraine is an excellent example of why centralizing your grid energy source is a bad plan... but not just for war situations. If you have an agile, adaptable modular grid you can recover for any form of disaster (natural or man made) very quickly and cheaply.
I really feel this is an under valued aspect of electrification and greening of the power sources we use.
With fossil power plants, the bigger plants were more efficient. This lead to centralization. We now find ourselves in a situation where you can end up with a lot of small/local generation.
What happened in Ukraine can probably happen in almost every developed country today as this was all built/planned in a different time.
But yes, grid following alone does not provided the required stability - synthetic inertia etc needed
It's a sub 15 minute actual grid engineering for lay public explainer video (I know, I'm not a video fan either)
A better duller title might be: How Australia's Grid is being adapted to Solar Boom
00:00 Introduction
01:23 The Problem with Too Much Solar
03:29 Batteries Change the Economics
05:40 What the Grid Actually Needs
07:04 A Cautionary Tale – The 2025 Iberian Blackout
08:21 Australia’s Secret Weapon – Experience with Weak Grids
10:08 The Genius Technical Fix – Grid-Forming Inverters
12:25 The Perfect Partner - Batteries
12:58 From Mechanical to Software-Defined Stability
13:42 Conclusion – Fixing the Grid Before It Breaks
Like nuclear, I believe geothermal has high capital cost and low running costs, suggesting that it isn't usefully dispatchable.
But that's too simplistic. A big limitation of geothermal is that rock has poor thermal conductivity. So once you remove heat it takes a while for it to warm up again. If you're running it 100% then you need a large area to compensate. OTOH, if you're running it at a lower duty cycle you likely need less area.
So if you know the duty cycle in advance, then you can likely significantly reduce costs. Yay!
But that also means that you likely can't run a plant built for low duty cycles continuously for 2 weeks during a dankelflaute. It's likely great for smoothing out daily cycles, but not as good for smoothing out annual cycles. That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
Higher capital costs, but not nuclear high capital costs.
> That means it's competing against batteries, which are also great for smoothing out daily cycles, and are very inexpensive.
It likely would supplement batteries rather than compete against them. A battery buffer would allow a geothermal plant to slowly rise to load and fall as that load goes away.
A very large battery can store 200MWh worth of energy. The largest geothermal plant produces 1.5GW. (A lot of the large plants look like they are in the range of 100->200MW). Presumably those plants can run for more than a few hours which ultimately decreases the amount of batteries needed to smooth out the demand curve.
https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
Also, France can’t build new nuclear for cheap/fast anymore either. They have a program for new reactors, even if they go ahead the first one won’t come online till 2038 by the earliest. We can’t wait that long.
Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.
We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now.
Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.
As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.
You are using long-term in an extremely vague way.
Pumped hydro is not a solution for seasonal storage or yearly storage. Seasonal variation can be a problem in higher latitudes.
For example we have a serious problem in New Zealand where our existing "green" hydro lakes are sometimes low and our economy is affected: creating national power crises during dry years. We use coal-burning Huntley and peakers to somewhat cover occasional low hydro generation.
Unfortunately our existing generators also have regulatory capture, and they prevent generating competition (e.g. new solar farms) through rather dirty tactics (according to the insider I spoke with).
Apparently much of our hydro generation is equivalent to “run-of-river” which requires the river to flow. Although the lakes themselves are large, they don't have enough capacity to cover a dry year.
NZ had planned a pumped hydro, but it was expensive: planned cost of 16 billion compared against total NZ export income of ~100 billion. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/503816/govt-confirms-it-... So completely uneconomic risk (plus other problems like NIMBY).
It was shocking to me to drive by many of the California lakes/reservoirs that were overfull in the spring of 2019 only to hear that they were basically running dry two years later, and realize that as substantial a water storage system as they are, they're not multi-year scale against the required water supply.
What will likely happen is that people will decide that "99% is good enough", and use fossil generators to cover dankelflautes,
We know that in North America, for example, significant energy use comes from transportation and heating requirements, and that at this time, very little transportation is powered by renewables, and not a whole lot of heat either (though both are growing).
On the other hand, the entire current residential electrical demand of the city of Santa Fe (about 82k people) can be met with a single relatively small PV+BESS plant (and might just be if it manages to get built).
