alt.hn

4/14/2026 at 3:44:15 PM

For the first time in the U.S., renewables generate more power than natural gas

 https://e360.yale.edu/digest/us-renewables-natural-gas-coal

by Brajeshwar

4/14/2026 at 5:22:07 PM

Extending the life of existing power infra is low-hanging fruit for more power short term, but the economics of renewables are just unstoppable.

Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these.

The US has shot itself in the foot because of its energy dependence on its own energy source. The resource curse strikes again.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 5:50:06 PM

Some panel manufacturing has been moved to the US and is actually thriving. Qcells keeps growing, year over year and as of 2023 had expanded their US facilities to manufacture more than 5.1 GW[0] of annual production. I'm aware this is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 339 GW[1] of annual production in China, but we're also talking about a single manufacturer operating in an actively hostile administration and yet is still managing to grow.

Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit.

[0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da...

[1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...

by knappe

4/14/2026 at 5:39:27 PM

I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time, and I rarely see that being mentioned in this sort of gung-ho post. I want to feel how you feel - can you help with the specifics there?

by philipallstar

4/14/2026 at 7:38:30 PM

> I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time

The way a traditional grid works is that you have baseload plants (nuclear, coal) that generate all the time and peaker plants (hydro, natural gas) that make up the difference between the baseload generation and the current demand by varying the amount they generate to match demand in real time.

The higher demand periods when you're not using electricity to heat buildings are typically daytime and early evening. Solar generates power during daytime. That makes "use solar instead of natural gas during daytime" an easy win. You can also do things like "charge electric vehicles mostly during daytime" and use solar again. Then you're still using natural gas in the early evening but you save a lot of fuel (and CO2) by not having to use them during the day. Meanwhile the gas plants are still there to use in the evening and then you can use them on a day when it's cloudy.

That's still where we are in most places. There isn't enough solar in the grid yet to completely replace natural gas during most of the solar generation window, and we could add even more by electrifying transportation, so we can still add a lot more solar before we have to really deal with intermittency at all.

Optimists would then like to extrapolate the economics of doing that to doing 100% of generation from renewables, which would require actually dealing with it.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 6:22:05 PM

Easy. US puts panels, turbines and batteries everywhere connected in big grid. Grid is big enough that something is always generating, and batteries smooth out the curve. Power is priced dynamically. Cheap solar at noon? Do big work. High demand in evening? Discharge battery. Power is always available, but cost goes up and down. Daily, god willing.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 7:14:58 PM

In theory that works as long as you're willing to let the price reflect actual supply and demand even when the difference is very large, e.g. it has been cloudy and still for a couple weeks so the batteries are low and then you get a hot summer day or cold winter night with a lot of demand. No problem, we'll just set the price to "high enough to get people to stop cooling/heating their buildings" and the market will clear. But people aren't going to like that.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 8:19:33 PM

It’s not something that’s likely to happen at the retail level, but at the industrial level. Battery farms buying power when the price is low or negative (due to too much wind/solar) and selling when the price is higher (early evening). Aluminum smelters curtailing. Etc.

There is something interesting happening in the retail space, though, called a “virtual power plant.” Worth googling if you’re curious.

by jdlshore

4/14/2026 at 8:42:50 PM

Aluminum smelters are something like 4% of global electricity consumption and 60% of them are in China. In general industrial is less than a third of electricity consumption in the US, not even all of that can be curtailed, and that number is only going to go down if we electrify heating and transportation. It's pretty hard to curtail heating and cooling by more than a minor amount. It's easy to do with transportation over the course of hours or days, but not weeks or months.

Batteries work great to let you generate power at noon and use it at dusk. They're not so great at letting you generate power on days with a surplus and then use it later in the year when there is a multi-week or seasonal shortfall.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 7:30:24 PM

The demand can be more elastic than you envision. If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers.

The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.

People might not like changing their habits to follow the energy, but they'll probably be pretty happy when the end result is both good for the environment and cheaper overall. At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 8:23:51 PM

> If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers.

That buys you days, not weeks.

The smoothing out things also have kind of an ugly failure mode. People set their cars to sell power into the grid if the price is X% above normal, but that prevents it from getting to be 2X% above normal on the first day, and then fewer people choose not to run their dryers. The batteries get exhausted sooner because their own existence prevented the price from going up very much at first, but that's the profit-maximizing strategy because nobody knows exactly how long the shortfall is going to be and the shorter ones are more common. Then the batteries get depleted quickly and when the shortfall lasts for more than a couple of days, you're not only low on battery storage, you now have more people whose cars have a charge gauge pointing to E and they need to get to work in the morning.

> The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary.

It isn't a regulatory restriction. It's, where are you setting your thermostat if electricity hits $5/kWh today?

> At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.

The problem is that it's occasionally neither and that doesn't have to happen very often to cause a lot of trouble.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 8:13:34 PM

The WTO found that China cornered the market with illegal dumping. Of course the investigations and punishments are too little too late.

by Amezarak

4/14/2026 at 8:27:15 PM

That may be the case, though from a US perspective, in terms of "unilaterally acting to gain control of other markets" being bad, we aren't a position to criticize.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 5:33:27 PM

What's even more important is how solar, and to a lesser extent other tech, served as a gateway for China to accumulate electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry talent the US seems committed to offshoring by incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China). We are training them and not our own.

by 0xWTF

4/14/2026 at 6:28:26 PM

I don't think the engineering talent was the bottleneck. The difference was the long-term planning and industrial policy of China.

