These oil rich countries are no fans of clean energy.
Is it merely coincidence, then, that Trump is canceling wind and solar projects in the United States?
Previously Trump also canceled the largest solar project in the United States. Known as Esmeralda 7, the project planned in the Nevada desert would have produced enough energy to power nearly two million homes.
Then Trump went a step further: He is using tariffs to pressure other countries to relax their pledges to fight climate change and instead burn more oil, gas and coal [1].
The oil princes are getting their moneys worth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/trump-internation...
how and why the republican/maga party wholeheartedly adopted Trump's grievances as their own is beyond me
https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-says-15bn-qatar-uae-c...
The jet was gifted to the American people. There's no reason why he should be allowed to fly on it. It goes in the library with the rest of the state gifts.
Generally utility scale solar buys cheap panels that aren't as energy dense as those purchased by rooftop consumers, so you could make the argument. However, the efficiency and energy density of the ever-growing turbines installed by utilities, particularly off-shore, are far more efficient than anything you would install yourself. E.g. average annual wind speed typically improves with altitude, and having a taller turbine can reach those larger sustained wind speeds. Whereas, utilities and consumers almost always install solar near-ish ground level and see the same sky, perhaps the utility installs in a sunnier corner of geography. Consumers potentially benefit from the shading of panels, and lower distribution costs.
The cost isn't as good as solar though. a 1kw turbine is expensive.
I got an offer for a "essentially free" residential turbine including the pylon (8 to 10 meters, the legal limit for a "Kleinwindanlage") in SW Germany - just had to dismantle it and put it on my lawn. And of course pour a huge foundation [2x2m?] and have an accredited electrician do the necessary alterations. Nope. It didn't even produce enough electricity to offset the maintenance costs - no idea how I should offset the costs for moving it, even with the free capex.
And I did the math about 3 years ago: Prices for both PV and batteries dropped a lot since then. For late fall/early spring I would be better off by adding a PV carport (2 cars). I could also finally automate charging my batteries while electricity is cheap during Dec/Jan, might even be worth bumping my existing battery from 28 kWh to 42 kWh.
To be fair: The math might work out in the Northern Germany; but I would not bet on it.
Obviously, cost scales more than linearly with blade length but it’s a bit like big O - the n^2 factor dominates. This is why wind turbines have been getting bigger and bigger. And why the cost of domestic or small-scale wind turbines remains stubbornly high despite the dramatic fall in the average cost per MW seen for wind turbines - as the falls are largely driven by the ability to manufacture larger and larger turbine blades. While falls in costs for solar PV can be seen at every scale.
https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
Edit: Looks like they were a bit late to veto it here though.
It seems to me this is very much intentional to keep oil demand up and prices high.
Gold painted wind turbines. Art of the Deal!
Who are we afraid of? If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending. Regardless of whether we prevent wind farms in any of the 12,000+ miles of coastline.
Are we expecting missiles to come from the Gulf of Mexico? People always bend over backwards to justify this administration. It's tiresome.
its up to discussion. US has many measures which combined could give them a chance to survive nuclear war, namely: preemptive strike by tridents on enemy's silos(https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...) and anti missile defense.
> Are we expecting missiles to come from the Gulf of Mexico?
there is a possibility of submarine launch from that direction.
It looks increasingly like a US vassal state for every year so that part wouldn't be so surprising.
Besides, the article you posted does not support your claim that Sweden blocked all offshore wind construction. On the contrary it refutes it by mentioning some greenlit offshore wind construction projects.
This is the kind of thing you know years before construction is even funded, much less started.
This is a US administration being dishonest, whether for stupidity or to apply political pressure who knows.
There are several other comments above that allege other countries have come to the same conclusion regarding offshore wind farms having a negative affect on radar.
Not much on details besides a “classified study“ but sounds pretty transparent to me?
This is delusional. The US has been spending metrics fucktons of money on national security since long before Trump.
Biden, like trump, was absolutely a war monger, as almost all US presidents are. He was a center neoliberal politician who love love LOVED the military industrial complex, and it shows in all of his policy choices.
