Renewables are just really cheap. Unless the government is actively harming them for ideological reasons they get built. Baseload power plants have a harder time making a profit every year.
Are they?
Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system - either batteries or water reservoirs for pumped storage. That also inclides efficiency of storage, and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
Initial cost per unit is low and they're faster to build - that's the reason of their proliferation - and in case of personal use, subsidiaries.
Compared to nuclear - which takes many political terms to build - politicians can reap benefits early. Because nuclear is superior by every metric except:
- high initial costs
- longer lead time
Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
Why should I as a consumer buy electricity from your extremely expensive new built nuclear power when either my own renewables with storage or grid based renewables with storage delivers?
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and doesn’t provide anything a modern grid needs.
You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system. Few countries are at the stage of the renewable rollout where they need to think about storage. Poland can easily double the amount of renewables without additional storage.
> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.
> Because nuclear is superior by every metric
Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?
> Are they?
Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.
Even when governments interfere, people will still invest in grid independence, resilience, or just access to cheaper rates. Domestic solar makes sense only because the grid is unreasonably expensive for a lot of people.
Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.
Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
Most inverters don't work without grid synchronization. E.g. you lose electricity from your provider and your batteries / stored energy won't work either.
All new projects need to be A++ energy class rated which require you to use renewable energy, which is likely one of the main reasons for these increases.
As much as I don’t like the administration, I don’t think this is necessarily true. Subsidies are being removed but I think most renewable has the chance to hold on its own. I do wish more of the markets worked closer to a an actual market like Texas which incentivizes creativity and trying to maximize. Renewables are so cost effective these days that most areas implement them and then natural gas serves as a useful baseload.
A 747 burns ~9 tonnes of kerosene per hour, creating ~29.6 tonnes CO2. The Monroe Power Plant produces 3400 MWe at ~1 kg CO2 per kWh, so ~3400 tonnes CO2 per hour.
It's a little complicated to weigh stratospheric emissions- the CO2 has a larger impact, and while the water droplets and contrails left by planes somewhat counteracts it (by reflecting incoming infrared) it's harder to compare intangibles like mercury emissions from coal. If you just say its all a wash, that plant is equivalent to 120 747s running full speed.
Private jets consume more like .9-1.5 tonnes per hour, so that's equivalent to ~900 billionaires. That's a bit less than half of them which is probably a lot more than were at the wedding. They also probably parked them instead of leaving them circling in the air.
If there were 90 billionaires who flew 12 hours each way in their private jets, then they probably released around 2.5 hours worth of Monroe Power Plant time over those 90 days- 8458 tonnes. Fun fact, the pilots and flight attendants probably used ~1000 tonnes of CO2 worth of energy etc and exhaled ~25 tonnes of CO2 in that time. 25 tonnes is small compared to the planes (>.3%), but in those 90 days the planes released just .11% as much as the coal plant.
Coal really truly sucks and it's unfair that I can't eat tuna without getting mad hatter disease.
Good, but the main issue in Poland is the usage of cheap coal for individual heating. During winter there are multiple days when you see smog and it's unhealthy to breath outside.
Readit News
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly
Initial cost per unit is low and they're faster to build - that's the reason of their proliferation - and in case of personal use, subsidiaries.
Compared to nuclear - which takes many political terms to build - politicians can reap benefits early. Because nuclear is superior by every metric except:
- high initial costs
- longer lead time
Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/large-solar-arrays-batt...
Nuclear also has non-negligible ecological impact outside the power plant due to mining and processing of nuclear fuel.
Nuclear power is extremely expensive and doesn’t provide anything a modern grid needs.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48' of lanes. 237,250 square kilometers. The "blue square"[1] is 10,000 square km. The amount of land we spend on parking lots absolutely dwarfs it.
> Because nuclear is superior by every metric
Nuclear has not gotten cheaper- why would it? It's a big clockwork. We are not better at building pipes than we were 80 years ago. Solar has and will continue to: plants get more productive, panels get thinner, efficiencies go up. There is no grounding principle that indicates nuclear can be cheaper, and it certainly is not in practice. Solar is far cheaper than coal by capacity much less kWh, and nuclear plants are more complex than coal. What indicates that a 500 MW nuclear plant should be cheaper than a 500 MW coal plant, not counting running costs?
> Are they?
Demonstrably yes, absent weird conspiracy theories. Renewable installations keep opening at much lower costs than traditional plants.
[1]: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon...
Base load is one of those terms that gets wielded without putting numbers on it. It's kind of meaningless without numbers. How many gw of it is needed? Is it whatever we have? Or far less than that? Considering that most countries have been actively removing lots of base load in the form of coal plants and have seen a lot of growth in renewables, you could make the point that whatever that number is, it's far less than it used to be. For the simple reason that a lot of it disappeared without creating a lot of instability.
Coal plants don't have much of a future. Gas plants are more flexible but seem to be increasingly used for reserve power rather than for base load and of course they compete with batteries for that. And the less they are utilized, the less profitable they get. Neither is attractive from an investment point of view.
Most inverters don't work without grid synchronization. E.g. you lose electricity from your provider and your batteries / stored energy won't work either.
All new projects need to be A++ energy class rated which require you to use renewable energy, which is likely one of the main reasons for these increases.
[0] for instance https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessmen...
It's a little complicated to weigh stratospheric emissions- the CO2 has a larger impact, and while the water droplets and contrails left by planes somewhat counteracts it (by reflecting incoming infrared) it's harder to compare intangibles like mercury emissions from coal. If you just say its all a wash, that plant is equivalent to 120 747s running full speed.
Private jets consume more like .9-1.5 tonnes per hour, so that's equivalent to ~900 billionaires. That's a bit less than half of them which is probably a lot more than were at the wedding. They also probably parked them instead of leaving them circling in the air.
If there were 90 billionaires who flew 12 hours each way in their private jets, then they probably released around 2.5 hours worth of Monroe Power Plant time over those 90 days- 8458 tonnes. Fun fact, the pilots and flight attendants probably used ~1000 tonnes of CO2 worth of energy etc and exhaled ~25 tonnes of CO2 in that time. 25 tonnes is small compared to the planes (>.3%), but in those 90 days the planes released just .11% as much as the coal plant.
Coal really truly sucks and it's unfair that I can't eat tuna without getting mad hatter disease.
The original analysis of renewables in Poland in June 2025: https://www.forum-energii.eu/en/monthly-magazine-1
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