“renewables” are neither particularly desirable nor inevitable. Nuclear is the ultimate energy source of the universe. Even if you can make renewables works well(and you basically need 3 miracles, one in storage, one in transmission and one in capital cost of generation capacity to make this happen) it is just a temporary detour and will be replaced by nuclear fission and fusion technologies.

Posted 2 years by Soylent

Energy efficiency has always been the status quo. It doesn’t need additional incentive to happen. Energy efficiency is not going to play a big part of the solution because of rebound effects; if the demand is elastic efficiency can even increase energy consumption(Jevon’s paradox).

California is not a success story. It is true that you can vastly reduce energy consumption by nuking heavy industry from orbit; but if you try to do it everywhere in the US simultaneously you will turn the US into a third world country.

The 1.7 cents/kWh number almost certainly ignores “friction”. Anyone who does hands-on work in the real world, whether it is programming, engineering, or construction or whatever, has the experiences of all these little snags you weren’t aware of or didn’t fully consider the implications of that pop up when you actually try to implement something. These snags increase cost, time or effort expended; you can reduce the friction by performing a similar task repeatedly and learning to predict and avoid snags for this particular problem; this is what you do when you work yourself down the learning curve.

Posted 2 years by Soylent