5 ms·

I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose ever

I was just about to make precisely the same comment. The fear, uncertainty, and doubt about renewables here is ridiculous, and I expected better. I suppose everyone watched too much Landman. China is rocketing ahead in every domain possible, from resource and financial independence, to infrastructure in terms of high-speed rail, bridges, roads, advanced fission reactors and bleeding-edge fusion research. Heavy industry like mining and processing, chemicals, ship-building. Let's not even get into semiconductors. I fully expect them to achieve parity with TSMC before 2030 and surpass them shortly after. Meanwhile, Western countries will say 'clean coal' or have a million different stakeholders squabble about where and how to build nuke power plants.

spiderfarmer 9mo ago
The EU is moving towards 50% sustainable with lots of countries that at 60-75%, while the USA is at 25%. Europe is also at least a decade ahead. And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.
- delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
  > And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely. Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
  - raducu 9mo ago
    > Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar. Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      > Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar. Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.
    - lolc 9mo ago
      Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos. The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.
    - pfdietz 9mo ago
      > unlimited fusion power This is pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by fantasy. Fusion's sole accomplishment is likely to be making fission look cheap in comparison. Just because something became a science fiction trope doesn't mean it's actually going to be a part of the future.
    - soundwave106 9mo ago
      One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of. In that: * Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative. * What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.) * Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such. This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere. The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still. (There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.) (Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)
  - hnmullany 9mo ago
    It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    > it becomes night, it might not be windy. That's where long distance interconnects come into play.
  - stuaxo 9mo ago
    > Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. That's two baskets right there.
  - energy123 9mo ago
    There's words like "cloudy", and then there's proper simulation studies which demonstrate that these concerns are unfounded.
    - delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
      Okay... and? I'm not saying 'let's only do nuclear, and not bother about wind/solar/tidal'. I'm saying there is plenty of money to go around, and it doesn't hurt to spend some of that to diversify our power generation and have some reliable, non-polluting, highly power-dense, high-tech base load (nuclear) that can be quickly throttled to meet demand, and is generally resistant to most environmental conditions. The Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, French, British, and even Singaporean[1] (of all places, one might expect a tiny equatorial city-state to be the last place to think about nuclear, but it is all the same, because nuclear is ridiculously power-dense) governments seem to agree with me. [1]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriously-considering-nuclear-energy https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriou...
      - energy123 9mo ago
        If you read the simulation studies you would know that ~0% nuclear is the most cost effective solution in many locations.
  - matthewdgreen 9mo ago
    Nuclear isn't getting built at any significant scale in the US after Vogtle. We might get a couple of plants opened up (like 3MI) but large scale new buildouts aren't happening until SMRs are available at scale. Anything else is an Internet fantasy.
  - tzs 9mo ago
    > Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy ...which is why China has 40 000 km of UHV transmission lines forming a vast network to move the energy from where it is abundant to where it is needed. They have 8 new UHV projects that started in 2024 or 2025 that will add another 10 000 km.
- api 9mo ago
  If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers? I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons. Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
  - pfdietz 9mo ago
    See if they've actually committed money in a serious way, not in a "if you can actually achieve this absurdly low price point we'll buy it" way.
  - ceejayoz 9mo ago
    > If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers? They're looking for credulous investors in the nuclear startups they founded?
  - natmaka 9mo ago
    NVIDIA wants to run on 100% renewable electricity and already does so: https://nvidia.com/en-us/sustainability/ https://nvidia.com/en-us/sustainability/ OpenAI bets on SMRs (now an ectoplasm, check NuScale...) and solar arrays: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-2025.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-202... , and drives breakthroughs on renewable energy: https://openai.com/index/strengthening- https://openai.com/index/strengthening- americas-ai-leadership-with-the-us-national-laboratories/ Microsoft: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/microsoft-qcells-strike-massive-supply-deal-us-made-solar-panels-2024-01-08/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros... Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Announces-Agreement-to-Acquire-Intersect-to-Advance-U-S--Energy-Innovation-2025-DVIuVDM9wW/default.aspx https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...
  - 9mo ago
kiba 9mo ago
I expect China to overbuild and the west to underbuild.
- jgalt212 9mo ago
  You say that and OpenAI is signing compute deals in excess of 20X current revenues.
  - kiba 9mo ago
    Good point. Reality is more nuanced than simple overbuilding and underbuilding. Still, we aren't really still building enough housing and mass transit infrastructure. That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
- sneak 9mo ago
  I know which error I’d prefer to be making.
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  Overbuilding energy doesn't seem like a problem, if Jevon's paradox applies to ANYTHING, it applies to energy.
andrewinardeer 9mo ago
Whoa boy. I caught Landman for the first time today because my partner was watching it. Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera. Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous. It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again. Oh, and the
- zzzeek 9mo ago
  never heard of this show, I wonder who produces it oh Paramount the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS all running on Oracle (tm)
- 3D30497420 9mo ago
  I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles. I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.
NedF 9mo ago
[dead]
samiv 9mo ago
With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything. If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars. There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China. There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.
- ebruchez 9mo ago
  > There's just no way to deny this. Of course there is "way". All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.
  - ragazzina 9mo ago
    > authoritarian system making massive mistakes Compared to the US democracy?
    - ebruchez 9mo ago
      Yes - so far.
- lateforwork 9mo ago
  China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
  - delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
    > but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best Your current government seems determined to make sure this won't happen.
api 9mo ago
America is stuck in its past, specifically the 1950s-1960s.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  And it's aiming to go further back.
- pphysch 9mo ago
  That would be nice. It looks more like the early 1900s with naked imperialism and crony capitalism right now. Possibly staring down the barrel of a 1930s economic collapse.
HumblyTossed 9mo ago
> I suppose everyone watched too much Landman. No, too much Fox "News".
nullocator 9mo ago
Landman is fascinating because it goes out of its way to bring up valid claims about renewables or criticisms of oil/gas but then spits an insane amount of propaganda and lies at you in quick succession to falsely "debunk" these criticisms or sweep them under the rug. This is definitely not being done for the character's benefit in the show, so its quite impressive how effectively and frequently its tossed in there.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