This characterization of the modern American Democrats as communist hippies is just so out of touch with reality it's not even worth humoring. It's just wrong. You're wrong.
I smell BS.
All other things equal, opening a literal breach in one of the white house's exterior wall seems like it would cause a "national security" issue if the construction project was not finished and the hole remained gaping afterwards.
Which is precisely why US defence agencies are heavily involved in the permitting and design of these wind farms from the start, to account for these valid issues.
This is particularly relevant for low-altitude incursions and drones.
Now, other large governments (UK) have resolved this in several ways, including the deployment of additional radars on and within the turbine farms themselves.
So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.
You could mount interceptor drones on them though. Like https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80
Same applies to how this admin forced layoffs at the green energy (hydro + nuclear) behemoth BPA [1] (which was funded entirely by ratepayers, not the federal government) then claimed an energy emergency to keep open coal plants serving the same geographies, coal plants that were already uneconomical and planned for shut down (or re-tooling to gas in the case of TransAlta's plant in WA). [2] Oh and they already re-hired some of the laid off staff at BPA because they overcut.
There is no point in taking these arguments at face value. It's an excuse generated after-the-fact, and in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
[1] https://www.columbian.com/news/2025/mar/12/letter-cuts-at-bp...
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/doe-or...
Fascinating, I haven’t heard this from anywhere else is there something specific you are referring to?
Maybe this? https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...
Its not clear what specific programs this $408 million cut would affect but frankly ARDP and Gen III+ reactor development are not needed. What is needed is large construction investment in existing approved designs like AP-1000 and BWRX-300 which is what the $80 billion pledge is for. “The full details of the $80 billion deal, including the precise allocation of financing and risk-sharing, have not been specified.” With no contract signed your skepticism is warranted. https://www.ans.org/news/2025-05-05/article-7001/trumps-fy-2...
Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.
Good news? Net new solar and wind plants can come "online" in less than two years. Net new natural gas takes four years. Part of why 95% of new energy deployed last year were renewables in the US, not just the subsidies.
It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.
A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar
- Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack
- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak
- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours
- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much
source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).
Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).
I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
> Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.
I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant
Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess.
I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.
Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago.
Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.
It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.
>cutting costs at every corner
Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?
No, this is literally the opposite of what happened. They did not want all the operators to go through lengthy and expensive recertification processes as required by the FAA so they make the system as close as possible which likely cost them millions of dollars.
The issue was that pilots were not aware, they received very little training and knowledge on the subject when they should have had more (just not a new type cert)
Lost me right here, MCAS may have been motivated by losing type certification (as it should), but everything they did was not a result of regulations. Including upcharging to make the system actually redundant. Had they actually engineered the MCAS properly, they would have never gotten caught in the first place.
Yup: It really is big, it really is scary.
Isn’t that just code for trying to violate regulations without getting caught?
Clearly the system worked as intended because nobody had to be re-certified to fly the aircraft but being completely unaware of an additional control layer is dangerous and should have been known about by pilots, but Boeing kept it hidden.
Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs.
Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good.
This is not accurate.
Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has.
The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good.
And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.
Absent that, when a coal plant goes badly wrong, the damage is small enough and localised enough to be affordable.
When a nuclear plant goes wrong, the upper bound for error includes both Chrenobyl and also "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" followed by terrorists repeating the Goiânia accident somewhere.
Making all the failure modes not happen is expensive.
p.s. ICE cars are literally spewing cancer fumes right into kids faces. 0 fucks given. If anything people try to frame EVs as actual devil.
I swear HN is infested with bots now.
It isn’t going to kill me via the route you suggest: by giving kids cancer.
It’s Christmas very shortly, try not to be this much of a cunt around you’re family.
Wait till you meet your attitude!
It's cancerogenic. Namely causes leukemia. 20k deaths per year in US alone.
But yeah, throw some jokes around. Maybe something about lead retarding detonation?
Not that I could've enforced it for all those years even if I had an army, as coal was dominant for so long for the same reason it is now being rapidly displaced: cost.
The Goiânia accident caused four deaths.
The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.
Got any real complaints?
And why was that allowed? Because of quality regulation?
Others I guess the answer to your question is: fuckwit communists were running the place at the time.