A lot of mountainous places are dry, and a lot of wet places are flat.
Of the remaining places, some are so unique that they cannot be destroyed by industrial construction (National Parks etc.)
For example, the main ridge of Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) on the Polish-Czech border has a lot of wind and rain and deep valleys, but it is the only place south of Scandinavia with a Scandinavia-like tundra and many endemites surviving from the last Ice Age. Any attempt to construct pumped hydro there would result in a national uproar on both sides of the border.
You can serve a small town of 500 or so people (plus tourists) with a mini systems for ~ $8 million (AU)
But off river? The possibilities are vast.
This "there is no base load" idea is a ridiculous myth trivially disproven: every grid on the planet has continuous demands on it and they're quite significant (5 GW is about 50% the day time peaks).
It doesn't matter what the cost is, because later this evening or tomorrow morning I can guarantee you the same thing: my state will need at least 5GW of power to literally keep the lights on.
I’m sorry, but wind and solar may be cheap, but they don’t provide cheap electricity 24/7.
When solar and wind produce at near-zero marginal cost, running inflexible baseload beside them just forces cheaper generation to switch off, driving up system costs.
What the grid needs is dispatchable capacity - batteries, hydro, gas peakers (if we must) and demand shifting - that can plug the gaps when cheaper forms of generation cannot.
Just compare Germany to France.
Unless you have a time machine that you can use to get every country to build state subsided nuclear 50 years ago.
What does it look like if you actively encourage people to use power when it is cheapest to produce now?
I guess we'll find out when 3 hours of free electricity at noon becomes a standard offer next year.
Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production?
It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a smaller part of total energy usage than most people imagine.
But any serious discussion of renewable energy should be careful not to make this very significant error.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory publishes a great diagram of US energy use: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
Great chart, by the way.
Which (not sure if you did this intentionally or accidentally) brings up an interesting point on the parent comment and the LLNL sankey:
> It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
That "global energy consumption" figure includes a lot of Rejected Energy going out tailpipes and smoke stacks turning burnables into electricity. A secret bonus of wind and solar is if you produce electricity without burning things, you actually decrease the energy demand! If you're not losing 70% of your energy consumption to the Rejected category, you suddenly need a lot less total energy.
The 1 megajoule of useful electricity is also ultimately dissipated as low grade heat, but it can do work first (like generating light, or pumping water uphill).
When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my engine. This energy (heat) doesn’t provide any benefit to anyone and just leaks out into the atmosphere (which we’ve already established is trying to kill me).
That’s rejected energy. Or when it’s below -40, rejected motherfucking energy. :)
Sounds like a very unique experience :)
So even in a residential context, electricity is only about 1/4 of the demand. Across the whole country it's less than 300TWh out of 1500TWh, under 20%.
That excludes "imported energy" though, as in goods which used energy to make but were then imported.
It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.
Focusing on fusion .. I think that's a legacy of 60s SF, when the fission revolution was still promising "energy too cheap to meter".
In a world where anyone could just YOLO any reactor into production with minimal red tape, consequences be damned, fission energy would actually be extremely cheap. Hence the optimism around fusion. The promise of fusion is an actualization of last century's idealistic conception of fission. It can be a silver bullet for all intents and purposes, at least once it's established with a mature supply chain.
At worst, nuclear waste contaminates a discrete section of the Earth. Climate change affects literally everywhere. The correct answer would have been to aggressively roll out fission power 40-50 years ago and then pursue renewables. You can argue that other solutions would make fission power obsolete, but we would have been in a much better spot if it'd at least been a stepping stone off fossil fuels. Instead, we have 40-50 years of shrieking and FUD from environmentalists over an issue that can be kept under control with proper regulation. The US Navy has operated reactors for over 60 years without incident, proving it can be done with proper oversight.
TL;DR nuclear has issues, but I'd take it over coal every day and twice on Sundays, at least until something better can scale.
Denser urban living is pretty energy efficient, and forcing lengthy commutes on people because of NIMBYism is a huge waste.
Similarly, better to have people be able to have reasonably energy-efficient houses than demanding they all live in apartments.
Reversing the downzoning of the 70s - 00s is about allowing construction in cities again.
The only ones demanding anything are those who show up to try and stop apartments.
(Source needed. This probably depends on a lot of variables in play.)