I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 6:03:50 PM

>incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China)

That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.

by asdff

4/14/2026 at 7:16:28 PM

Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.

by linkjuice4all

4/14/2026 at 7:42:10 PM

>GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here.

I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.

by asdff

4/14/2026 at 7:25:44 PM

It was also the case at MIT that students on an NSF fellowship cost the PI more to hire.

by selimthegrim

4/14/2026 at 5:40:30 PM

[flagged]

by mrroper

4/14/2026 at 4:07:34 PM

I do think the Iran crisis should continue to push countries towards nuclear + solar. Like Ukraine helped shift some in Europe back to supporting nuclear after foolishly shutting down reactors.

by mchusma

4/14/2026 at 4:41:31 PM

The wars in Ukraine and irán have also highlighted what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic. The idea that such will never happen is as silly as the idea that there will never be an accident or a tsunami. But passive safety won't stop a missile.

by contubernio

4/14/2026 at 8:57:57 PM

They were designed with that in mind though. They were built to withstand an plane crash or attack.

You may have seen the famous test of ramming a F4 Phantom into a reinforced concrete walls without much effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4CX-9lkRMQ

It's certainly possible to blow them up, but they very unlikely to melt down like Chernobyl did anymore due to all the effort put into preventing that. Easier to just launch radioactive materials at your enemy if that's the result you want.

by nitwit005

4/14/2026 at 6:44:29 PM

A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.

by philipallstar

4/14/2026 at 7:43:00 PM

> A missile hitting a coal power plant will also be pretty bad, and there's not a giant shield around it.

Probably not even the same order of magnitude. A blown-up nuclear reactor would be WAY worse in short- and long-term effects (and cleanup costs) than a blown-up coal power plant producing comparable MW.

(See: Fukushima and Chernobyl.)

by dctoedt

4/14/2026 at 9:21:29 PM

Coal is shockingly nasty. Combustion concentrates heavy radioactive elements that are present in the coal. Coal and nuclear plants can't be built too close together or the exhaust from the coal plant will set off the radiation alarm at the nuclear plant.

It also does the same thing to heavy metals in the coal like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury. More than 90% of coal is carbon and therefore becomes CO2, but because of the huge difference in energy density, the coal plant has to burn millions of times more coal than nuclear reactors consume uranium, and thereby generates tens of thousands of times more toxic and radioactive coal ash than the nuclear plant generates nuclear waste.

Then they put the stuff into "wet surface impoundments" which is industry for dumping the toxic sludge into a lake. Those things frequently poison entire towns without any kind of terrorist attack.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 9:40:32 PM

Agreed — but we’re talking about a catastrophic missile strike, not longterm operations.

by dctoedt

4/14/2026 at 8:45:52 PM

I think it's an error that International Atomic Energy Agency classified both Fukushima nuclear accident and Chernobyl nuclear accident on International Nuclear Event Scale Level 7 (major accident).

In both the amount of released radionuclides and health effects of the accidents, Chernobyl accident was much, much bigger than Fukushima.

by leonidasrup

4/14/2026 at 4:50:01 PM

> what a horrendous insecurity nuclear power plants are. A direct missile attack on one could be catastrophic

The same holds for hydro. Even worse, there would be no time for evacuation. Yet nobody is considering banning dams.

by senko

4/14/2026 at 5:45:09 PM

Not in the same ballpark. Chernobyl nearly poisoned the entire continent’s water supply. Nuclear waste is far far worse than excess water.

by Dumblydorr

4/14/2026 at 6:18:09 PM

How would Chernobly poison all of Europe's (or you mean Asia's?) drinking water while all of our nuclear testing hasn't?

by lesuorac

4/14/2026 at 7:31:34 PM

He probably meant Chernobyl accident was close to polluting Dnieper river downstream. Not quite the source of water for all of Europe.

by dh2022

4/14/2026 at 8:39:54 PM

Cumulative total number of deaths from Chernobyl, definitively the worst nuclear disaster in history, ranges from 4000 to 16000 (estimates, via Wikipedia). A dam bursting upstream of a few small towns will kill many more[0].

Do not underestimate excess water.

[0] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770592

by senko

4/14/2026 at 8:52:17 PM

For comparison the Bhopal disaster (which is much less known in the West) that occurred on 3 December 1984 in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India caused deaths in the range 3928 to 16000.

A government affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125 injuries including 38,478 temporary partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and permanently disabling injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

by leonidasrup

4/14/2026 at 8:35:27 PM

Most of Europe drinks water from underground aquifers, which could not be affected by Chernobyl. Even breathing with air with radionuclides from Chernobyl in far distance from Chernobyl power plant didn't cause much radiation dose to the population. It was eating contaminated food and drinking contaminated milk that cause most radiation dose for population.

The precise mechanism was: radioactive particles fall to ground, or are washed to ground by rain, which concentrates them on vegetation with a lot of surface especially leafy vegetables, grass. Leafy vegetables are eaten directly by humans. Grass is eaten by cows, which again concentrates the radionuclides in milk. Humans drink milk, eat cheese concentrated from milk.

Not all radionuclides produced in nuclear fission have the same health impact on population in case of a nuclear disaster. To have a significant health hazard a radionuclide needs to have 3 properties: volatility, half-life, bioaccumulativity.