spiderfarmer 9mo ago

The EU is moving towards 50% sustainable with lots of countries that at 60-75%, while the USA is at 25%. Europe is also at least a decade ahead. And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely.

delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
> And since renewable + batteries is now cheaper than nuclear, we should spend our money and time wisely. Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. Nuclear will output power come rain or shine, and like I said, it's not like China isn't investing in advanced fission. They're throwing money at everything to see what sticks. They're working on SMRs, molten salt, thorium, and more.
- raducu 9mo ago
  > Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, night is a thing, it might not be windy Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar. Nuclear is transcedental. If we had practically unlimited fusion power, we could build underground, grow plants in aquaponics and aeroponics and ride it out in underground cities and farms.
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    > Also, we can't survive an asteroid crash/extinction event with solar. Maybe tell the Chinese they have it wrong and are risking extinction.
  - lolc 9mo ago
    Fusion will be its own extinction event as things go. At our development level, if we develop fusion, we'll have to live underground after boiling the oceans to generate crypto tokens and undress videos. The asteroid is just science unlikely fiction.
  - pfdietz 9mo ago
    > unlimited fusion power This is pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by fantasy. Fusion's sole accomplishment is likely to be making fission look cheap in comparison. Just because something became a science fiction trope doesn't mean it's actually going to be a part of the future.
  - soundwave106 9mo ago
    One of the problems with nuclear is, um, it's ability to cause an "extinction event". Sort of. In that: * Nuclear power plant failures can be very, very nasty. As in, "producing uninhabitable land for eons" nasty. Yes, dam failures are spectacularly nasty, too (but don't create unlivable land as much). Yes, fossil fuel power plants also are quite bad in a "more silent way" via pollution (plus the occasional centuries-burning coal mine fires etc.). All power sources have problems. But this is a pretty big negative. * What this means is that big centralized nuclear is also a big target for rogue actors... similar to dams, but not similar to more distributed energy sources like solar or wind. Blowing up a single solar farm or windmill doesn't have a huge impact, relatively speaking, compared to blowing up a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants thus have to spend extra expense protecting themselves against this sort of thing. (And, in the United States at least, classify much of the process of doing so.) * Nuclear power plants can also be used to produce nuclear weapons. Now this is where the really fun politics begins. Many countries would be really unhappy if their adversary countries start making nuclear weapons from their nuclear power plants. A lot of military stuff has been spent over the last decades trying to prevent such. This last point is where China's solar panel play actually makes more sense compared to nuclear. Think of the politics involved if China builds a big nuclear point in (insert adversary of some other country here). Could be very, very tricky in many cases. Whereas, there is very little if any politics involved with shipping a solar panel somewhere. The distributed, small scale nature of solar panels also means that customers in countries with poor centralized power grids (common in developing countries) are able to use them to bypass the current system. This happened previously in many of these countries with mobile phones, where customers were able to bypass poor centralized phone networks. In this aspect, I think the "decentralized" aspect is far more important than the "renewable" aspect... but still. (There are positives to nuclear, of course; I'm mainly countering the "transcendental" word here. All power sources have plusses and minuses.) (Note: I have heard of work on smaller scale nuclear systems, but I am not certain if even a small nuclear power device completely resolves political or security concerns.)
- hnmullany 9mo ago