Plenty of people in dense urban areas are happy with living in an apartment and, where I live, buying a condo in the city is at least as frequent as buying a house 20 km away from it for the same price.
Living in suburbia has its downsides - long commute, very limited entertainment and cultural possibilities, very limited choice in schools. Not everyone loves cutting the lawn etc. either, I surely don't. If any of your family members has any disease that could flare up, ambulance response time tends to grow worse with the growing distance.
Of course, a lot depends on factors such as "is the transport authority willing to make public transport actually safe and nice". That requires keeping raving drugged lunatics out of it, plus paying enough money for it. AFAIK in the US, Republicans have an ideological problem with the "paying money for it" part and the Democrats have an ideological problem with the "suppressing antisocial behavior in it" part.
Chernobyl took out Welsh farming for years, and in a few places decades, because it spread a thin layer of bioaccumulative poison over the whole of Europe.
Know what else spreads a thin layer of poison over the whole of the world? Coal power.
I wasn't really commenting on the merits of 20th century environmentalist movements, more raising the general point that fission power has inherent costs which weren't reflected by narrow 1950s analyses of how much energy was extractable from U-235. Operation of a fission plant requires much more capex and opex than it would if we didn't care about cleanliness (waste management), security (fissile material theft prevention), or safety (meltdown prevention).
Fusion power is more complex to invent and practically depends on modern technologies that didn't exist 50 years ago, but once the first demonstration plants are operational, marginal costs to deploy and operate more should be much lower and ultimately become very low at scale.
That's basically it. Most geothermal plants today are in locations where there are hot rocks, maybe geysers, close to the surface. "Deep geothermal" gets talked about, because temperatures high enough for steam are available almost everywhere if you can drill 3,000 meters down. There are very few wells in the world that deep, not counting horizontal drilling runs.
The economics are iffy. You drill one of the most expensive wells ever drilled, and you get a medium-pressure steam line. Average output is tens of megawatts.[1]
[1] https://pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/db/GeoConf/papers/SGW/2020/A...
I went to high school with two guys who are working on geothermal as a means to remediate orphan wells. I’m biased in their favour, but the numbers make a lot of sense.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c16/page_96.shtml
The problems are that rock isn't a good conductor of heat, so once you've cooled a bit down, you have to wait for it to warm up. Warming only happens very slowly at the rate of < 50mW / m² which limits the amount of power you can get out.
The worst earthquake that was induced that way was 3.5, but given that one of the quakes happened in an area that had a catastrophic earthquake in the Middle Ages, some caution might be warranted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1356_Basel_earthquake
If economically viable fusion was "cracked" what would the nature of it's unreliability even be?
The reactor breaks because it's a large device operated at high stresses (power/area, neutron loading). There are many components and joints that can fail.
BTW, this means fusion will be expensive, because getting all those components to be reliable right off the bat becomes expensive. No tiny cracks in the welds means expensive quality control.
Ground-source heat pumps extract about 1000 times more power from ground loops, where does the difference come from?
> There aren’t gates of Hell just anywhere. A kilometre below ground in Kamchatka is considerably hotter than a kilometre below ground in Kansas. There is also readily accessible geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty per cent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty per cent), and the Philippines (about fifteen per cent)—all volcanic areas along tectonic rifts. But in less Hadean landscapes the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have curtailed development.
I like how David Hamel put it: We live in this thin sliver on the surface of the planet where it is reasonably peaceful. This is the tranquility! It's a good thing! If you go up or down by a mere few miles there is so much energy it kills you.
We have to see if and when any of them goes into production, but the technology seems very interesting
Another way they've utilised geothermal energy is with large, sophisticated greenhouses which allow growing of many produce they would otherwise import. I only had the opportunity for a brief visit but a lot of it looked hydroponic with really interesting monitoring and control technology. (Plus the biggest bees this Antipodean has ever seen! These suckers were so big they didn't buzz, they rang the doorbell.)
Whoever was there before had left the shower running. We were the only people there, and hadn't seen anyone pass us on the (dead end) road, so it must have been on for quite a while.
Only when I went to for my pre-soak shower did I realize that it didn't actually have any kind of user-accessible way to turn it off.
