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> By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable. You're posting this and sta

> By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable. You're posting this and statements like it all over this thread without a lot of supporting evidence that indicates very strong probability of it happening. Hacker News currently has a highly-ranked article on the main page regarding how there are massive battery and energy storage problems, and this particular issue is raised weekly here and in the news. Why are you so optimistic that seemingly significant blockers will be for sure eliminated in the short decades to come?

pfdietz 8y ago
The reason to be optimistic about renewables is they have a proven track record of improvement. These experience curve effects are somewhat mysterious, but they've been shown to occur in a wide variety of industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_experience_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_e... Solar has declined in price by 20% (or perhaps a bit more) for each doubling of cumulative production. This empirical observation has been sustained over a history during which solar's cost has declined by more than two orders of magnitude. Wind has showed similar learning effects. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not shown consistent experience effects (or, arguably, any, if one discard as unreliable the numbers from South Korea). Talk is cheap, but renewables have actually demonstrated, in the real world, that they get cheaper as they are built out (and, if anything, the learning rate has increased recently). Nuclear proponents are hanging the future of their technology on the assumption, unsupported by much of anything, that these real world trends will suddenly switch places.

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> By that time, renewables will have marched down their experience curves to an economic position that will likely be unassailable. You're posting this and sta

by icelancer 8y ago

pfdietz 8y ago
The reason to be optimistic about renewables is they have a proven track record of improvement. These experience curve effects are somewhat mysterious, but they've been shown to occur in a wide variety of industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_experience_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_e... Solar has declined in price by 20% (or perhaps a bit more) for each doubling of cumulative production. This empirical observation has been sustained over a history during which solar's cost has declined by more than two orders of magnitude. Wind has showed similar learning effects. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not shown consistent experience effects (or, arguably, any, if one discard as unreliable the numbers from South Korea). Talk is cheap, but renewables have actually demonstrated, in the real world, that they get cheaper as they are built out (and, if anything, the learning rate has increased recently). Nuclear proponents are hanging the future of their technology on the assumption, unsupported by much of anything, that these real world trends will suddenly switch places.