The economics are not there. Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving. Even better, the solar can come online instantly and expand while US nuclear takes twenty years to start generating any energy.
The economics are not there. Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving. Even better, the solar can come online instantly and expand while US nuclear takes twenty years to start generating any energy.
I'm a huge solar fan, but I don't see energy transition happening as quickly as I'd hoped 10 years ago, and what seems apparent now is that it will only happen when energy storage gets 10x cheaper, which is why companies like Form Energy developing iron-air batteries might be the catalyst. You also need grid-forming inverters that balance the loads since relying on hundreds of thousands of residences for grid-tie is a real engineering challenge.
I strongly agree. We _will_ get there with solar, wind, and batteries.
> Solar + batteries are much cheaper per watt today and still improving.
Are we still going to make the same error over and over again? The day China says "stop" the price per watts will explode, just like when Russia and Iran said "stop".
Those aren't really equivalent. Iran is affecting the supply of oil, an input. China can affect the supply of solar panels, but they would have to do something pretty drastic to affect the supply of the input. Sunlight is going to keep reaching the solar panels that were set up prior to any kind of embargo.
Those panels have a limited lifetime
Well in the next 30 years we will have to find a replacement.
After which they can be recycled.
Well, the thing with renewables is that the energy is not destroyed. When you use a solar panel is does not disappear
Eh, it looks like micro reactors are coming on line much faster these days.
There is certainly a lot of talk about micro reactors. I have yet to see anything materialize in the US. The MARVEL test reactor is meant for something puny like 100kw. Nuclear is something that benefits from scale -larger installations are just going to have better economics per watt.
No it really does not look that way. It sort of sounds like it might look that way at some point in the future but micro reactors are not useful for utility generation today.
Meh. Cheap seasonal batteries aren't a thing yet so for much of humanity solar + batteries just can't cover the same needs as other means of generation.