1. The host at our apartment encouraged us to leave the windows cracked and the heat on for good air circulation.
2. The hot water (at the taps) has a sulfer smell, because it's (also) piped geothermal water. My host explained they also had a water heater upstairs in their home because they preferred "heated cold water" over "hot water", which is a funny distinction to those of us who do not have the latter.
"Geothermal energy" involves drilling down to hot rock to tap intense heat to run a turbine that produces electricity.
Seriously this would be such a dream!
Turns out that the best battery is literally 10 feet away* - and you don't even need to charge it!
*if you want to make steam its a few thousand, but for heating and cooling its literally just 10 feet!
However, I'm skeptical that geothermal energy can be economically competitive with solar without major innovations in heat engines, no matter how abundant the energy is and how easily you can get that energy to the surface.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... outlines the estimated costs (five years ago) of a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical coal power plant without carbon capture; the total capital cost estimate comes out to US$2.4 billion, which is US$3.70 per peak watt. Of that, I think the only line item that wouldn't be the same in a 650MW peak ultra-supercritical geothermal plant is "Mechanical – Boiler Plant", which is US$905 million, leaving US$1.5 billion, US$2.30 per peak watt. (I'm not even sure you could eliminate even all of that US$905 million in a geothermal plant; some of it might be plumbing you'd also need to pass heat from your downhole heat exchange fluid with the ultra-pure deionized water you use to drive the delicate steam turbine. But let's suppose you could.) Of that US$1.5 billion, US$155.2 million is "Mechanical – Turbine Plant", so the turbine alone costs 24¢/Wp.
But SEIA last year published https://www.seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight.... They have a set of cost breakdowns for “turnkey installed price” for power plants, coming in at 98¢ per watt for “utility-scale fixed-tilt”, slightly higher than the previous year and almost half due to about 40¢ for the PV module itself. Residential is at 325¢, with about 20¢ for the PV module. That's even in the US, where the EIA report's estimates were sited, despite the US's prohibitive import tariffs on solar panels from China, which makes most of the world's solar panels.
Mainstream PV modules are now 12.3¢ per peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... (except in the US), which would drop SEIA's cost estimates from 98¢/Wp to 70¢/Wp, even in the absence of any other cost optimizations in solar farm design.
Now, utility-scale fixed-tilt solar farms typically have a capacity factor of around 20%, depending on latitude, because the sun is below the horizon half the time and somewhat slanted and/or clouded most of the rest of the time, so 70¢/Wp is really about US$3.50 per watt, not counting the batteries. But geothermal typically only has a capacity factor of around 74% in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto... so US$2.30/Wp is really US$3.10 per watt.
That leaves you 30¢/Wp (74% × ($3.50 - $3.10)) for geothermal exploration and drilling. And if you can reduce the 82% of the solar 70¢/Wp represented by the non-PV-module costs by a little bit, or if you're equatorial enough that your PV capacity factor is 23% or above, that's going to zero or negative. I think the average PV capacity factor in California is something like 29%, though that isn't fixed-tilt and therefore has slightly higher costs.
Also note that the PVXchange page I linked above lists "low-cost" solar panels as having fallen to €0.050/Wp this month, a new historic low, which is 5.9¢/Wp. That's a 50% price decline from two years ago.
Fundamentally I think it's just going to be very hard for 24¢/Wp steam engines to compete against 5.9¢/Wp solar panels. The steam engines have the additional disadvantage that, to get the price even that low, you need enormous degrees of centralization—on the order of a few thousand power plants for the whole population of the US. This requires long-distance electrical transmission lines as well as local distribution lines, which are both substantial costs of their own as well as wasting a double-digit percentage of the energy. Local electrical generation eliminates those costs; you can charge your cellphone or your angle-grinder battery directly from a 5.9¢/Wp solar panel with no more electronics than a couple of protection diodes, not requiring the rest of the 70¢/Wp in the utility-scale solar plant.
This cost analysis is completely indifferent to where the heat to boil the water comes from, so it applies equally well to nuclear power, except for Helion.
The exceptions would be in places where geothermal energy is available and solar energy is either unavailable or very marginal: the surface of Venus, the ocean floor, Antarctica, Svalbard, etc.
