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I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but e

I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors.

sofixa 5y ago
> I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors Not every locality will have the place, budget, geography to enable that. Furthermore, "a lot of batteries". Isn't there a shortage of battery production capacity currently? Isn't there a massive shift to battery electric vehicles which will need multiple times the battery production capacity available today? Wasting enormous amounts of space, money and production capacity to be able to offset a couple of hours of no wind/sun seems wasteful and risky.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  The shift to EVs drives down the cost of batteries and scales up manufacturing capacity. Nuclear is never getting built, takes too long and isn’t cost effective against storage and renewables. There is more than enough unused space worldwide for solar, wind, and batteries without impacting more productive land uses.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    The only thing holding back renewables is cost -- particularly that there aren't really off-the-shelf battery storage solutions yet, the reason why this article is a headline is in itself indicative that it's still immature as of yet. However, it's obvious that this is going to be solved soon, the actual battery tech is there. and if cost is the main thing holding back renewables, nuclear will never win, because it's an order of magnitude more costly. It takes a LONG time for something that costs a billion dollars to break even versus renewables that cost $100M.

sofixa 5y ago

> I don't understand why people see this as a problem. Energy generation being a local thing feels like a good thing -- sure you'll need a lot of batteries, but every city/state/municipality already has power plants, sewage plants, water treatment plants, etc. If we get to the point where energy is just this easy thing where you buy off-the-shelf batteries and have some solar panels or wind turbines that need replacement every now and then, that sounds way better than investing billions over decades to build a centralized fleet of nuclear reactors Not every locality will have the place, budget, geography to enable that. Furthermore, "a lot of batteries". Isn't there a shortage of battery production capacity currently? Isn't there a massive shift to battery electric vehicles which will need multiple times the battery production capacity available today? Wasting enormous amounts of space, money and production capacity to be able to offset a couple of hours of no wind/sun seems wasteful and risky.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
The shift to EVs drives down the cost of batteries and scales up manufacturing capacity. Nuclear is never getting built, takes too long and isn’t cost effective against storage and renewables. There is more than enough unused space worldwide for solar, wind, and batteries without impacting more productive land uses.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  The only thing holding back renewables is cost -- particularly that there aren't really off-the-shelf battery storage solutions yet, the reason why this article is a headline is in itself indicative that it's still immature as of yet. However, it's obvious that this is going to be solved soon, the actual battery tech is there. and if cost is the main thing holding back renewables, nuclear will never win, because it's an order of magnitude more costly. It takes a LONG time for something that costs a billion dollars to break even versus renewables that cost $100M.