Volatility - some radioactive elements (heavy metals) are not moved far away by air, some radioactive elements like radioactive noble gases dilute very fast.

Stuff with a short half-life will transform into stable elements before migrating far. Stuff with with very long half-life will not produce much radiation during human lifetime.

Bioaccumulativity, radioactive stuff needs to stay in body to do damage. If it's eaten and then pooped out next day it usually doesn't cause much damage.

Most dangerous for general public in case of nuclear disasters are:

Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days): Iodine is stored in thyroid gland and stays in for long time in body. Especially children need a lot of iodine per kilogram of body weight. In regions where there is not enough of iodine in food (lacking seafood, table salt without added iodine), human body will try to get every bit of iodine from environment and hold it in body as long as possible.

Cesium-137 (half-time 30.04 years) : Alkali metal that forms salts. Has tendency to accumulate in soft tissues.

Strontium-90 (half-time 28.91 years) : Chemically similar to calcium. Has tendency to be incorporated into bones, teeth and stay in body for very long time.

https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q10097/

Big part of radiation dose to the population could be prevented if the Soviet state didn't tried to cover up the Chernobyl and would prevent people from eating local food and milk, because most of the damage is done by eating iodine-131 in the first weeks after accident. Timely administration of potassium iodide tables would also help.

Chernobyl liquidators were affected with much broader range of radionuclides (radioactive stuff that did not migrate far) and with much high concentrations (radioactive stuff was not diluted much).

Direct deaths: 2 killed by debris (including 1 missing) and 28 killed by acute radiation sickness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

There many estimates about impact of Chernobyl disaster. I think the most comprehensive study is from Chernobyl Forum.

"On the death toll of the accident, the report states that 28 emergency workers died from acute radiation syndrome and 15 patients died from thyroid cancer. It roughly estimates that cancers deaths caused by the Chernobyl accident might eventually reach a total of up to 4,000 among the 600,000 cleanup workers or "liquidators" who received the greatest exposures."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Forum

by leonidasrup

4/14/2026 at 5:13:06 PM

Dams are just too good a source to ban them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medog_Hydropower_Station 60 GW planned capacity!

by foobarian

4/14/2026 at 5:54:08 PM

Both are good sources of energy. If you're going to make the argument that "nuclear is unsafe so we shouldn't do it" though, it's relevant to keep in mind that since we've had nuclear power, dam failures have outpaced nuclear by many times in terms of deaths / TwH (1).

Edit to add: Before anyone jumps on for this it's important to note that without the Banquiao disaster the rates are about the same. Still means "nuclear is unsafe" is kind of a red herring.

1 - https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

by pksebben

4/14/2026 at 7:52:03 PM

"In August 1975, the Banqiao Dam and 61 others throughout Henan, China, collapsed following the landfall of Typhoon Nina. The dam collapse created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected 12,000 km2 (3 million acres) with a total population of 10.15 million, including around 30 cities and counties, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 26,000 to 240,000."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

"After the disaster, the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government remained silent to the public, while no media were allowed to make reports."

"The official documents of this disaster were considered a state secret until 2005 when they were declassified."

by leonidasrup

4/14/2026 at 5:12:24 PM

Saying humanity should never use nuclear energy just because someone might shoot a missile at it is incredibly stupid when CO2 emissions are causing climate change.

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 5:51:41 PM

If climate change prevention is the target, then its also an no for nuclear. Nuclear reactors need tons of cement, the fuel needs an complicated and energy intensive process with a lot of waste.

by stop50

4/14/2026 at 6:00:21 PM

Okay, but how do those emissions compare to burning fuel to gain the same amount of energy?

by vanviegen

4/14/2026 at 6:34:58 PM

That’s false but hey, you have proofs I guess ?

by pjerem

4/14/2026 at 6:06:01 PM

By that logic solar power should also be banned, due to the amount of coal required per panel (0) both for reduction and Czochralski process. And remember, solar panel factories don't run on solar power.

(0) https://co2coalition.org/2024/05/21/coals-importance-for-sol...

by OneDonOne

4/14/2026 at 4:53:52 PM

That's why we have MADD

by downrightmike

4/14/2026 at 4:59:32 PM

But still after +4 years of war, with extensive targeting of Ukrainian civilians, the nuclear power plants stand while the plants using gas etc. are bombed daily. They are simply too dangerous of a target. Russia enjoys using Zaporizhzhia power plant for some brinkmanship once in a while, but they are well aware of the risk and everything has turned out fine so far.

If Ukraine didn't have nuclear energy they would be blacked out now.

by tokai

4/14/2026 at 5:36:10 PM

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant hasn't been bombed because (1) the Russians control it right now (it's behind their lines) so why would they, and (2) the Ukranians live downwind so why would they?

Russia has bombed the switchyards and trandformers of other NPPs though.

by JohnCClarke

4/14/2026 at 5:00:24 PM

This administration has killed dozens of solar + wind projects. Don't get your hopes up, the US is run by people that only want to profit off of natural gas and nothing else matters.

by shimman

4/14/2026 at 4:22:55 PM

nuclear is not useful today. It is too slow to change output as load changes. We need to focus on storage for all the excess power renewables give at the best case, shifting that to worst case-

by bluGill

4/14/2026 at 4:27:22 PM

If we want to have an industrial economy with 24×7 heavy manufacturing then we need nuclear power for the base load. There's no need to change output much. The amount of batteries needed to keep a huge factory running is ridiculous.

by nradov

4/14/2026 at 4:44:01 PM

The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year. New nuclear sucks, and baseload is a false concept that can (and is) being synthetically replicated with over-building + storage + transmission + peaking.

by energy123

4/14/2026 at 10:34:57 PM

> The world's biggest industrial economy, China, installed about 300x more renewable energy than nuclear last year.