Does anyone have a trustworthy estimate of the costs of drilling? Even drilling into cold rocks (for oil) would be a good start, even if hot rocks are more expensive to drill into. The article says that Fervo has raised US$800 million in capital and drilled three appraisal and demonstration wells with it so far, which gives us a ballpark of US$200 million per well. This does not offer much hope that drilling costs will be a minor fraction of the costs of a geothermal plant.
The article unfortunately doesn't enter into this analysis at all.
I am somewhat skeptical of this figure:
> Geothermal energy production in the U.S. at that time [i.e., 02005] was around three or four thousand megawatts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit... says that geothermal energy production in the US in 02022 was 16.09 billion kWh per year, which is 1825 megawatts. Does that mean that geothermal energy production fell by about half between 02005 and 02022? More likely Rivka Galchen got confused.
It's unfortunate that the article also confuses ground-source heat pumps (thermal energy storage) with geothermal energy sources. It's a common confusion, and it makes conversations about geothermal energy unnecessarily difficult.
Geothermal is a great fit for dispatchable power to replace coal and fossil gas today (where able); batteries are almost cheaper than the cost to ship them, but geothermal would also help solve for seasonal deltas in demand vs supply ("diurnal storage").
https://reneweconomy.com.au/it-took-68-years-for-the-world-t...
https://ember-energy.org/data/2030-global-renewable-target-t...
I also love geothermal for district heating in latitudes that call for it; flooded legacy mines appear to be a potential solution for that use case.
Flooded UK coalmines could provide low-carbon cheap heat 'for generations' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45860049 - November 2025
We deploy solar PV capacity, this doesn't mean we actually get that much power from the deployments. Nuclear fission provides reliable, baseload power, and doesn't require huge battery arrays to compensate for the sun setting or winds calming.
(and to stay on topic for this thread, geothermal is a component of this when geothermal potential exists, cost is competitive, and dispatachability is a requirement to push out fossil generation in concert with renewables, hydro, legacy nuclear, battery storage discharge, and demand response)
https://www.google.com/search?q=baseload+is+a+myth
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/11/15/coal-killing-sodium-ion...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/q3-global-power-rep...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44513185 (lfp battery storage cost citation in 2025)
Unsophisticated investors like the Chinese government? 'Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.'
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
Your citation comes from an organization with pro nuclear bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Institute
Can China Break Nuclear Power’s Cost Curse—and What Can the US Learn? - https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/can-china-break-nuclear-... - September 17th, 2025
China built more solar power in the last 8 months than all the nuclear power built in the entire world in the entire history of human civilisation. And even if you adjust for utilisation rate to compare against nuclear utilisation China built more solar power generated per hour than all the nuclear power currently in operation generate in an hour - and did so in 12-18 months - https://bsky.app/profile/climatenews.bsky.social/post/3lggqu... - January 23, 2025
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week - https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa... - July 15th, 2024
Nuclear Continues To Lag Far Behind Renewables In China Deployments - https://cleantechnica.com/2024/01/12/nuclear-continues-to-la... - January 12th, 2024
Nuclear Energy & Free Market Capitalism Aren’t Compatible - https://cleantechnica.com/2023/11/06/nuclear-energy-free-mar... - November 6th, 2023
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1910780131318374524 | https://archive.today/iu9jx (China demographics citation)
Even if the Western world lags behind due to labour regulations, the cost still pays off in the long run due to overall less complex infrastructure and stable, AC baseload power. You are thinking only about the cost of building. What about the cost of maintaining all that infrastructure? Huge solar and wind farms spread out over vast areas, essentially destroying the local ecology? NPPs have a relatively tiny footprint.
Every cited source has a bias. You think 'Clean Technica' is unbiased? Come on.
Plus, Germany invested 500 billion Euros in its energy transition and is STILL heavily dependent on coal.
Not really. Solar has gone down in price almost 500X since 1975.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
Wind has gone down significantly too.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/54526.pdf
Meanwhile, the graph for nuclear waste disposal is going rapidly in the opposite direction.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-6587/us-spent-fuel-liabilit...
France had to nationalize EDF because they could not afford the costs associated with their nuclear fleet. The 70s are 50 years in the past, and are not what the future will look like.
This is also why Spain plans to retire its remaining nuclear generators, and go all in on renewables.
