4 ms·
If a $250 million subsidy gets you 2GW of solar/wind backed by pumped storage in 5 years and 1 GW of nuclear power in 20 years it doesnt really make much sense
by pydry 4y ago
If a $250 million subsidy gets you 2GW of solar/wind backed by pumped storage in 5 years and 1 GW of nuclear power in 20 years it doesnt really make much sense to split a $500 million pot of subsidy money 50/50 between the two.
We would get more GW for the buck by using subsidies to really accelerate the expansion of green power generation that is already cost effective without subsidies (solar/wind/pumped storage) rather than throwing money at a form of power generation that wouldnt even exist without subsidies.
If the subsidies were distributed on the basis of stability, GW output and availability then that would be efficient, effective and fair but that would kill off the nuclear industry entirely.
- throwaway894345 4y agoRight, but you’re assuming that solar and wind are capital constrained, and I asserted above (twice now) that they aren’t (that spending more money on solar and wind isn’t going to get more solar and wind deployed because we’re already building it out as fast as we can).
- ncmncm 4y agoMore capital would finance building more factories to enable building out faster.
- throwaway894345 4y agoThat’s not how that works. See the chip shortage for example. It takes a lot of time to build out factories, train personnel, etc.
- ncmncm 4y agoAt any given time you have a rate of capital expenditure you are willing to devote to the crisis. Some fraction of this maxes out production capacity of wind and solar energy equipment. The rest is spent on something else. It can be dumped on building individual nukes, or invested to expand wind, solar, storage, and fuel synthesis equipment production. Only one of those choices feeds an exponentially increasing capacity to respond to the crisis.