Aside from that, “because communism” is not a serious answer.
This reads a bit like "why do we need a QA department when we don't have any bugs"?
The reason nobody stole the stuff from reactors is because everyone has, by international law and also nonbinding recommendations, security and armed guards making sure they don't. These are not free.
The Goiânia accident was stupidity, not malice, so you can't predict how many people would die if it was done maliciously from how many were killed. My understanding is what keeps people (relatively) safe from this type of attack at the moment, is the public deployment of radiation sensors since 9/11, which we know about because of people with radioisotopes in them for medical reasons getting caught by them. These are not free.
The Chrenobyl reactors were housed in what’s "best described as a shed" because that was cheap. Same for all of the other design issues with those reactors: it made them cheap.
The rules that make reactors expensive are written in incidents.
For starters: I think clean coal is absolute nonsense (I’ve cited the White House’s outrageous stance on this several times on HN) and people brush away the environmental, social, and general health impacts of coal to their own peril. We know the harmful impacts. We know the body count. We have alternatives and it’s time to move on.
I am absolutely 100% critical of the coal industry/power - far more than I am of nuclear. It doesn’t even compare.
So to answer your question:
> But why not same scrutiny for coal?
I’ll give you the same answer I give every person who gives me this tired refrain without ever even trying to suss out what I think about coal: I am. You are misinformed. And it has no impact on my desire to demand the highest safety standards for nuclear power.
It's a heavy capex business with very small marginal returns, that takes planning on the order of decades.
AKA, a US company's worst nightmare. Investors don't like that shit, they like half-baked software that code monkeys can pump out.
indeed, that's the case for many businesses, even with little-to-no regulation, so it's hard to agree with your opinion there.
e.g. most of the cost of hiring a plumber is a "cost of people" – buying torch fuel and fittings is a much smaller fraction of it.
The biggest issues people usually have with any construction work is dealing with the city/county because they throw up the most roadblocks and you do not have the freedom to choose, in the case that there is no free market available the regulation must be good, cheap and efficient, a bit off topic but alas
Most work you'd hire a plumber for does not require any sort of permit. Fix a leak? Replace a toilet? Install a water hammer arrestor? Unclog a toilet? Hydrojet a sewer line? etc. None of those have ever required a single permit for me. A recent $450 quote to install another shutoff valve was about 95% labor, 5% parts, 0% bureaucracy.
In fact, I would be surprised if there was a single location in the US where permits constituted "a large majority of the costs" of plumbing work done in that location. I honestly don't know what you're talking about there. Maybe you could share such a location?
Indeed, the cost of most construction work is not dominated by any sort of bureaucracy or government-mandated paperwork, but by materials and people doing the work. If I bought a new house for $1M, regulation did not constitute $500,000 of it.
> The biggest issues people usually have with any construction work is dealing with the city/county because they throw up the most roadblocks and you do not have the freedom to choose
This is simply not the case. Maybe you're talking about the issues you personally have. The biggest issue people usually have with construction is the cost, and the biggest part of the cost is the labor and materials, because you live in a high-COL country. The current inflation and tariffs we're seeing don't help. I guess if we want to bring costs down by cutting regulation, the overwhelming tariffs (aka very expensive regulations) would be a good first target, and that would help address inflation, too – bonus cost savings!
> I am against overwhelming bureaucracy
So is everyone else, but is hiring a plumber expensive because of "overwhelming bureaucracy"? No, it's because it costs money to pay the people who do the work.
Blaming regulations seems like trying to find a scapegoat rather than admitting reality.
The people who don't agree with you are largely reasonable, as you likely are, and are no more infectees of a "mind virus" for holding their opinions than you are for holding yours. There's no need to denigrate them, or misrepresent their views to try to make your point. Indeed, many of them arrived at their opinion after seeing what happens when people push for not-enough regulation: Once bitten, twice shy.
If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people.
This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.
You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.
Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."
I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.
Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.
People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.
Different people
Would to prefer underregulating it?
How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
No
> How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science
Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes
Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept.
The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.
However, ‘Paid off nuclear’ in terms of construction costs still needs to worry about decommissioning, and their maintenance costs keep increasing every year.