Comparing nameplate capacity for generation methods with much different capacity factors is misleading. China generates the majority of its electricity from coal, and is still adding more. They're adding more in renewables than coal by nameplate capacity, but coal likewise has a higher capacity factor than renewables, so it's really about the same. Then they say "increasing the proportion of renewables" because the initial proportion of renewables was close to 0.

Coal is a baseload source but not one you actually want to use.

by AnthonyMouse

4/14/2026 at 5:33:24 PM

How is base load a false concept?

by ambicapter

4/14/2026 at 6:52:33 PM

Base load is marketing term for electricity supply which cannot economically follow the demand curve and is only affordable if you can use a constant supply of it. It's not a feature, it's a bug. What you want is dispatchable power.

The term vaguely makes sense if there are sources of electricity that output a constant supply that are cheaper than the dispatchable sources of power. Like nuclear was supposed to be (but in the end is not). Or in some very specific locations hydro (without a reservoir) and geothermal are. But as often bandied about as a "type of power that must be filled" it simply doesn't exist. The type of power that must be filled is dispatachable power, everything else is just "well what cheap non-dispatchable sources can we use to avoid using more expensive dispatchable power".

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 6:57:53 PM

Base load is a feature, not a bug. Companies planning new industrial facilities need long-term guarantees of reliable 24×7 power with predictable rates. Otherwise they'll build elsewhere. Dispatchable power doesn't help them.

by nradov

4/14/2026 at 7:43:46 PM

industry needs perdictable cheap power. They only care about base load because it is traditionally cheap enough to schedule your energy intensive work around. Wind and solar are much cheaper and we are often good enough at predicting it for industry.

by bluGill

4/14/2026 at 7:00:30 PM

Base load power cannot provide predictable rates because it provides a fixed amount of power that the market then bids on. If there's too much demand rates go up arbitrarily high. If there's too little rates go to zero.

Dispatchable power is the only sort of power that provides 24x7 power with predictable rates. If there's more demand, you produce more power (at the same cost). If there's less, you produce less so you can sell what you do produce at the same cost.

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 7:46:08 PM

Base load provides predictable cheap power at night. Which is why heavy industry runs third shift only (only rare industy is this way), and shuts down for maintenance in december (christman lights). Now that wind is cheap they are changing shifts because nobody wants to work third shift if they don't have to.

by bluGill

4/14/2026 at 8:02:51 PM

Nope. What you're describing is an artifact of certain electricity markets work for spot prices. This is artificial, not inevitable. Large industrial customers often bypass those markets and contract directly with producers for fixed rates.

by nradov

4/14/2026 at 5:22:43 PM

Firm/dispatchable capacity that can run for arbitrary durations is required unless you've solved seasonal storage.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30386-6

Firm low-carbon resources consistently lower decarbonized electricity system costs

• Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases

• Without these resources, electricity costs rise rapidly as CO2 limits near zero

• Batteries and demand flexibility do not substitute for firm low-carbon resources

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 5:51:32 PM

The solution mix needs to be tailored the location.

Non-tropical equatorial countries don't have meaningful seasonality, so they don't need seasonal storage.

For countries far north of the equator, it's more challenging, but there are multiple tools to address this, including: over-building so you have enough in winter, using wind which is seasonally negatively correlated with solar, importing power over HVDC, and diversifying wind spatially to reduce correlations which drop more than linearly in distance.

For small countries very far away from the equator that have highly variable insolation and limited geography to decorrelate, nuclear may be better. But it cannot be asserted a priori without a simulation study tailored to the specifics of that location. When I said that nuclear is bad, I am talking in generalities about the common case (United States) at current market prices.

The paper that you linked is old, we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar.

by energy123

4/14/2026 at 6:02:09 PM

"over-building so you have enough in winter" This makes wind and solar much more expensive to the point where nuclear is cheaper.

" we are dealing with exponential change in the price of storage and solar."

But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 6:10:34 PM

> "over-building so you have enough in winter" This makes wind and solar much more expensive to the point where nuclear is cheaper.

No it doesn't. Why do you just say that? There are simulation studies like CSIRO's work which show that it's still cheaper than nuclear after you account for everything.

by energy123

4/14/2026 at 6:54:29 PM

> But not in grid storage. That is still incredibly expensive.

The price of grid storage is absolutely falling exponentially with respect to time.

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 4:32:33 PM

The need for nuclear is simply not clear. Storage has advance so quickly, while nuclear tech has remained stagnant or even gotten more expensive.

Eve China, the best nuclear power builders out there, are shifting away from massive nuclear to storage and wind and solar.

Without a major technological innovation in the nuclear power space, I don't see how it can compete, except at the poles and in niches with very poor renewable resources.

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 5:17:34 PM

Grid Storage is very expensive and right now only has a few hours of capacity. We would need weeks to really replace nuclear.

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 5:37:41 PM

Saying that grid storage "only has a few hours of capacity" is like saying that a nuclear power reactor "only has 1GW of power." You solve both issues by deploying more. And if you want a longer lithium ion battery installation without the additional power capacity, you can save a bit on inverters.