EDF fleet upkeep will cost over 100 billion euros by 2035, court of auditors says - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/edf-fleet-upkeep-wil... - November 17th, 2025
French utility EDF lifts cost estimate for new reactors to 67 billion euros - Les Echos - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-utility-edf-l... - March 4th, 2024
Explainer-Why a French plan to take full control of EDF is no cure-all - https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/07/07/edf-nationalistion - July 7th, 2022
Spain’s Nuclear Shutdown Set to Test Renewables Success Story - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/spain-s-n... | https://archive.today/4fB7K - April 11th, 2025 (“Spain is a postcard, a glimpse into the future where you’re not going to need baseload generators from 8am to 5pm” with solar and wind providing all of the grid’s needs during that time, said Kesavarthiniy Savarimuthu, a European power markets analyst with BloombergNEF. Still, she said, there is a reasonable chance this goal may take longer than expected and “extending the life of the nuclear fleet can prove as an insurance for these delays.”) (My note: As of this comment, Spain has 7.12GW of nuclear generation capacity per ree.es, and assuming ~1GW/month deployment rate seen in Germany, could replace this capacity with solar and batteries in ~28-36 months; per Electricity Maps, only 17.25% of Spain's electrical generation over the last twelve months has been sourced from this nuclear)
Tangentially, Europe has enough wind potential to power the world, for scale.
Go and throw all your money into renewables stocks and ETFs if you’re so convinced.
I bet you’re not doing that because you realize that the industry isn’t doing well and it’s nuclear power nowadays where all the money goes.
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-renewabl...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-...
Wind and solar do not replace conventional power plants and never will.
Heck, Germany tried that on the small island of Pellworm and failed and yet some people think this will work out for the whole country.
It does not work.
Nuclear is actually the leader in waste management. No other energy source has as complete a story. Eg what happens to solar panels when they EOL in 25 years? They go into landfills and leach toxic chemicals into the ground. These chemicals, like lead and cadmium are toxic forever. They have no 'half-life' in which their toxicity reduces.
Conversely, ~95,000 metric tons of nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions, as of this comment, and there is no plan for long term storage or recycling. Nuclear generation is experiencing a negative learning curve; we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
(solar PV panels have a 25-30 year service life, at which point they will still produce power at ~80-85% initial rating, batteries have a 15-20 year service life, with sodium ion chemistries estimated to have up to 50 year service life assuming once daily cycling)
https://www.epa.gov/hw/solar-panel-recycling
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/beyond-recycling-...
https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/09/nuclear-power-energy-radioac...
https://www.gao.gov/nuclear-waste-disposal
https://decarbonization.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-all...
(nuclear power accounts for about 10% of electricity generation globally, as of this comment)
That's very clever wording. If someone glances at this sentence they might interpret it to mean that almost all solar panels are recycled. But your own citation tells a different story: https://e360.yale.edu/features/solar-energy-panels-recycling
> Today, roughly 90 percent of panels in the U.S. that have lost their efficiency due to age, or that are defective, end up in landfills because that option costs a fraction of recycling them.
Let's compare to spent nuclear fuel, which we know for sure does not end up in landfills. I am talking about today, not some hypothetical utopian future. Today, NPP spent fuel is safely sequestered while solar panels are dumped into landfills.
> nuclear waste in the US does not have permanent storage or recycling solutions
It does, it's just not built yet because it doesn't make sense to do it now. In a few decades, maybe a century we will have commercialized fusion reactors. Once we do, we switch to fusion completely and build the deep geological repositories or whatever other solution makes sense then. Or we can even recycle the spent fuel–the only thing stopping us from doing that now is misguided US politics (as usual).
> we keep spending more the more we attempt to build it.
It's capex. We are investing in nuclear technology. If you have a proven design and build the reactors at scale, the costs will flatten or decline, which is obvious to anyone who knows about economies of scale.
https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...
installs: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/13/the-fastest-energy-ch...
costs: https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/11q58pe/price_trend...
Maybe SMR's, thorium, 4th gen, etc will work out, but maybe not.
The EU also forgot how to build airports and train stations on budget and on time.
Should we stop building airports and train stations?
As for nuclear power plants: Germany and France built most of their reactors on budget and on time.
Having smaller scale local power generation, whether it’s SMRs, solar, wind or geothermal, there’s a huge advantage in terms of economy, investment, and politics.
