Comments by "jeppen" (@jesan733) on "Why Green Energy Can't Satisfy Electricity Demands || Peter Zeihan" video.

Your analysis has some clear merits, but to my mind, new nuclear power was killed by a regulatory explosion while RE has been nurtured by various subsidies.
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I agree with you on the big picture. Factory-made SMRs like NuScale should be built close to cities, but of course politics gets in the way. (I disagree that nuclear is earthquake-vulnerable, and that it necessarily needs cooling water.) I'd add that yes, intermittent power works but needs lots of hydro or gas for balancing, or storage. Gas is cheap for now in significant areas of the world but it's a finite resource. So longer-term and at scale, solar and wind will need lots of storage. Perhaps that's doable. Otherwise nuclear or coal is needed.
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@TheMrCougarful people said 20 years ago that nuclear is too slow, and people will say 20 years from now that nuclear is too slow. But it really isn't, it's almost arbitrarily fast, and there's no urgency it seems.
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@stevengrice1807 what's holding back RE is intermittence, right? Even if you kill all big baseload, the potential for non-stored RE is still pretty low.
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@rkramer5629 yeah, I call this very common fallacy "Appeal to Capacity".
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@tonywilson4713 well, nuclear is cheap and fast if we want it to be, but clearly there's no urgency so we keep nuclear on the backburner as an option for the future. The US essentially kicks the can down the road using fracked natgas with intermittent RE as fuel savers. Possibly China will lead the way eventually, but it doesn't seem to feel much urgency either.
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@msimon6808 I don't think there's much evidence for such theories, and fracked wells deplete fairly quickly. It'll be interesting to see though how reserve additions keep up with demand in the decades ahead. World energy needs are increasing, and so is the need to balance increasing intermittent RE sources. Natgas use has increased globally 2% per annum, and in the US 4% per annum, the last 10 years.
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@FamilyManMoving although the 86 years include almost 6 times more unproven resources than proven reserves, so it's an estimate that at least aims to include what we'll find in the future. And with a 2% annual increase in production, 86 years is cut down to 50 years. I agree, there's a lot of time and economically it probably makes sense to use natgas with RE fuel savers in the US for the foreseeable future.
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I think the optimal amount of solar on roofs in Europe is zero.
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@andrewc662 it doesn't reduce the load on the grid if it's not in areas of the world that has its peak load in the summer, and even then only the first 5% penetration or so.
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So why doesn't it go faster?
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@adrianpaz472 who cares, that's sunk costs. If solar and wind is cheaper than fossil fuels+maintenance, then the fossils would be replaced ahead of time. Random googlings: "Coal power continues to expand in China, despite the government's pledges and goals. In the first half of 2023, construction was started on 37 gigawatts (GW) of new coal power capacity, 52 GW was permitted, while 41 GW of new projects were announced and 8 GW of previously shelved projects were revived." "India has an estimated 65.3 GW of proposed, on-grid coal capacity under active development: 30.4 GW under construction and 34.9 GW in pre-construction"
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@adrianpaz472 agree that nuclear and hydro can have OPEX costs below 20 usd/mwh, but not coal and gas. If China and India could build RE for CAPEX+OPEX 20 usd/mwh with no limitations, I don't understand why they would build any coal. I don't agree RE numbers are higher. 37 GW of coal construction in China in just half a year is far more than RE, adjusted for capacity factors. Granted, the coal might to some degree replace old and worse coal, but why do even that if they could just as well build 20 USD/MWh RE? It doesn't add up.
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@adrianpaz472 doesn't make that much sense, considering you could retrain for solar/wind jobs. Perhaps the below 20 usd per MWh reports we get are simply not honestly calculated LCOEs, and/or that it doesn't take into consideration high system costs for grid extensions, balancing the intermittence and more that you don't have with coal?