Grid storage is cheap enough that Texas, a purely profit-driven grid is now overtaking California in the amount of battery storage deployed. 58GWh of new grid storage was added in 2025 alone, and the growth is still exponentialhttps://seia.org/news/united-states-installs-58-gwh-of-new-e...

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 10:28:11 PM

All current grid storage will fully discharge in less than 4 hours at max watts. It is designed to level daily demand variability. To make a 4 hour battery last for a week at the same wattage would make it cost 42 times as much.

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 4:44:36 PM

The cost of nuclear power is absurd. It's 5x the cost of solar and wind.

If you use electricity to synthesize gas and then burn that later to generate electricity that is still cheaper than nuclear power.

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

Nobody builds nuclear power because it's cost effective or green. They either have nukes like China or have purchased an option on nukes (like Iran or Poland).

by pydry

4/14/2026 at 5:52:57 PM

You need to overprovision solar and wind capacity by at minimum 5x for northern latitudes' winter months compared to the summer, plus another few multipliers to keep storage topped up, or invest heavily in HVDC and massively overprovision the southern states.

For that scenario, nuclear is still marginally cheaper (at today's prices at least).

by zdragnar

4/14/2026 at 6:22:57 PM

Northern latitudes have low population density and plenty of hydro power which, unlike nuclear power, CAN actually operate as a battery at a reasonable cost.

There is still nowhere in the world nuclear power makes economic sense.

by pydry

4/14/2026 at 4:41:28 PM

That we now have cheap storage makes nuclear more useful, just like with solar/wind we can use storage to make nuclear follow the demand curve, something it was previously incapable of.

The problem with nuclear today is just that it simply hasn't kept pace with the lowering cost of alternatives.

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 4:53:32 PM

> It is too slow to change output as load changes.

its really not. The new(ie 90s) french reactors are about as fast as Combined cycle gas turbines. Even if its not, it works well enough, spain has shit all battery capacity and manages well enough

but if you have lots of renewables you need batteries ideally, which means the hypothetical argument of "its too slow" goes away because batteries are there to even out the supply.

by KaiserPro

4/14/2026 at 5:16:33 PM

Stored electricity is much more expensive than nuclear electricity. To replace 1 GW of nuclear running at 92% CF with solar+storage, you need 3-4 GW of solar nameplate plus enough storage to cover nighttime AND multi-day cloudy periods AND seasonal winter deficit. The seasonal piece is what blows up the cost, you'd need weeks of storage, which at current Li-ion prices is economically absurd ($1000s/MWh delivered).

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 5:42:37 PM

For the few days without wind, natural gas is cheaper than nuclear. There is also biogas and hydro. Nuclear is not cheap to turn on off. Also, the insurance cost of nuclear power is not accounted for: basically, there is no insurance, and the state (the population) just have to live with the risk.

by thomasmg

4/14/2026 at 10:29:58 PM

Natural gas emits CO2. The risks of climate change caused by CO2 utterly dwarf those of any nuclear reactor. Nuclear power in the US has the lowest deaths per joule of all of them.

by UltraSane

4/14/2026 at 5:32:38 PM

It's definitely a bit ironic that a war for oil drives the last push for getting rid of it, but I'll take that as well, if logic and sanity didn't help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by endymi0n

4/14/2026 at 4:31:22 PM

Most uranium mining is from Russia/CIS and those African counties that have experienced the recent wave of Wagner-assisted coups. The West needs to be energy independent, not just swap who it is dependent upon?

by wood_spirit

4/14/2026 at 4:20:29 PM

Poland was ~80% coal before Ukraine. It wasnt energy independence which got them interested in nuclear power it was the idea that they might one day want a nuclear bomb (in case the current nuclear umbrella goes away).

It's never an economic decision to build nuclear power stations. They're 5x the cost of solar and wind.

by pydry

4/14/2026 at 4:25:39 PM

If we actually cared about making nuclear cheap - getting rid of the political barriers to building Gen IV reactors, not throwing away our “waste”, it would beat the pants off solar by operating 24/7 and not using up all our land.

by nsxwolf

4/14/2026 at 4:31:11 PM

While I am a big fan of nuclear, I think the issue of land usage for solar is overblown. We use a lot of land for far less useful things. In the end, anything that helps us burn less fossil fuels, I am happy with.

by RealityVoid

4/14/2026 at 4:47:04 PM

You're also taking away farmland that could be used to produce all kinds of things. Most of the prime solar areas are the same prime areas for agriculture. By creating massive solar farms, you're at the same time, reducing acreage that could be used for range animals and other agriculture:

Modeling by the American Farmland Trust (AFT) finds that 83% of projected solar development will be on agricultural land, of which 49% will be on land AFT deems “nationally significant” due to high levels of productivity, versatility, and resiliency. In May 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) reported that between 2009 and 2020, 43% of solar installations were on land previously used for crop production and 21% on land used as pasture or rangeland.

In a few years we'll have to deal with an impending disposal issue on farmland:

Forecasts suggest that 8 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their lifecycles by 2030. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory reports that less than 10% of decommissioned panels are recycled. Many end up in landfills at the end of their lifecycle, which could be problematic, according to researchers with the Electric Power Research Institute because panels could break and leak toxic materials like lead and cadmium into the soil. If decommissioned panels are not disposed of properly, they could contaminate the surface and groundwater in the surrounding area, making disposal a major issue for farmers and rural communities who rely on groundwater for needs ranging from crop irrigation to drinking water.

by burningChrome

4/14/2026 at 5:39:33 PM

The land use argument is less than zero.

