They are not cheaper. They appeared cheaper for a while when there was a bubble and interest rates are zero. Now wind and solar farm projects are failing.

The problem isn’t due to bubble economics but contractual fixed rates that no longer make sense given post-covid rampant inflation.

Higher interest rates make everything more difficult of course - ask the auto or mortgage industries.

I’ve now posted this three times, but I don’t think people on this site are aware of it, since we’re still seeing the same obsolete debate. China built 415 TWh of wind and solar in the first 9 months of 2023 (adjusted for capacity factor), more than the combined total of all 26 nuclear plants under construction. Based on this surge of construction, Chinese emissions are expected to begin a structural decline next year.

The debate at this point isn’t about whether renewables will scale: China has already answered that question. There is a very real question about whether the West will be able to keep up. There seem to be a lot of people who want to sit around and fantasize about 1970s-era nuclear tech while our neighbors undergo what is effectively a second Industrial Revolution.

You can post it three more times and it won’t make it any less true that renewables are plagued with shortcomings regarding 24/7 uptime and massive safety issues with installation and eventual end-of-life environmental costs.

440 people die for every 1000TW of solar, compared to 90 for nuclear: https://www.engineering.com/story/whats-the-death-toll-of-nu...

Solar panel disposal impact: https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power

Renewables have a place in our energy future. Fanaticism about them does not.

Have you read what you linked to, while trying to have a skeptical eye? That article, especially when you're claiming others are fanatics, is not something you probably want to link to.

"The number of deaths for every 1000TWh of energy generated by rooftop solar panels is 440. Put simply, this means that for every 1000TWh of energy produced via rooftop solar power, 440 people lose their lives. Other estimates [obfuscated hyperlink to a Forbes page] place this number to be around 150. These deaths are mostly the result of electrocution and other hazards that occur during rooftop solar panel installation (such as falling)."

So they're not happy with the official statistics bureau that is Forbes and chose to stick with their uncited 440. It sounds made up to me. Searching for that exact datum actually yielded the original source [1], and yeah - it's made up. It's from a 2008 article where some guy just started hand-waving hard in a not entirely coherent fashion.

A quick search for something more reasonable turns up this. [2] The data comes from multiple studies and the UN Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Wind/Nuclear/Solar all have pretty much the same mortality rate: 0.04/0.03/0.02 per unit of electricity, respectively. If I want to be disingenuous I can claim [accurately] that nuclear is 50% deadlier than solar, but the numbers are low enough to be irrelevant.

[1] - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all...

[2] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Also, even if that 440 number was accurate, comparing fatalities occurring when random people install solar panels on their rooftops to the decade long massive construction projects that are nuclear power plants is just meaningless.

China is a special case because it has to import all its oil which makes it a huge strategic weakness. Wind and Solar is still a tiny part of its electricity production. You can't rely on either for cold dark winters. Its emissions are already higher than Europeans per capita and still growing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China#/m... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_Ch...

The thing about exponential deployment curves is that, at a certain point, posting charts that end 1 to 2 years in the past is like posting charts that end in 2000. Things are moving extremely rapidly now. https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

according to the wiki numbers, wind + solar make up 17% (with hydro being another 17%). Nothing to sneeze at! Though coal is extremely present.

How is it that nuclear didn't benefit from the same bubble?

Mostly red tape. It's much tighter regulated, and takes longer to get any project off the ground.

Why would high interest rates not be even worse for nuclear, which requires a far larger and earlier initial capital investment?

That argument doesn't make any sense.

If solar profitability is affected by higher interest rates (I'm not arguing this point) nuclear would be much more effected. Nuclear power is the most capital intensive form of power, they are a huge up front investment with very long ROI (incidentally they almost always require significant price guarantees over for decades and backed by the government to derisk the investment).

Next gen nuclear was developed fifty years ago for the Mars program before it was cancelled. See nuclear lightbulb research.

It’s taken that long for renewables to get marginally cheaper without solving the base load problem one bit. Meanwhile natural gas has dominated both.

You conveniently remember that nuclear power was unfairly sidelined for decades, and then conveniently forget that solar power was also unfairly sidelined for decades.

