[FredPret]

Renewables have huge hidden costs as well.

Solar panels and windmills are low density sources - we need a LOT of them to get the job done, and even then you still need base load somehow.

That means a huge amount of extra powerlines and future landfill of defunct panels. Not to mention the very sturdy windmill foundations scattered around the landscape.

Say what you will about nuclear, but all of its negatives are concentrated in a small mass and volume.

The optimal, nom-ideological solution is probably a mix of nuclear, gas, and solar panels.

[Jedd]

I find that people with strong, pro fission feelings, but no hard numbers, often preface their opinions on the matter with phrases like 'honestly' or 'objectively' or 'non idealogically'.

Concentration of power production is just one of the problems that renewables / distributed power generation systems solves.

[FredPret]

I agree with this but going on as if either fission or solar is the One True Electricity Solution is ideological. Every technology has tradeoffs.

[rcxdude]

Nuclear and renewables do not like to share a grid. Their attributes do not complement each other at all, despite their differences, because fundamentally both of them are not dispatchable. In practice what happens is either nuclear has enough subsidies to survive or renewables completely wreck the economics of it by supplying way cheaper power most of the time.

Both forms of generation want to be paired with something dispatchable, either gas turbines or energy storage. A mix of renewables and nuclear is a mix that is weaker than the sum of its parts, not stronger.

[adgjlsfhk1]

solar panels actually decrease load on power lines. every house with solar panels on it reduces the amount of power the grid needs to bring to that house

[FredPret]

In that case, yes. But for solar farms, it's the opposite.

That's why I think we should end up with:

- gas plants: easy and cheap to spin up, can provide district heating

- nuclear: squeaky clean, issues are concentrated in one spot, district heating

- solar panels: super cheap, decentralized, and there are lots of opportunities like rooftops and carparks where we are wasting sunlight right now

I just re-read Critical Mass by Daniel Suarez (great book if you like hard near-future sci-fi) and that has the idea of solar stations in geostationary orbit and beaming power to where it's needed with a phased-array microwave transmitter on the station, and rectennas where you need them on the ground. We can't do this economically any time soon, but that would be clean, and require no power lines

[adgjlsfhk1]

Solar farms aren't really any worse for the grid than other types of power plants that can't be located near cities.

[eldaisfish]

yes, they are worse for the grid, depending on how you define worse.

One interpretation is that solar adds variability to the generation side of the equation and managing that variability is currently a question without a clear answer.

[eldaisfish]

this is false.

Power line capacity is designed around the maximum power that must be delivered. Solar power by itself reduces the mean, and possibly the minimum as well, but never the maximum.

[Scoundreller]

Are we expecting peak a/c loads on cloudy days or something?

[philipkglass]

In some places the annual peak demand is for summertime cooling, but in others the annual peak demand is for wintertime heating. It's too strong to say "never [reduce] the maximum" as the parent post did, but there are substantial regions where solar power can't reduce the needed power line capacity.

[gpm]

You do not, ever, need base load power. Base load power is by definition power generation that does not follow the demand curve because it is uneconomical to do so. In this way it is entirely similar to solar and wind in that it cannot, by definition, fill the entire demand for power and it needs to be completemented by dispatchable power sources.

You do need dispatchable power sources (which you can pair with solar/wind/nuclear/...). Recently that has mostly been in the form of gas peaker plants. Today, in most places, the most affordable form of new dispatchable power is batteries paired with excess solar generation.

The real estate costs for solar and wind are not hidden, you pay those costs up front when you install the projects.