If you replaced ONLY existing fields used to grow corn for ethanol, and turned those into solar panels, you would already exceed the entire current US demand for electricity.

Solar energy is a phenomenal use of land, of which we have enormous amounts of in this country.

by mjamesaustin

4/14/2026 at 5:01:08 PM

Agricultural land in large parts of the US is going through a massive degradation cycle. We are heading for dustbowl 2.0 especially now that a bunch of the weird land universities have been shut down. In short its being used wrong and left empty too long, meaning the top soil is blowing away. Not to mention the land drains stopping proper soaking leading to flash flooding and runoff events.

Depending on how the panels are put in place, the land and soil quality will increase significantly because its reverting to fallow and long rooted stabilising plants will have 25 years to build up the biome again. Converting land back to farming is pretty quick.

I understand the point your making, and I do agree with the end of life cycle issues. THere is going to be a lot of lead leaching into water courses if not dealt with properly.

by KaiserPro

4/14/2026 at 6:43:07 PM

Fewer cows would be a huge environmental win. Beef farming is a major source of GHG. Also a very expensive/inefficient way to produce calories.

by rjrjrjrj

4/14/2026 at 4:57:34 PM

You can do both farming and solar on the same land and it improves crop yields. As of yesterday, studies found it creates rainfall in the desert

by downrightmike

4/14/2026 at 4:39:27 PM

While we're at it I would actually prefer it if nuclear power paid for its own catastrophe insurance instead of lumping that burden on taxpayers.

Currently their liability is capped at $300 million. Fukushima cleanup cost $800 billion.

End the insurance free ride first and then maybe lets talk about deregulation.

by pydry

4/14/2026 at 4:31:01 PM

And also be peaceful and never bomb plants.

by actionfromafar

4/14/2026 at 5:05:20 PM

> foolishly shutting down reactors.

Ahem, have I missed something? Do you know more then the rest of us? I mean, has the nuclear waste problem actually been solved?

by lynx97

4/14/2026 at 5:33:20 PM

No*, but the nuclear waste problem is a problem for 50, 100, 1000 years from now.

Climate change is a problem for 50 years ago. And now. Very, very much now.

Having to, in the worst case, designate some small areas that we choose as uninhabitable "nuclear waste zones" in a few decades is vastly preferable to having to designate entire regions of the world as uninhabitable "too hot to live" zones around the same time. And that's if we don't find some better way to handle the nuclear waste.

* Not in the sense of "a permanent and comprehensive solution". However, the actual spent nuclear fuel can now be reprocessed and reused in newer reactor designs, down to a tiny fraction of what we would have considered "nuclear waste" with the earliest designs in the mid-20th century.

by danaris

4/14/2026 at 4:42:22 PM

The flush of $$ to North American oil companies will unfortunately lead to a pile of investment in more oil and gas exploration, refining, and transport.

Seeing that already here in Canada. All parties (except one) seem united in their newfound aspiration to just mine and ship more of the stuff.

Talking about transition is politically toxic here right now.

by cmrdporcupine

4/14/2026 at 4:46:24 PM

The shift in Canada predates the oil crisis the US just created... it dates back to at least the election a year ago.

I strongly suspect it was primarily created by the US threatening to annex us via "economic force" and thus creating a need to prioritize our short term economic strength over longer term charity things like climate change.

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 4:55:40 PM

Plus if Canada warms up, hey win win

by downrightmike

4/14/2026 at 5:09:28 PM

This war has definitely had massive positive implications for the financial future of the north west passage...

But Canada has a pretty great climate apart from a bit of snow, I wouldn't take warmer at the cost of a small risk of desertification, forest fires, hurricanes, etc. Climate change is unfortunately not just in the nice and warm direction.

by gpm

4/14/2026 at 5:07:20 PM

If you like forest fires, permafrost collapse, and drought, sure.

by cmrdporcupine

4/14/2026 at 5:16:50 PM

I live in a ski resort, you insensitive clod /s

Warmer over here in the west means wetter, which means land slides and floods (plus more wild fires in drier seasons). It also means a pivot in tourism (from glaciers, ski resorts, frozen north) to well, who knows what at this stage.

Logging also becomes even less advisable (see land slides etc.).

So less "hey win win" (with an implied wink), more "hey win, lose, lose, ?".

by robrain

4/14/2026 at 5:07:04 PM

I think we absolutely agree and in fact it goes back much further than that. There's a well funded "opposition" in Alberta that sees any constraints on the energy sector as aggressive "imperialism" from central Canadian "elites", and they've cultivated a grievance politics so deep on this subject that they've convinced people in Alberta of some honestly pretty outlandish things. And yes, a lot of this is directly funded from the US.