"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...

Also, "marginally cheaper" can't help but sound like sour grapes; the cost-per-watt of solar has fallen by 500x in the past 50 years (https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/evolution-of-...). How many hundreds of times cheaper per-watt is nuclear since then?

Solar was never “unfairly sidelined” because it was never regulated to death. That’s why it’s gotten cheaper while nuclear has stagnated.

Why is solar 3x more expensive in the US then, say, Australia? Because it is indeed regulated out of and into existence. Will the utility let you even connect solar to power your house, will the utility charge excessive fixed per-month fees for the privilege, how many hoops will your local municipality make you jump through for permitting, how many weeks or months of delay will there be, how many pointless and useless diagrams will they make you submit, how will a large installer every gain efficiency while dealing with every single city's pointless differences in . Or even, will you silly HOA allow panels, and if so, where and at what visibility?

Because solar is already so cheap to make that transportation is a significant expense and Australia is closer to China than the US.

That is absolutely not the case, the panels are not significantly more expensive when matched for quality.

Riding a bike is cheaper than driving. Driving a car is dead.

Unless you are in USA because we like to live each in a separate house instead of apartment complex.

I'd want a separate house, too, if my neighbors are Americans.

China produces more power from renewables than the entire generation capacity of the UK. You can build more firm generation capacity with solar and batteries than a typical nuclear generator, in a year, at a cheaper price. Hell of a bike.

Nuclear has a niche, but it got steamrolled by the S curve of solar, wind, and batteries.

Slight amendment: China is installing more wind and solar PV generation capacity this year than the entire generation capacity of the UK. The increment, not the total.

Edit: Nuclear power generation in China has, IIRC, tripled in the 21st century.

But demand has gone up much more than twentyfold though, and this year we are the crossover point where wind an PV manufacturing and install rates, and transmission line build rates, exceed the growth of demand, so fossil plants can start to be retired there.

If nuclear can't be built fast in China, where can it?

Citation:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carb...

> The most striking growth has been in solar power, according to Myllyvirta. Solar installations increased by 210 gigawatts (GW) this year alone, which is twice the total solar capacity of the US and four times what China added in 2020.

> The analysis, which is based on official figures and commercial data, found that China installed 70GW of wind power this year – more than the entire power generation capacity of the UK. It is also expected to add 7GW of hydro power and 3GW of nuclear power capacity this year, said the report.

You won’t get an answer to this. The energy world has changed very quickly in the past few years, and many can’t adjust their opinions to take new data and trends into account.

It would be interesting to see what the consequences of that would be. China solar addition scale is from another fourth dimension. Not only it is massive but it seems to be accelerating too. They added more in PV Solar in 2022 than the whole PV installations of Germany. It seems that the politicians there realize that being dependent on unstable regions (ie: Middle-East) for fuel is not wise. They are not B.S.ing their population with green propaganda and instead going full speed for PV solar and electric vehicles.

Edit: I found the 2022 numbers on Wikipedia and got curious what the 2023 outlook is going to be. It is shocking: https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-sur... Their 2023 numbers are double the 2022.

Electricity is fungible.

But not easily storable.

Not entirely true. There's all sorts of mechanical storage systems, the most common being artificial hydroelectric and flywheels - spin something really fast and than extract energy from its rotational velocity later.

But a practical issue here is that there hasn't really been much motivation to develop this industry, because there's been relatively little critical necessity for high capacity at-scale energy storage.

Just store it by selling it to your neighbor state or country and buying it back when their renewables are at peak :)

It is very easily storable, and in energy markets that are driven by free markets (rather than utility biases or legislative mandates), storage is one of the biggest investments on the grid:

> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.

https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2023/1017

Riding a bike requires you to live in a shoebox-sized apartment.

Shoeboxes are dead.

Terrible metaphor, obviously. All electricity generating methods are compared in the same way, cost per power generated.

Privileged myopia is certainly is alive in thriving!

I say this as someone who bikes their kid around most of the time; I love biking but it is way of life that only a minority of people can make work.