  It's two orders of magnitude difference between renewables and nuclear though. China commissioned about 3GW of nuclear and almost 300GW of solar last year.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  > it becomes night, it might not be windy. That's where long distance interconnects come into play.
- stuaxo 9mo ago
  > Eggs in one basket. Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy. That's two baskets right there.
- energy123 9mo ago
  There's words like "cloudy", and then there's proper simulation studies which demonstrate that these concerns are unfounded.
  - delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
    Okay... and? I'm not saying 'let's only do nuclear, and not bother about wind/solar/tidal'. I'm saying there is plenty of money to go around, and it doesn't hurt to spend some of that to diversify our power generation and have some reliable, non-polluting, highly power-dense, high-tech base load (nuclear) that can be quickly throttled to meet demand, and is generally resistant to most environmental conditions. The Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, French, British, and even Singaporean[1] (of all places, one might expect a tiny equatorial city-state to be the last place to think about nuclear, but it is all the same, because nuclear is ridiculously power-dense) governments seem to agree with me. [1]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriously-considering-nuclear-energy https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/singapore-seriou...
    - energy123 9mo ago
      If you read the simulation studies you would know that ~0% nuclear is the most cost effective solution in many locations.
- matthewdgreen 9mo ago
  Nuclear isn't getting built at any significant scale in the US after Vogtle. We might get a couple of plants opened up (like 3MI) but large scale new buildouts aren't happening until SMRs are available at scale. Anything else is an Internet fantasy.
- tzs 9mo ago
  > Renewables are good, but it gets cloudy, it becomes night, it might not be windy ...which is why China has 40 000 km of UHV transmission lines forming a vast network to move the energy from where it is abundant to where it is needed. They have 8 new UHV projects that started in 2024 or 2025 that will add another 10 000 km.
api 9mo ago
If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers? I can think of two possible reasons: (1) it's America, and it's very hard to build anything, and nuclear is smaller and fits on site, and (2) we have an administration openly hostile to solar and wind energy for political "vibes" reasons. Vibes are dumb. I think looking back this is going to be seen as an age of people deciding based more on vibes, which ultimately comes down to tribal dog whistles, than reason.
- pfdietz 9mo ago
  See if they've actually committed money in a serious way, not in a "if you can actually achieve this absurdly low price point we'll buy it" way.
- ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > If they're cheaper than nuclear, why is the AI crowd looking to nuclear for data centers? They're looking for credulous investors in the nuclear startups they founded?
- natmaka 9mo ago
  NVIDIA wants to run on 100% renewable electricity and already does so: https://nvidia.com/en-us/sustainability/ https://nvidia.com/en-us/sustainability/ OpenAI bets on SMRs (now an ectoplasm, check NuScale...) and solar arrays: https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-2025.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/global-affairs/openai-doe-rfi-5-7-202... , and drives breakthroughs on renewable energy: https://openai.com/index/strengthening- https://openai.com/index/strengthening- americas-ai-leadership-with-the-us-national-laboratories/ Microsoft: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/microsoft-qcells-strike-massive-supply-deal-us-made-solar-panels-2024-01-08/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/micros... Alphabet (Google) buys 'Intersect' which "delivers ((...)) infrastructure for data centers and other energy-intensive industries by co-locating industrial demand with dedicated gas and renewable power generation". 4.75 billion USD. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Announces-Agreement-to-Acquire-Intersect-to-Advance-U-S--Energy-Innovation-2025-DVIuVDM9wW/default.aspx https://abc.xyz/investor/news/news-details/2025/Alphabet-Ann...
- 9mo ago

kiba 9mo ago

I expect China to overbuild and the west to underbuild.