Several power plants have looked at going offline for potentially years and spending billions at around year 40 to get to year ~60 as not being worth the investment. That’s the issue with projecting those long lifespans, the buildings/containment structure/cooling tower may be fine but that doesn’t mean the pipes, pumps, turbines, and control systems etc are still fine.
Somebody must be able to point to the nuclear waste by now. There it is, waving frantically in panic, the nuclear waste! It’s coming right for us!
Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.
But never both highly radioactive and for a long time.
In reality, there is so little nuclear waste that most of it has mostly been stored on site where it was generated, taking up less space than any grid scale solar or wind.
Good question! Since you asked: it is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.
> Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.
This is not true at all, unless you consider "short amount of time" to include decades to centuries to millenia.
Exactly what I said.
> This is not true at all
Yes it is.
I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence, then all we’ve got is opinions.
If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with mine.
Pure Americium-241 is extremely radioactive 0.0000045 grams of the stuff puts off useful amounts of radiation for smoke detectors, it’s half life is also 432 years.
As an alpha emitter it’s not that bad to stand next to but internally it doesn’t take much to be lethal.
Also, I don’t know how to gauge “useful amounts of radiation for smoke detectors”.
α-particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper.
This is a manufactured product not waste from a nuclear reactor. We use it because it’s an alpha emitter, there’s harder to shield material with similar half lives they are just less useful. I bring this up because longer half lives don’t mean safety. If you’re looking for a weapon, salted nukes are the stuff of nightmares if they use something with a month long half life or several hundred years.
> I don’t know how to gauge
And that’s the issue here, you need to do some more research before making such statements.
Actually, it's exactly what I said. Here's the quote:
>It is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.
See? Exactly.
> Yes it is.
No it isn't.
> I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence
lol, you never provided us with any in the first place! Why would I waste more time and effort disproving some claim of yours, than you spent trying to prove the original claim in the first place? That'd be falling for gish gallop.
Until you produce sufficient evidence to convincingly prove that your original claim is true, we can safely assume it is not. So, onus is on you: It's up to you to prove your own point, nobody else. If you’ve got data, let’s see the data.
Add all that stuff up and fuel is a major expense. Granted that downtime depends on the design, and is also used to do other maintenance tasks but without refueling you’d end up with different tradeoffs.
It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.
I disagree. building big infrastructure projects always scales well. As stated by the project managers at Hinkley Point C (the most expensive nuclear reactor ever) they estimate that build times and cost will be significantly reduced for the second reactor due to the knowledge and expertise baked into the workforce. Frances nuclear revolution during the 1972 oil crisis also shows the same thing with construction cost getting lower the more reactors built.
There are other reactor designs that do not use uranium that have been tested and hypothesized.
Unless you are the US Navy. It probably helps that they churn out dozens of the same few cookie-cutter designs without needing permission from NIMBYs.
The highly enriched fuel is used because it simplifies the design and maintenance. It eliminates all the machinery you'd need to support things like operational refueling of the reactor. Old designs still needed to be rebuilt every 25 years but the new ones are sealed systems that are never supposed to be cracked open over their design life.
I think the main reason we don't use HEU in civilian reactors is non-proliferation concerns, valid or not. Ideally you'd want maximally simple, sealed reactors for the same reason the US Navy does.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power...
At 1.5-1.7x the cost of diesel ship, and the "well-managed" Virginia class costing $3.6B, we are at over $1B for 60MW of power, 200MW thermal, which is far worse than larger civilian reactors per watt.
The reason we use nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are their far superior operational characteristics when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. That benefit is massive and well worth it. For terrestrial grid electricity those benefits don't really exist.
This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.
Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...
This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.
And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...
There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.
What?
That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA.
That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).
Citations:
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-...
https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-s...
https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report
https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-w...
Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage
A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c
The only answer we're using is to build 1:1 natural gas capability for solar, which is roughly double the cost. That's a solution, but it needs to be accounted for when comparing options.
Mostly relying on long-distance transmission has high costs in capex, opex (losses), reliability, and security.
Natural gas and fossil fuels are not our only options, they are the easiest options.
