For enhanced absorbance, alternative technologies that come to mind could be electrodeposition with additives that preferentially bind specific crystal faces, nanoimprint lithography+etching. I was personally involved in developing an electroless deposition technology that created "black gold" that had broadband absorbance across NIR and visible wavelengths. That sucker was black, and easy to make!
No doubt this would be less energy efficient, but perhaps you reap so much savings by not having to worry about water circulation that it's worth it.
But to be fair, you have to consider your « aside », because nuclear has the tremendous advantage of working when it’s cloudy, dark and you need the energy the most in the winter.
I do not think that we can just compare the prices, or maybe we should also add the cost of storage (that is going down too) for solar.
But currently a mix is probably the pragmatic approach.
Nuclear can't compete. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...
Maybe in some far off future nuclear will have a role... But the global energy investment markets paint a very clear picture: solar + wind + battery is the way.
Or when there’s too much and you’re melting your grid.
The main reason for negative electricity prices are inflexible generators, eg. nuclear and coal, because they can't easily (cheaply) ramp down or shut off. Sometimes it is cheaper to let prices go negative than to use emergency mechanisms (that do exist).
Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in. Specially, a negative price does not mean the grid is melting.
And like you wrote, that's controlled. Agreed with the rest of your comment, especially the bit that pricing is mostly controlled by the worst parties, not by the best. What we are simply finding out is that a grid designed mostly for baseline loads needs fast response generation (for instance: half of the UK putting their kettle on during half time requires so much extra power that pumped storage becomes a good alternative). And conversely, that if you change the mix considerably that you're going to have to have more control over the cumulative effect of many smaller generators.
But there are already standards for dealing with that even absent remote control of resources: as soon as the local grid voltage that the inverters in modern wind and solar plants see exceeds a very specific maximum for a proscribed period of time they fully autonomously back off their capacity until they are well below those maximums again, and then slowly ramp up to avoid causing grid instability due to oscillation.
What grid balancing is all about is to make this all financially optimal, it has relatively little to do with the safety of the grid, it is simply a way to extract maximum capacity without affecting that safety. A coarser mechanism would simply incur some more waste, but given the amounts of money involved it pays off to tune this.
So yes there are mitigations but it still is a major cause of concern I think
I think for myself the main takeaway is that we have come to rely on always available grid power to a degree that we probably should not have. Unfortunately inverters and battery systems that are capable of running in off-grid mode are very hard to come by compared to the on-line variety. Automatic disconnect and synchronization hardware are present in pretty much all inverters but they are connected in ways that the house would not be isolated from the grid and the software does not support such a solution because of the certification requirements.
Interestingly, a large (house capacity, which is a considerable amount of power) UPS does have those capabilities, and charging UPS batteries through a different mechanism than the built in charger is easily doable.
As for that Spanish/Portuguese outage: I fully expect that there will be some regulatory demands made on grid operators, especially with respect to containment of such outages, and possibly a requirement for better interconnection to increase the amount of perceived inertia in the grid. That is the best protection against such issues. Another thing that needs to be studied better is the kind of 'thundering herd' scenario that seems to have been the cause here (that's very much preliminary, but that seems to be the most logical explanation), especially in grid regions with low internal inertia. Such inertia is basically tightly coupled to how much grid synchronized rotating mass there is in a particular section of the grid. The more mass like that the more inertia there is the harder it is to make the grid go into oscillations. This mass is present both on the production side (generators) and on the consumer side (industry, because the prevalence of electric motors). So areas where the are no traditional (non-renewable) sources and very little industry are more susceptible to such kind of problems, especially when they become more isolated.
I'm following this closely because I look at companies in this space with some regularity and it is in fact what I went to school for at some point, it has always been a field that has interested me.
The easiest is probably radio or satellite broadcasts but the topology of the grid, which does change, would also have to be considered. Probably not an easy problem to solve simply?
Both have the same effect. Good distribution of generation and consumption in a geographical sense is something we never really gave much consideration in the past, it wasn't rare at all to have one side of a geographic region to be 'mostly producers' and another to be 'mostly consumers' and where the two sat next to each other it was usually to accommodate some really large consumer (for instance, a paper mill or a steel or aluminum plant). That also allowed for co-generation which is far more efficient. I think we will see more of this as well, and incentives to allow EVs to be used as sinks during times of excess power availability.
Other options are HVDC interconnects between geographically distant regions or to use these to create micro grids, each of which would be less stable than a much larger one but it would serve to isolate problems if and when they occur.