jgalt212 9mo ago
You say that and OpenAI is signing compute deals in excess of 20X current revenues.
- kiba 9mo ago
  Good point. Reality is more nuanced than simple overbuilding and underbuilding. Still, we aren't really still building enough housing and mass transit infrastructure. That may hamper us more than anything else. If AI proves to be as beneficial as its proponents hyped, the economic gains will just mostly get soaked up by landowners. Even UBI won't save us, because it will just get absorbed by landowners. Ditto for renewable energy.
sneak 9mo ago
I know which error I’d prefer to be making.
CuriouslyC 9mo ago
Overbuilding energy doesn't seem like a problem, if Jevon's paradox applies to ANYTHING, it applies to energy.

andrewinardeer 9mo ago

Whoa boy. I caught Landman for the first time today because my partner was watching it. Oil, cigarettes and alcohol were all clearly being pushed and promoted. Pretty sure it was episode four where a women rather matter-of-factly stated that one alcoholic beverage when pregnant was perfectly fine - inso much that it was good because it helped her body generate breast milk. Such a weird statement to shoe-horn into this soap opera. Coupled with BBT chain smoking the coffin nails, the rampant shit-canning of renewables and incessant self promotion of how large and wonderful the fossil fuel industry is the money behind the show was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Plus the sexual objectification of women in this show is ludicrous. It's 2026. It seems everything old is new again. Oh, and the

zzzeek 9mo ago
never heard of this show, I wonder who produces it oh Paramount the ones that just decimated CBS News, put talentless propagandist Bari Weiss in charge, and censored a critical report on human rights abuses ordered by POTUS all running on Oracle (tm)
3D30497420 9mo ago
I haven't seen Landman, but I have heard of it. My understanding is that all the characters are pretty miserable, but that it nonetheless weirdly glorifies their lifestyles. I guess it is a bit like François Truffaut's statement that there are no "anti-war films". I imagine if some population segment has chosen to identify with a particular lifestyle (oilman, soldier, gangster, etc.) then it doesn't really matter quite how that lifestyle is portrayed so long as the viewer can make a connection with it.

NedF 9mo ago

[dead]

samiv 9mo ago

With China's huge resources both natural and human it's only expected that China will again reclaim its position as the leading country in science, technology, production and generally everything. If you assume that .5% of population are "einsteins" then China has 7.5m einsteins who are now able to access universities and advance sciences whether it's AI or solar power or self driving cars. There's no doubt about the fact that the future belongs to China. There's just no way to deny this. The economical and political power will shift to China.

ebruchez 9mo ago
> There's just no way to deny this. Of course there is "way". All the above above in itself sounds like propaganda. You forget other political (authoritarian system making massive mistakes), demographic (1.0, probably less in reality, birth per woman), psychological (disillusioned young population), and geographic (food and other imports) aspects, among other things.
- ragazzina 9mo ago
  > authoritarian system making massive mistakes Compared to the US democracy?
  - ebruchez 9mo ago
    Yes - so far.
lateforwork 9mo ago
China draws mainly on the talents of the best of its billion+ population. But America has had its pick of the best of the world's 8 billion people. We are taking a break now, but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best.
- delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
  > but starting 2029 America will resume having its pick of the best Your current government seems determined to make sure this won't happen.

api 9mo ago

America is stuck in its past, specifically the 1950s-1960s.

jacquesm 9mo ago
And it's aiming to go further back.
pphysch 9mo ago
That would be nice. It looks more like the early 1900s with naked imperialism and crony capitalism right now. Possibly staring down the barrel of a 1930s economic collapse.

HumblyTossed 9mo ago

> I suppose everyone watched too much Landman. No, too much Fox "News".

nullocator 9mo ago

Landman is fascinating because it goes out of its way to bring up valid claims about renewables or criticisms of oil/gas but then spits an insane amount of propaganda and lies at you in quick succession to falsely "debunk" these criticisms or sweep them under the rug. This is definitely not being done for the character's benefit in the show, so its quite impressive how effectively and frequently its tossed in there.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]