I also think that there's a bigger force at work which is that despite actually being only 2nd or 3rd in Canada's GDP by percentage, energy sector is basically the majority of what's on the TSX and a key driver in equity growth in Canada. And so, the old maxim applies in regards to climate change and Canadians generally: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

I'm from Alberta originally and talking to extended family etc about this topic is just painful. Not officially climate change denying, but in practice fully actually

by cmrdporcupine

4/14/2026 at 5:40:08 PM

I don't think this article did the math right. In the linked source from the article (https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...), in 03/2026 combined generation from hydro (26 TWh), wind (53), solar (27.7), bioenergy (3.82), and other renewables (1.51) is 112.03 TWh, vs 120 TWh for natural gas. It's still an impressive number but it is still slightly less than natural gas.

by ike2792

4/14/2026 at 8:00:36 PM

UPDATE: Solar was 37.6, not 27.7. I'm not quite sure where I got the incorrect number from. The corrected total is 121.93, which is indeed greater than the 120 for natural gas. I apologize for the error but I can't edit my original comment anymore so I'll just post the correction here. Thanks to mekdoonggi and 0xdde for correcting my mistake.

by ike2792

4/14/2026 at 6:43:40 PM

I am not seeing those numbers in the chart. For March, I see 37.6 solar, 53 wind, 26 hydro, 60.4 nuclear, 5.3 other, together for 182.3 vs 120 for gas.

by mekdoonggi

4/14/2026 at 6:37:42 PM

I think you misread the solar number. The link says 37.6TWh solar with the remaining numbers matching what you wrote. That gives a total of 120.42TWh.

by 0xdde

4/14/2026 at 7:57:49 PM

You are right, I read 37 as 27. I will update my parent comment.

by ike2792

4/14/2026 at 4:23:51 PM

I wonder how good it could be if the governments offered the exact same amount of subsidies to renewable energy they offer to coal and petroleum, including indirect subsidies like distribution infrastructure etc.

by itopaloglu83

4/14/2026 at 4:30:34 PM

Right now renewables and storage are cheaper than most new fossil fuel types of generation. The cheapest new fossil fuel generation, gas, is bottlenecked by limited capacity to build new turbines currently.

So if you look at new resources being added to the grid, it's all solar, wind, storage, and a tiny bit of new fossil gas generation.

The biggest impediment to more renewables is no longer cost, it's politics and regulations. We have a president that has torpedoes one of the best new sources of wind, offshore wind, just as it's becoming super economical, and all the rest of the world is going to get the benefit of that cheap energy while the US falls behind. Floating offshore wind in the Pacific, based on the same type of tech as floating oil platforms, could provide a hugely beneficial amount of electricity at night and in winter, to balance out solar with less storage and less overbuilding.

Meanwhile on land, transmission line are a huge bottleneck towards more solar and wind, and the interconnection queue for the grid is backed out to hell in most places.

The technology and economics are there, but the humans and their bureaucracy is not ready to fully jump on board.

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 5:03:01 PM

> is bottlenecked by limited capacity to build new turbines currently.

its bottlenecked by price. The reason why the UK's electricity is so fucking expensive is because its pegged to international gas prices

by KaiserPro

4/14/2026 at 5:17:07 PM

My comment, like the linked article, was focused entirely on the US's situation, which has abundant fossil gas to the point that many frackers burn it as a waste product.

I'd totally agree for UK and continental Europe. The difference between oil and gas is massive on the distribution angle, oil moves easily as long as there's not a naval blockade, but fossil gas requires super super expensive infrastructure either via pipeline or LNG. And with nearly all fossil fuel companies in the last stages of their life, trying to maximize profits on existing capital, it's hard to get investor support to buy infrastructure that costs multiple billions and has limited lifetime. I don't know the details in Europe, but it seems like this phasing out of infrastructure as the transition happens is a major hassle... I'd love any links on that sort of info about Europe.

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 6:02:29 PM

You're missing the nuance here, gas is priced internationally, as is oil. The distribution costs for the UK are much less than in the US

by KaiserPro

4/14/2026 at 7:02:09 PM

LNG may be priced internationally to some degree, but local distribution of gas by pipelines drastically changes that equation. It may only be a few dollars per barrel to transport a barrel of oil, but LNG is far higher due to the massive liquefaction costs. As an indication of just how much natural gas is not priced internationally, US Henry Hub is down around $3/MMBTu, while UK NBP prices are around $14/MMBtu, if I did that correctly.

When you say that distribution costs for the UK are much less than in the US, do you mean the cost of distributing natural gas? I'm not following your logic there.

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 4:32:26 PM

You seem to be focused on generation and delivery costs. Fossil fuels like coal needs to be mined and then shipped to the power plants.

by dylan604

4/14/2026 at 5:20:37 PM

I'm including the costs of fossil fuel extraction in the comparison here; in the US fossil gas is super super cheap which makes it more competitive with solar and storage than in most places.

by epistasis

4/14/2026 at 4:38:35 PM

Is there a good resource for finding out more about fossil fuel subsidies? There are lots of questionable sources out there, like ones that inform you that oil companies only pay taxes on profits, not on revenue, so they consider that a subsidy. But that is just like every other company.

by Jblx2

4/14/2026 at 4:32:27 PM

You also then have to include the subsidies renewables have gotten. They of course also use distribution infrastructure

by oklahomasports

4/14/2026 at 4:40:40 PM

Or subsidize nuclear because it complements beautifully solar & wind as cheap and clean energy?

by ezst

4/14/2026 at 4:35:20 PM

Can we stop with this? It's not a helpful line of thinking or a useful argument. This is the batman vs. superman argument of children at a comic convention. Arguing whether federal highway funding factors in to the cost of coal is absurdly useless.

