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I doubt it’s a good strategy to put all our eggs in a photovoltaic basket. I love PV tech, I think it’s incredibly useful for small and medium scale self susta

I doubt it’s a good strategy to put all our eggs in a photovoltaic basket. I love PV tech, I think it’s incredibly useful for small and medium scale self sustainability. And yes, in many areas it makes sense to dedicate a bunch of space to PVs and energy storage. But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat. Until we manage to harness nuclear fusion we’ll need nuclear fission along with hydropower to be the backbone of our energy generation.

pfdietz 4y ago
No, we don't need nuclear. Intermittency of renewables is a problem that has solutions, and the cost of those solutions is low enough to render new construction nuclear entirely uncompetitive in the US and Europe, and likely elsewhere. At worst, if the cost estimates of the solutions are grossly underestimated, this just means we're paying a bit more. At the same time, costs of nuclear power plants are consistently grossly underestimated, so one should honestly address the cost risk on both sides.
ben_w 4y ago
> I doubt it’s a good strategy to put all our eggs in a photovoltaic basket. This is why I still support nuclear despite the cost. Although… > But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat. isn't strictly true. In a magical alternative reality where we can do mega-projects and can ignore geopolitics, antipodal power grids are technically fine, much cheaper than batteries, and don't need any backups. (I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to make one without such assumptions, only that it takes a minimum of about one years' global aluminium production, so treat it as merely an interesting though experiment at this point).