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Comment by ljf

3 days ago

While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.

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ljf

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lotharcable  3 days ago

Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.

Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.

  • dgacmu  3 days ago

    Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.

    https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/

    It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.

    (But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)

    We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.

    • coldspoon95  3 days ago

      Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.

      So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.

      And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.

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