The LED bulbs I have access to (whatever's in the aisles at Home Depot, Costco, etc.) fail much more frequently than the incandescent bulbs I used to buy, and produce an uglier light that is less warm even on the softest/warmest color settings.
My suspicion is that incandescents were at the "end" of their product lifecycle (high quality available for cheap) and LEDs are nearing the middle (medium quality available for cheap), and that I should buy more expensive LED bulbs, but I still think that there are valid "complaints" against the state of widespread LED lighting. I hope these complaints become invalid within a decade, but for now I still miss the experience of buildings lit by incandescent light.
The other thing with AI--the LED revolution was led on this idea that we all need to work as hard as we can to save energy, but now apparently with AI that's no longer the case, and while I understand that this is just due to which political cabals have control of the regulatory machinery at any given time, it's still frustrating.
I figured out why this happens.
The light color they call "daytime" is around 5000K, so I expected it to look like being outside in the sun; but instead I got a cold blueish vibe. The problem? Not enough power! I got the equivalent of a moonlit room.
So I got this 180W LED lamp (that's actual 180W, not 180W equivalent) [1]. It's so bright I couldn't see for 5 minutes. I put two in my office on desk lamps. The room now looks like being outside, without the "ugly blue" tint, even though the product says it's 6000K. The days of my SAD suffering are over!
LED lamps work just fine, you just need to pay more attention when you’re buying them. Philips makes decent LED lamps.
Make sure you’re buying lamps with 90+ CRI, that will help with the quality of light. 2700K is a good color temp for indoor living room/dining room/bedroom lighting, 3500-4000K for kitchen/garage/task lighting.
You also need to buy special lamps if you put them in an enclosed fixture, look for ‘enclosed fixture’ rated lamps. Regular LED lamps will overheat in an enclosed fixture.
Do they fail more than incandescents? idk maybe not, but they fail much more often than their advertising would suggest.
Look for ‘enclosed fixture rated’ LED lamps for enclosed fixtures.
citation needed
> “West Virginia has numerous coal plants that have powered this country for decades. We need these plants to remain operational,” [WV Governor] Morrisey said. “… We will never turn our backs on our existing coal plants and we will work with the federal government to pursue new coal-fired generation.”
https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/09/11/morrisey-shares-new...
https://wvpublic.org/story/energy-environment/data-center-bi...
https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?bil...
Also, due to solar not panning out at scale.[1]
More seriously, coal is just cheaper and, with incentives being removed for green energy, it's the cheapest and fastest option to deploy. It's dead simple and well understood reliable power.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/california-solar-energy-ivanpah-b...
That solar plant you linked is an obsolete experimental technology. Obsolete because regular PV became so much cheaper.
I see yow it can read that way but it isn't what I said. Coal plants exist, either shuttered or running low loads due to financial incentives (not favoring them).
Studies show solar is cheaper but businesses continue to choose coal. I think the entity who's entire existence depends on them making the correct financial choice is a much better indicator of economic reality than a study made by people who have zero stake (at best) in the game.
I'm all for green energy but I also don't think people are stupid.
Direct solar continues to be installed at greater amounts every year and coal is economically uncompetitive with basic anything (which is why it is collapsing), and especially against natural gas.
On twitter I saw someone claim PV is useless for heat because non-PV solar water heating is just so much more efficient. Not even true (I think it's a approximately a wash, different advantages in different applications), but very strangely in the weeds on a specific topic. Much too narrow a factual context to substantiate general level claims about solar as an energy writ large.
I think for whatever reason the missing the forest for the trees trap is really potent in energy discussions.
They either have only read propaganda pieces from fossil fuel producers or are trying to create some of those.
I would expect the number of people that honestly don't know anything but propaganda to be way higher than the number of people creating propaganda. But there's probably a selection bias due to HN being a somewhat large site with some influence on SEO and AI training.
Solar+storage is not a solved problem. The storage problem gets continually hand waived away in the conversations about how cheap solar is.
As I said in a sibling comment, I don't think the people running energy companies are stupid. If solar really was cheaper as a baseline power supply, what it needs to be to replace fossil fuels, they'd be doing it.
Assuming zero growth in energy consumption (hello AI), extracting even half of that seems like it would be consequential.
Looks like it's more like 200,000Twh / Yr