Interesting detail: wind power, while theoretically rotating grid synchronized mass is increasingly uncoupled and powering the grid using inverters. This is for efficiency reasons, the rotors have a much wider range that way, and you then only use furling of the blades to protect the installation from overspeeding and maximum efficiency the rest of the time even if that means rotating at a different speed than what would sync with the grid. This is optional, if the machine is synchronized it will still produce power, but not quite as much because blades are more efficient at higher RPM running flatter than at lower RPM running coarse, though coarse they do have more torque. So by sticking an inverter in the middle you can basically electronically do MPPT for the windmill rather than doing that mechanically.
Over the life of an installation the cost of that inverter is more than paid back in extra power but it has the downside of not having the mechanical mass of the wind turbine rotor and blades as extra inertia. Win some, lose something else...
Ah yes, wind and solar generation crushes the grid (https://x.com/ElectricityMaps/status/1786377006562541825) but that's the fault of all those dastardly nuclear plants germany is littered with, all zero of them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...)
> Negative prices are not all bad: they are an incentive for storage / flexible demand to step in.
Maybe that'll happen, but currently such events only keep increasing in frequency (https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/26/germany-records-453-h...), and as neighbours also install more solar and wind the ability for germany to maintain their grid stability through exports is going to worsen not improve.
Why do market based financial incentives to shift demand and balance supply and demand freak you out so much?
Do you have the same visceral reaction to cheap prices used to shift demand towards overnight periods for nuclear? The frequency of that increased as people built nuclear too. Some even spent millions on storage systems to take advantage of it.
Melting would imply that currents exceed rated capacity of the lines that is entirely impossible due to how the grid is set up. What does happen is that loads that are otherwise not economical to run get turned on and that sources that are remote controllable (which is all wind installations > 2 MW and all solar farms > 10 KW except for residential) are switched off. This is a fascinating subject and worth some study, the thing you want to read up on is called grid balancing.
Typically the day-ahead and the 15 minute ahead markets take care of this with pricing alone and there have been no meaningful excursions due to overproduction of renewables, that's just FUD and it does not contribute to the discussion.
What you could argue if you had read up on this is that there are market operators that do both sides of the market, which sets you up for an Enron like situation because they can make money by front-running. After all, they have a little bit of time between the moment where they know what they're going to do and the moment when they actually do it. Market makers that are also traders is always a dangerous combination and this has already led to some trouble, especially early on in the energy balancing market process. Now it is much better.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewab...
I'm an empiricist.
FUD about "what about where renewables aren't available " is just rhetorical handwaving. The answer, which already exists at nation-level scale is storage and infrastructure.
That table also doesn't say what you apparently think it does: it lists Luxembourg as 89% renewable, which is true, but does not include that Luxembourg only covers about 28% of the electricity it uses, and imports the rest.
Thus Luxembourg's production being 89% renewable is worthless information as to the viability and reliability of wind and solar for baseload: Luxembourg relies on its neighbours for reliable electricity supply.
Nuclear has its own failure modes. In Switzerland, one of the nuclear plants will be offline for winter (!) due to "unplanned repairs". This will cost the owners of the plant millions.
At continental level "no sun and no wind" is extremely rare and doesn't last.
The nature of nuclear power doesn't make it 100% available (no equipment is), therefore a classic way of presenting the challenge, such as "nuclear power is perfectly controllable and it's necessary" (two lies), is a distortion.
The major intellectual fraud consists of considering the characteristics of a type of energy source (renewable, nuclear, etc.) when all that matters is the adequacy of the electricity system, i.e., to begin with, its ability to meet demand.
In terms of the imperfection of sources and equipment, which prohibits us from always expecting them to be ready to produce, the solution is known, applies to all types of sources and equipment, and is already in place: a production fleet containing a number of units that sufficiently reduces the effect of their individual variability (whatever the cause).
The French nuclear fleet is thus made up of a sufficiently large number of reactors (57 in 2025) to make it unlikely that they will all be shut down simultaneously, and for their combined flexibility to increase its "controllability."
This smooths out the impact of imponderables because it is possible to approximate the probability of failure of each reactor (its reliability) and because they are not identical, so the discovery of a defect does not necessarily imply the shutdown of the entire fleet.
A renewable mix at continental level will be way better on nearly all accounts (cheaper, less dangerous, no dependency on any fuel, no durably very dangerous 'hot waste', no weapon proliferation...).
