China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing.
> It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies.
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
Well see the problem is we'd get the reactor hardware and we'd have to write the control software ourselves ha ha.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
How much per kW?
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country.
Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
> we paid dearly for that
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
> Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
> solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.
>They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
> How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
> Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
> The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?