"I wonder how good it could be"

It's already here, solar is already dramatically cheaper and has none of the risk profile a global energy market produces. You install solar and you have that energy for decades.

Solar is here and its cheaper, batteries are good enough for utility scale. Now its simply an adoption curve.

Moralizing or bringing up silly arguments about how cost ought to be accounted should be considered harmful to the progress away from fossil fuels. Unless it's your intent to start pointless arguments.

by colechristensen

4/14/2026 at 4:50:24 PM

It doesn't seem like a silly argument to me, and certainly not moralizing. Rather "I wonder..." seems to be an indirectly phrased request for information, an open invitation for somebody who has seen the numbers to provide a link.

But I do think I get your point - the subsidies are there so we should compare the costs as they are.

by WastedCucumber

4/14/2026 at 5:55:25 PM

I also acknowledge that we need energy for pretty much everything, so finding ways to make it cheaper enables a whole range of industrial activity as well.

It’s quite intriguing that we haven’t been able to come up with solid energy policies in the recent decades and it’s all about rent seeking behavior of existing providers that’s holding us back. I don’t understand why we can enable things like Uber/Lyft to disrupt the taxi madalyon system, but become very protective about certain industries, even when it’s in our best interest to explore those areas in detail (regardless of the result).

by itopaloglu83

4/14/2026 at 4:25:45 PM

[flagged]

by actionfromafar

4/14/2026 at 6:41:45 PM

Fusion power has gone from 30 years away to just 8 light-minutes away.

by aidenn0

4/14/2026 at 6:44:36 PM

But the energy prices (electricity and gas) don't go down :-( Then "renewables generate more power than natural gas" is not very meaningful.

by dxxvi

4/14/2026 at 6:52:06 PM

Power companies will charge what they can, and to be fair most of their costs aren't generation, the guy who fixed that HV line a block over when the power went out during a winter storm? He doesn't work for free. And somebody paid for all those huge metal pylons or, if there aren't any where you live, the even more expensive underground cables.

But, the other practical effect is that if you use less fossil fuels you're making the climate worse more slowly. Now, given we'd like it to stop getting worse just making it worse more slowly isn't the whole answer but it does at least help.

by tialaramex

4/14/2026 at 3:58:38 PM

Good stuff. But I would blame the Trump admin more then data centers for coal power plants staying on line. Gas would substitute for the coal ata minimum otherwise.

> Nine coal power plants that were set for retirement last year have had their operating lives extended, including five in response to emergency orders from the Department of Energy.

Maybe the other 4 still stay open without the bullshit DoE order keeping the 5 open, but who knows.

by Ericson2314

4/14/2026 at 4:10:49 PM

It’s worth noting that at least one of those is being kept open against the operator’s wishes, as it’s no longer profitable to operate. That’s how ridiculous these people are about coal.

by wat10000

4/14/2026 at 4:14:36 PM

"you're not allowed to shut this down until after congressman so and so wins reelection."

by cucumber3732842

4/14/2026 at 6:11:32 PM

If an incumbent US Senator's electability depends upon a single coal power plant they're already in deep shit.

On the other hand for House reps the elections are every two years like clockwork, "after they win election" is in effect never because they will already be thinking about re-election, so if that's what they're asking for they mean never.

by tialaramex

4/14/2026 at 4:23:17 PM

A promise of Nuclear SMRs (Small Modular Reactors) is that they could be dropped into existing coal fired power plants and leverage the existing power generation equipment.

Apparently they are failing to attain traction because despite the promise of lower cost reactors due to them no longer being bespoke, their LCOE cannot compete with renewables.

I'd argue that we should subsidize those and help make them happen NOW even if the cost is not as low as it should be, as we need all the energy we can get and we need to get off of fossil fuels NOW to try to mitigate global warming.

by pstuart

4/14/2026 at 4:29:54 PM

The problem with small nuclear reactors is that costs don't scale down linearly with size or power output. Like you still need about the same number of armed security guards to protect the site.

They might be a good option for remote sites off the grid where physical security isn't a concern.

by nradov

4/14/2026 at 5:31:01 PM

Some costs scale down more than linearly, some less. For example, because of the square-cube law, you lose more neutrons through the walls of the reactor, so you often times need a higher level of uranium enrichment, and you produce less energy per ton of fuel, all other things being equal. That’s bad news for SMRs. But many reactor components, being significantly smaller, become much cheaper to manufacture, at least that’s the theory. We don’t know yet. But China is planning to start operating its ACP100 SMR in the next few months, and we will probably hear soon how happy they are with it.

by credit_guy

4/14/2026 at 5:06:18 PM

They are scaled for politics.

Tell someone over 60 or 70 that Poland has better modular reactors than us, and they'll suddenly care.

by lithos

4/14/2026 at 4:27:49 PM

How much is industrial scale batteries for solar?

by dummydummy1234

4/14/2026 at 5:16:31 PM

The LCOE is better than nuclear and nuclear is not getting cheaper while industrial scale batteries continue to get cheaper.

by lukeschlather

4/14/2026 at 5:57:27 PM

For everyone confused by all the different ways, these things are measured. Here’s the simplest breakdown.

Total U.S. energy use: about 27.6 million GWh/yr

From renewables: about 2.5 million GWh/yr

Renewables’ share of total energy: about 9%

This includes the total energy usage, including cars and buses and propane for heating homes and like just about everything else. This is the number we need to maximize.

by dyauspitr