And also when better tech comes along, you can partially transition a farm to newer panels and resell the old ones after market.
Plus you don't have to build Onkalo Repository like systems to store waste for 100,000 years after you've produced your electricity.
It's wildly more feasible.
Of course the tech and science is cool, possibly useful in space or other niche environments, but whenever I see fusion proposed as some general energy solution, I just roll my eyes and move on.
There's already a convenient fusion reactor fairly close by, and it's unlikely to stop operating any time soon.
https://knowledge.energyinst.org/new-energy-world/article?id...
It's a 12-1 over OGC in what the IEA labels "advanced economies" https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-investment-2025
France and China have built nuclear plants in 6 years, and they provide stable power for over 40 years, unlike wind turbines and panels which last maybe 20 for panels (if you're lucky), and a few years for turbine failures, and neither provide stable power.
Renewables have their place but people really need to stop with this panacea nonsense.
Why do think the two countries you mention as being capable of quickly building nuclear are in fact much more quickly deploying renewables?
> Why do think the two countries you mention as being capable of quickly building nuclear are in fact much more quickly deploying renewables?
Short-term political expediency is not an argument for technical superiority or fitness for purpose.
In Fukushima, TEPCO was required pay $1.5 billion. But the real cost is / was around $150 billion. So, the bulk of the disaster was not covered / covered by the taxpayer. So: the public.
According to the French nuclear industry itself a major accident on one reactor may cost more than 430 billion euro (2013). Source (French): https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/crise/cout-economique-...
Biz as usual... https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/accueil#h....
Basically.
The price of solar and battery storage has collapsed. It's really dramatic
This is a log scale https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices?time=earl...
Maybe it will reach that point, maybe not but anyways, you can't plan a grid on non-existing tech. Otherwise I'd pick some better non-existing one
Systems like these are just getting started.
https://stateofgreen.com/en/solutions/storing-heat-for-a-col...
Say what you want about nuclear plants but they work, right now and we have example of countries successfully creating a grid with it.
I can't say the same about the magical batteries.
E: for reference from memory, it took about 50 years to install the first TW of solar. The next TW took 2 years, and the next TW is projected to take only 1 year, 2025.
Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.
True. But both are stories from the same book. Meaning: If more homes install batteries and some become fully off-grid you will stabilize the whole grid without needing to install more power generation. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan (src: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/08/pakistan-energy-affo...) and I expect will happen all over the world as:
1. PV+battery prices continue falling
2. Climate change resulting in more sunny days (one of the very few upsides)
3. The need to become more self-sufficient due to energy price volatility due to shitty govt/shitty grid/shitty neighbors attacking your neighbors
Would be nice to see some subsidy from the govt (is EU listening?) like: "here's low interest loan to take your home off grid payable over 20+ years (expected lifetime of the whole PV+bat system) during which you promise you won't connect to grid".
Nuclear is currently expensive, but you're 100% wrong on those other two. Also, more people die from installing and maintaining solar and wind turbines than have ever died from nuclear, so...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...
I don’t feel like doing napkin math on Saturday morning, but you’d need an obscene amount of batteries, the US uses 500+ GWh per day.
Ideally battery storage density will keep advancing to the point where we can use grid scale backup batteries for long durations but we are not there yet.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities. What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans? That doesn’t even get into industrial electrical loads..
Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries, sorry. Neither is “Let’s use cars to back up houses,” which ignores the fact that most power demand is non-residential.
We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
So what? Something which hasn't been done yet must not be attempted? Or is it doomed to fail?
The transition of many electrical systems is a work-in-progress. A complete re-haul of such heavy industry branch cannot be quickly completed, especially during a global crisis.
> You can safely ignore all the households, they barely use any power compared to commercial and industrial facilities.
Nope.
USA: Residential customers (139.894 million) directly consumed 1,509.23 TWh, or 35.23% of the total.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...
> What is the office tower going to do, use backup batteries from 500 cars in the basement to run dozens of pumps and fans?
A continental mix of renewables can cope most of the time. The point is the 'backup' (when a geographical zone doesn't produce enough and cannot be helped by another zone): dams, batteries, green hydrogen...
> Supplying 30% of California’s power is not 100% backup of the grid with batteries
This is a work-in-progress. 15 years ago some said that renewables will never be able to generate more than a few percent of the current running on national grid.