Places like hospitals have back up in case the mains goes out. It’s no longer a back up if used as the primary supply.
> You’re ok if governments give up and simply tell consumers “you deal with it”?
Paying people to be prepared and willing to go without electricity in times of extreme supply-demand balance is a part of the solution. It's a regular thing for data centers, hospitals, etc. It may be cheaper to pay people to install sand batteries than to install longer-distance interconnects, and if people voluntarily agree, why would you object?
Sounds pretty windy to me.
https://www.ehn.org/europe-faces-challenges-from-low-wind-an...
These are numbers from the known far-right organization....err... Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/cost-o...
> Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x?
Exactly. And you need closer to 100x for some locations (Germany) for the solar to be reliable enough.
Solar is _very_ cheap when you don't care about reliability, and impossible otherwise. Wind is a bit more nuanced, but in general has a similar story.
Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?
> Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?
Solar is not dumb in some parts of the US, like California or Nevada. It's dumb in the Pacific Northwest or Minnesota.
On the other hand, offshore wind is the _only_ form of renewable energy that is at least a bit reliable due to the inherent diurnal wind patterns near the shores.
The cost is also affected by the percent of energy coming from wind+solar+batteries vs. from natural gas. Wind+solar+batteries are cheap when they are used to supplement natural gas. If they were supplying 95% of generation (Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity 95%, LFSCOE-95), then the price of wind+solar+batteries would be $97/MWh compared to $37/MWh for gas, and $96/MWh for nuclear. For LFSCOE-100, the price of wind+solar+batteries increases to $225/MWh, compared to $122/MWh for nuclear and $40/MWh for natural gas.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
So yes, natural gas is much cheaper than nuclear. But that doesn't mean that nuclear shouldn't play a large role going forward. The moral of the story is that the price of energy is complicated. It's likely that a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and battery backup would be the best option in terms of price and carbon emissions.
Sure, happy to quibble over units.
The most recent mid-2025 data is from lazard here, it echos exactly what I'm saying.
Website: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...
PDF of report: https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Go to page 8 of that PDF and you will see these ranges for LCOE:
* Solar $38-$78/MWh
* Solar + battery $50-131/MWh
* Gas combined cycle (cheapest fossil fuel) $48-107/MWh
Yes, we are finally at price parity for the technologies.
My point is not that we can or should replace wind and solar with nuclear. It's that it is far cheaper to use a combination of nuclear, wind, and solar than it is to use 100% wind and solar.
Yes, the 95% renewables is the number we should be shooting for not 100% as that causes battery backup price to explode.
I have been pro-nuclear for a long time, to disappointing results naturally. So, with how well renewables are doing I've really just jumped on this train and seen nuclear as more of a distraction from the critical next 10-20 years given how long it takes to come online.
At the end of the day the grid is only about 30% of the emissions problem (depending where you look).
I don't see nuclear as a distraction, I see it as a piece of the puzzle. We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power. Whether that comes from natural gas, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, etc. depends on geographical considerations and what tradeoffs we are willing to make in terms of cost and carbon emissions. I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
I'd love to be France (~50%) but there is so much pushback against the technology due to accidents that happened decades ago with generation II plants (chernobyl + three mile island). We're now building tech for gen III+ plants and there is just almost no appetite to build them, we finished the vogles and now are completely pivoting to SMRs, which is fine.
SMR is probably what makes the most sense even if they're less efficient because until now the nuclear plants have not been very standardized which increases costs.
Why do I think nuclear is a distraction? Because I don't think it's a like-for-like replacement of fossil fuels and this admin knows that. They're willing to invest because it won't disrupt their biggest donors. The time horizon on nuclear is long, and there is a future (I hope) where we have nuclear plants hooked up to carbon capture technology and we pull these gasses out of the atmosphere. But until then what is the cheapest and most efficient path between current emissions and a massive cut in them? Renewables and battery tech (that's currently undergoing very dramatic cost reductions!).
Which can be for example gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. Optimizing for lowest possible CAPEX and acceptable OPEX.
The nuclear power lock in are engineer brained imaginary perfect solutions rather than accepting good enough.
