Posted by geox 17 hours ago
Before you get angry, remember what the sun is....
The main problem with solar and wind is that they can't be dispatched on demand. The power is incredibly cheap, but you are completely at the mercy of the weather.
What is needed is a source of power which can make up for the freak moments where 1) there isn't any sun, and 2) there isn't any wind, and 3) it lasts long enough that batteries can't cover it, and 4) it has to be widespread enough that you can't make up for it with power from half a continent away.
This power source will only need to be used for a few hundred hours per year but it'll need to carry a significant load, so while its per-MWh running costs are basically irrelevant its one-time per-MW construction costs should be fairly low.
This does not at all describe nuclear power, which has incredibly high construction costs, near-zero running costs, and is expected to run 24/7/365 at 100%.
I don't follow. Why would they be any less polluting than natural ones?
The median reactor in the US produces 1-2GW. Most nuclear installations have multiple reactors, so capacity is a multiple of that. 1GW of solar generation requires literally millions of solar panels and thousands of acres of land, and still needs the transformers and distribution infrastructure. And that doesn't include any storage capability.
This is a contrived example. You're making it sound like solar is power available now. It simply isn't, on any scale like that. If it takes a decade to bring 1GW of solar online and two decades to bring 1GW of nuclear online, it's not as clear-cut.
Nuclear could be done a lot more quickly than it is and still be safe. Not as fast as solar, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude.
No reason for people to splinter the effort on clean reliable power.
If we only go after solar, wind and storage -- how are we ever going to get to long form space travel and continue to level up our technology for energy? How will we get to fusion?
By researching fusion? Imagine how much research you could do with all the money that you didn't waste on building uneconomical nuclear power plants
Nope. One of the fundamental premises of money is that it circulates. The only way money could not be re-spent is if the money supply were to decrease.
The total volume of new power generation is going to be mostly determined by how much those capital holders value it. If there's more utility in power this year than last, we may see more new starts in generation projects, regardless of which type of generation those projects are doing.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
None? Project Solar? The last time I seriously looked at doing rooftop panels, they were significantly cheaper than the door-to-door jerks.
There's probably more to the regulatory problem than just the permits i guess.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
AI can't take my job then.
One indicator is that third world countries can seem to afford it.
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
This is really surprising to hear. Are you sure about that?
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
Solar isn't expensive - you are.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
US Dept of Energy: Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmarks - https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaic-syste...
Energy Sage: Solar panel cost in 2026 - https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
This is highly untrue, until you get to the task mounting on a roof. Barring that, making a solar array system is dead simple. Most anyone can turn a screwdriver or build a frame or connect very distinct connectors together (they just snap together for daisy-chaining solar panels) or insert a power plug into a NEMA receptacle (for balcony solar installs.)
It is the install on the roof itself which most people cannot do (because they lack roofing knowledge.) Every other thing is absolutely DIY by pretty much anyone with hands and eyes.
Literally the most important part is what most people cannot do. If you have the space, sure, ground mount. Most people do not have the space, nor are they going to be confident in putting penetrations in their roof deck to mount racking to hold the panels.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
https://www.energysage.com/news/solar-panels-withstand-hail/
- Every panel sold in the U.S. has to pass an industry-standard hail test, which fires ice balls at multiple points on the panel and requires no visible cracking, delamination, or more than a 5% drop in power output afterward. Companies like UL Solutions, an applied safety science company, test solar panels by dropping a two-inch solid steel sphere from 51 inches onto panels, simulating the impact energy of serious hail. Panels that survive without electrical hazards earn certification for real-world deployment.
- The proof is in the pudding—or in this case, the parking lot. When a severe hailstorm hammered the National Laboratory of the Rockies' (NLR) (formerly National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)) Colorado campus in 2017, just one single panel out of more than 3,000 suffered damage. That's a 99.97% survival rate against Mother Nature.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
So long as the roof itself lasts that long. People who are mid-cycle on their existing roof should not install solar until they get to the next replacement. This is where I am, and why I do not have rooftop solar. I expect to get 15 additional years from my roof, and there's no guarantee I will have hit the break even point by then. Plus, solar installers will not warranty a mid-cycle roof against leaks, so if something goes wrong that quickly eats into your cost savings.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
The World Crossed a Major Solar Milestone [3TW] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151977 - August 2026
it's a great source of energy mind you, but I kind of wince everytime people are trying to say it's better than nuclear (if you put the dangerosity of the raw material aside of course)
there are excellent storage capacities now, which helps a lot, but nuclear stays unmatched in producing vast amounts of electricity on demand (as long as we're not in a brutal heat wave to be fair)
You cannot switch off a nuclear plant in an instant, that process takes weeks.
Centralized energy infra just isn't resilient enough against geopolitical problems to be worth investing in. Something about too much dependency on a thing attracts bad behavior to that thing.
By contrast, ain't nobody wasting a $50k missile on a $5k battery just so they can cut power to one building.
Solar is the superior form of nuclear energy. You're using a big ass nuclear fusion reactor in the center of our solar system to generate energy, and you harvest that energy by capturing its photonic output.
As far as storing the energy for peak demand/nighttime usage, we've got literally hundreds of methods to do it, from pure mechanical to electrochemical.
I could also say: Solar is the best energy source (if you put night aside of course).
I mean obviously the main drawback of nuclear fission is the waste and the potential impact of radioactivity.
If nuclear were just as expensive as it is now but had no waste or radioactivity it would still be struggling.
If it were 10x cheaper but still had the waste and radioactivity it would be going like gangbusters.
Perhaps. While the amortisation of the costs of Chernobyl etc. over the global nuclear fleet are surprisingly low, the local economic impact was high enough that even governments are cautious about the risks.
e.g. the Chernobyl exclusion zone is about the size of Luxembourg, so I'd expect their government to have had… discussions… with the French government about the safety of the nearby reactor in Cattenom: were it to détoner while the wind was blowing the wrong way, Luxembourg may cease to exist.
(Low risk, but existential if it happens. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as powerful people seem to be today about AI).
Also to clarify, modern Gen III+ reactors have passive safety systems that make leaks/meltdowns virtually impossible [2], and the total volume of high-level waste is tiny, solid, and completely contained in dry casks with little chance of escape - however there are some concerns on the 100+ year timescale, I'll admit.
Also a fun fact, deaths per unit of energy of nuclear compared to solar are nearly identical.[3]
[1]https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [2]https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati... [3]https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy?hl=en-US