When you impose a tariff, domestic producers raise their prices because they face less competition

The thing about nuclear which drove us to large plants in the first place is that bigger reactors have significant economies of scale. Even with big reactors, nuclear has been very expensive to build, and hasn’t really come down in cost in a long time, and takes a very long time to actually build.

By contrast, wind, solar, and storage are cheap and can be deployed rapidly in small increments with much more site flexibility.

So what’s going on is a false promise of future nuclear being used to prevent the deployment of renewables now.

In the US, yes. Other countries do installers competing against each other over install price, which ends up dropping cost to about 1/4 of what it is in the US.

Basically they have a financing deal for the rooftop solar that’s designed to have a lower monthly payment than the utility bill it displaces

I don’t expect any kind of physical object to be free as in beer…but they definitely have a lot of room for technical improvement to make batteries cheaper

They’re mostly not set up as a backup system, but to time-shift wind and solar so that it isnt necessary to use more expensive fossil fuel generation. For example, here is what utility-scale battery use looked like on Dec 5 in California

Not really; there are real reasons people don’t want large-scale storage near populated areas, and it’s more expensive than avoiding the need for long-duration storage, and burning it (if you don’t store the oxygen, which raises costs even more) produces lung-damage nitrogen oxides. So there’s a lot of reasons to minimize the need for hydrogen as much as possible.

Depends a lot on where. Places with a lot of both wind and solar need a lot less than those with only one, or with big seasonal heating needs. Way more to say about this than can fit in a comment

You do need some amount of long-duration storage, with the amount depending on how generation diversity and how much clean firm generation you have, but we are still in the early stages of it.

People are going with batteries and demand-shifting first because they’re more cost-effective when it comes to dealing with a few hours of storage. Hydrogen storage is mostly a contender for longer-durarion storage

What’s new is the closed-loop horizontal drilling in places where geothermal was not possible before

That “or” is fairly surprising to me; its fairly easy to use waste heat from electric generation for district heat. Id expect some modest reduction, but not a total trade-off

Realistically you need to get them banned.

Get flock banned at a local level.

Get to protests on a bicycle or a bus. Carpool if you must.

Somehow read that as a snail onion

Thanks

Geothermal is the one renewable they didn’t cut off support for

They’re using it to fill out regulatory paperwork instead of making sure they satisfy the requirement that you establish actual knowledge about the plant to be built to show that it is safe

From xkcd

Better ad targeting does make ads more valuable…but because only Google and Facebook have the visibility and ML to do it effectively, they wound up with all the ad revenue. Everybody else ended up with a few pennies