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@adrianpaz472 have you looked into the 2023 lazard report? If you look at page 8, it has levelized cost of energy + cost of firming intermittency. The lowest cost for solar is $60 in a market with very low penetration, and $141 in CAISO with high penetration. The lowest for wind is $55 for a market with low penetration and $132 for CAISO. You can also note how expensive it is to firm solar + storage, meaning that the storage that solar is paired with is far too little to truly firm it. Also, lazard has no sub $20 unsubsidised costs even without firming.
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It's not viable unless you build, but if you build, costs come down. With the current economic structures and current attitudes toward nuclear, this is a catch 22.
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What would be the advantage of forcing people to buy wildly intermittent powersources for their roofs?
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@wam7484 nuclear isn't magical. If you build a lot, you learn and costs go down, not up.
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@dansanger5340 in the early days of nuclear, power reactors were smaller. Also we have plenty of small military reactors. We know the tech works well and we can calculate the costs. I don't really see the problem.
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@dansanger5340 if the world around the year 2000 had said that it would love for solar to be the answer to all our problems and that you think R&D should continue (with no build support), solar wouldn't have gone anywhere. Same for wind, but arguably with slightly different timing. Same for SMRs, but SMRs don't have the intermittency issue and are arbitrarily scalable. SMRs is a great answer to all our problems and it's available today. It doesn't come down to R&D, there are several adequate designs (although obviously the first builds may generate insights and tweaks). Instead, what's needed are support for the first dozens of builds and probably some streamlined regulation. Your assumption that nuclear "will continue to fail unless there is very good evidence to the contrary" is setting up a catch-22 situation. Nuclear succeeded in the 70-ies and 80-ies in many countries, including France, and this is irrefutable evidence that it can and will succeed if we are determined to make it a success.
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@msimon6808 what do you mean by "except for production"? Idk how long US natgas fracking will be viable, and ofc it makes economic sense for you to develop it. But it is finite.
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@FamilyManMoving I have a similar background, I would say. Agreed on better investments and especially SMRs. I think we simply need to build them and costs will come down as trails are blazed through the red tape, supply chains are warmed up and experience is gained. My understanding is that NuScale has NRC design certification, so that would be a good start. Thank you, have a great weekend!
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What if we want electricity when there's dunkelflaute?
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He was adding transport on top of reindustrialization. So 50%+50%. You're exaggerating the energy costs of the fossil economy. Electrified transport doesn't save much, if any, energy. It just provides the flexibility to use other sources than oil.
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America is big. You HAVE to be able to find someone who can get things done without all of Trumps moral failings.
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@kevinaltizer the timing boom and bust cycles are mostly down to luck, presidents can't do much to change that. When they manage to do structural changes to affect long-term growth, it often just benefits the next guy due to delayed effects. Trumps immorality hasn't got that much to do with his policy choices, but rather how he conducts himself personally and how he relates to the office. He sees the presidency as a tool for him to elevate himself, not as an office he holds to serve and make peoples' lives better. He lies like a firehose, he's completely undignified, he's impulsive and dangerous in foreign policy, his business dealings are fraudulent and predatory, and yes, he did try to steal the election and to this day lies about his loss. Also it's completely baffling to me that christians want to vote for him, considering how clear it is that he worships only himself, his dealings with a p-rnst-r, his "grab em by the p-ssy" remarks, his flip-flopping on abortion, his atrocious remarks regarding wounded and killed soldiers (as "losers") and so forth. Honestly, can you convince yourself that he's a believer?
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EVs can draw power when it's cheap, and their introduction pulls additional capacity online. We don't need to wait.
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@kenhelfer8900 no, EVs use the same amount of energy as ICE vehicles if powered from a thermal energy source such as coal or oil.
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@peterd9698 please consider that e.g. electrolysis equipment is expensive, and if that is going to be run when there's excess electricity from RE rather than all of the time, then we need say 4x as many electrolysers, and we also need more storage. Same for desalination, we need to make the facilities much bigger.
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If the place isn't particularly sunny, to the extent solar is cheap, it's only cheap 10% of the time.
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