> We are a ridiculously long ways away from an exclusively solar + wind + batteries grid.
To each is own opinion.
Production trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
https://www.energy-storage.news/edwards-sanborn-california-s...
You want a 320 GWh installation?
You do realize HVDC grids can do 3,000km energy travel, right? That's basically anywhere to anywhere, continental US. There's already installs like the PDCI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie that take 3GW from north oregon to LA.
There's even transcontinental energy links in the works like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
That's closer to 1% of what California needs by itself then even 1% of the USA's need. We aren't even taking into account the large and continual growth in electricity demand yet either.
Unless I'm mistaken, the US consumption is 500GWh/day with peaks at 700GW/day, so 3GWh isn't going to do much
3GWh isn't even at a proof of concept stage yet for this kind of usage. Even 10x that would barely be called a POC.
Which has to factor in the design and cost calculation.
Note in case SMR become part of our grid: what if something similar happens to your hundreds of produced and deployed SMR?
That would be go a very long way to convince me.
Energy got increasingly expensive in Germany the further the Energiewende agenda advanced, to the point that we’re now rapidly deindustrialising.
Turns out base load kinda matters.
That's not exclusively due to the price of energy, though it is a factor, there are other factors (such as the price of wages) that are much larger factors.
The biggest simply being that China is outcompeting Germany on its own strengths through a combination of a lack of environmental regulations, cheap labor and state subsidies at a level that the EU would not tolerate.
You can't really set aside the reality of the electric grid, you have to do with it.
I'd love to have more modern nuclear, but I don't see it happening anymore, no expertise in building them anymore, cost and time overruns all over...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Neat tech, but very inefficient, to make it efficient fluids start needing to be moved around which hurts reliability. The next step up are pebble bed reactors, I don't think any have been built but the idea is to have self contained fuel "pebbles" enriched enough to get hot but with enough built in moderation so they can never melt down. Then a traditional heat engine is bolted on.
And I'm not convinced that particular discovery would yield that kind of performance increase for such an application. There are just too many things different in the environment alone.
If you use ambient temperature for cooling, you are severely limited in your total power output. Like, we're talking about less than a megawatt output (depending on how big the ambient heat dispensers are) compared to the ~1GW of a regular old nuclear plant.
You might say: that's fine, let's just build many small ones. But you still need to track your radioactive material, make sure it's not stolen etc., which is a lot of overhead per installation.
Also, I guess you could have the hot end very hot too..? This improving efficiency. Especially if, by virtue of cooling being safer, you could run it at a higher temperature (less safety margin needed).
Explanation starts at ~minute 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmbZVmXyOXM
All the designs I know of have a pumped (active) cooling loop for the reactor, then a secondary loop where the coolant (typically water) evaporates and drives a turbine, and that secondary loop is then coupled to either river water cooling or evaporation towers. (There might even be another intermediary cooling loop, not entirely sure).
(You don't want potentially radioactive water to interact with your turbine directly, makes it a nightmare to maintain).
> Also, I guess you could have the hot end very hot too..?
There are some limiting factors:
* melting point of your fuel (you really want that to remain solid, so you can control where it is)
* The reactor core is usually contained in a pressure vessel, which is made out of steel. Steel becomes weaker with higher temperatures. Switching to other materials is super expensive (harder to machine, fewer people are good at machining it etc.)
* You really want to be able to reliably move fuel rods and control rods in and out of the reactor; thermal expansion must be taken into account. At the same time, you want as little leakage as possible out of the reactor core.
A "Boiling Water Reactor" (BWR) has the reactor and the turbine on the same cooling loop. The radioactivity in the water going through the turbine is not a "nightmare", it is a manageable trade-off.
Some major currently-operating BWRs are Leibstadt (Switzerland, 1.2 GWe), Oskarshamn (Sweden, 1.4 GW) and several dozen in the USA. Germany also had some, they were shut down a few years ago (e.g. Grundremmingen).
https://www.gevernova.com/nuclear/carbon-free-power/large-re...
There's many ways in which this can happen in existing reactors. You may have a catastrophic leak and lose the coolant - and you can't just send some welders in, what with radiation, superheated steam etc. The pumps that push the coolant around might fail. Etc. etc.
Even when you "switch off" the chain reaction, the fuel rods keep emitting heat from the decay of transient radioactive elements, enough to need active cooling for days or weeks.
So a lot of new reactor designs revolve around eliminating such failure modes. NuScale for example, IIRC, don't use pumps to circulate the coolant, and that's one thing less that can break.
What I'm daydreaming about simply cannot stop working, in terms of cooling. You have something hot in the middle, you let all the heat get our naturally, and you harvest some of it along the way.
What makes them potentially unsafe is nuclear technology having an incredible energy density, which can be misused and the radioactive material being active even without prior activation. The latter makes many radioactive isotopes a very effective poison.
And misuse or bad practices are a general problem. One can build awful buildings, toys or government structures, too.
And if you have a look at what the worst reasonable non-political consequences from a nuclear powerplant meltdown can be, they're surprisingly harmless.
We have to Soviets to thank for their absolutely incompetent response to the Chernobyl meltdown, that we have a good idea of the long term effects. The powerplant never stopped operating, people kept working there every day for decades. Hundreds of people were never evacuated and hundreds more returned within weeks.
Just to put this into perspective: Chernobyl was effectively a dirty super-bomb dispersing 50t of highly active radioactive materials and yet the death count among anyone who didn't approach into rock throwing distance remains 0.
The question becomes is the power production worth the operation and maintenance costs.
Outside of RTGs.
Turns out there’s companies that do hybrid systems! Water is used to cool the PV, increasing the efficiency of the panels in the process, and then the heated water is used wherever you need it.
Unfortunately it seems there’s only a couple of providers, it’s rare to find installers that do it, and it’s ssuuuppppeeerrr expensive relative to the normal options. Such a shame. I wish there were more options here. It seems like a great approach.
With photovoltaic panels being dirt cheap, we decided to rather heat our pool with a heat pump that is powered by our own electricity.
If you fully price it out you'll find it's more cost effective to just spam more PV and use a heat pump, unless you've reached space limits.
You're looking what the cost would be now and I don't think they were suggesting that, but rather as a direction of development for panels.
Luckily this is exactly how things work and why we have continues progress in the area, including with the batteries. Because 10 years ago you wouldn't even bother with super expensive Lithium batteries for home energy storage and go with NiCd, right?
So my very hot take is that a conventional forced air finned radiator treated with this laser process would show an improvement, it is unlikely to be economically viable versus just using a bigger radiator (at desktop/server CPU/GPU scales). At laptop scales it might be more viable given space constraints.
Some parts get very hot, and any electricity produced without engine or fuel add to range / efficiency.
I feel like someone should have caught that before publication.
What you described is the Log2 Fold Change (log2(A/B)), meaning that if A has a log2FC of 15 over B, its signal is 2^15 times higher, hence ≈32,000x.
mumbles something else about 2^15
Words are arbitrary, but there really isn't any dispute what -fold means as a suffix. See the dictionary entry for it https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/-fold
Also as far as i know, this isn't just an english being weird thing, most germanic languages use "fold" the same way.
Why is that? I can imagine doing two folds on a sheet of paper and ending up with three layers of paper. Imo one fold adds one layer.
You can use this to improve the efficiency of a regular solar panel and as a way to still produce electricity when there is less direct light but enough temperature difference.
I’m even willing to accept a lot of inefficiency because new AC’s in the US can cost 10-20k now and you can need them as frequently as every 7-10 years.
The whole industry is really getting absurd.
It is impossible to make a solid state peltier cooler that is even 25% as efficient as a vapor-compression cycle heat pump at removing heat, therefore it will never gain traction in applications where a heat pump can be used.
Over the lifetime of an air conditioner, the cost of the energy used to run the equipment will be larger than the cost of the equipment itself, so efficiency is important if you want to reduce your total cost of ownership. SEER ratings eventually have diminishing returns per dollar spent, but finding the most efficient unit per dollar is time well spent.
My point is this is rapidly becoming not true.
Thanks for the info on the efficiency though. I’m still hoping we can figure something out. If not , we should switch to propane for the coolant. Way cheaper than whatever they keep making manufacture switch to.
Propane is cheap but it has a couple drawback. Flammability, and the refrigerant must be pure so no mercaptan can be added which means if there’s a propane leak, nobody will smell it. This is more of a problem for commercial and industrial units than residential.
Laser patterning is a lot easier than improving thermoelectric device efficiency.
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Given the massive advantage in talent they’ve built up while the Us reverts to Drill Baby Drill we know how this ends.
Eventually the Us with push for atmospheric dimming to “fix” the negative externalities of their approach which had the nice side effect of degrading solar ….
FMl
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