> I'm still optimistic that small modular reactors are going to see success in the coming decades.
We’ve been trying to build ”SMR” since the 50s. It has never worked out. The industry likes producing fancy PowerPoint reactors in hopes for handouts and stupid money investment.
When they get far enough and have to present real costs and timelines the projects are shunned and forgotten. Like NuScale and mPower. And the boosters online move to the next juicy SMR project.
But I don’t understand how the combination of nuclear, wind and solar would be low cost. Wouldn’t you effectively have to build out enough nuclear to cover still cloudy days at which point your wind and solar is not very useful? That sounds expensive.
I suspect we won’t end up building much nuclear because we will already have built out so much wind and solar. Nuclear is a poor fit for filling gaps in generation by intermittent renewables because fuel costs are negligible so it costs the same whether you run at 50% or 100% of rated output.
To eliminate carbon emissions entirely we will need some green hydrogen for turning into aviation fuel and as chemical feedstocks. Perhaps the gas backup will eventually burn that.
Green hydrogen has to first prove itself that it can become economical viable. One of the biggest test trials for that is the Swedish initiative, and that one is mostly paid through subsidies and grants. Sadly it isn't looking very great even if the government did decide to continue sending more billions into the project.
Intermittent renewables and batteries will get us to 80% carbon free electricity generation for more quickly and cheaply than nuclear. While nuclear might make sense in the very narrow use case of 100% carbon free electricity generation, given we also need to decarbonise non-electrical emitters, it will probably reduce more carbon emissions per dollar spent to instead spend that money on even more cheap intermittent renewable generation capacity and use the excess to generate hydrogen. At the point hydrogen based fuels may make sense to use as a buffer for intermittent electricity generation.
Most of the time when I try to find any data there is the underlying assumption that the charge cycle is a day and night cycle, where the day produce the energy needed during the night, and not a seasonal storage that basically has a single charge cycle per year.
It is much cheaper in the rest of the world. Recent Chinese storage prices are down to ~$50/kWh.
The problem with these ”system costs” analyses is that they don’t capture the direct physical incentive structure of our grids.
Why should someone with rooftop solar and a home battery buy $180-220/MWh when they have their own electricity available?
Why should they not sell their excess to the grid cheaper than said nuclear power? It is zero marginal cost after all.
You can call it tragedy of the commons but new built nuclear power simply is unfit for our modern grids.
We need firming for near emergency reserves coming from production with the cheapest possible CAPEX without an outrageous OPEX.
Likely gas turbines running on carbon neutral fuels. But only if we determine that they are needed in the 2030s.
New built nuclear power simply doesn’t even enter the picture in late 2025.
A cost model has a lot of independent variables. It can be a weird function of the quantity you want of each technology. Not everything gets cheaper at scale. And you need to be able to manage time-varying demand.
For easy example: a few solar or wind farms cost $X to bring up, but to go large scale you need to also store or transmit the energy, plus keep fallback options. That makes 95% or 100% reliance prohibitive.
There is also the speed of powering on/off. Gas combined cycle turbines are fastest to come online/go offline, followed by hydroelectric (if you have it). Coal and nuclear are at the slow end. You need to have the ability to match total sources and loads at any time.
Just some intuition why total cost is a complex function.
People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.
Also, you (and everyone else in the thread) are listing capacity costs. Nobody cares about capacity costs except the CFO of a utility. Utilization costs are what matters. And by that (honest) metric, nuclear is quite cheap if you exclude the extra costs due to scientifically illiterate eco-activists and regulators.
People like to say that "A diamond is forever" is the best marketing effort of all time. I disagree, the ability of FF extractors to get ecos to do their dirty work for them is far more "impressive" (from a POV lacking in ethics).
PS The number of outright falsehoods in just this thread about nuclear should prove my point. Just research about how nuclear pays for cleanup and compare that to some comments in this thread for an example.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.
Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.
More power is always good (see china being 1# in solar, nuclear and wind lol), and it's known that the cost of energy directly correlates with growth right now there is no excuse for cutting any federal workers in the energy industry.
Also killing all humans, what idiots.
Even though you can partially work around the issue with better onshore equipment or just placing the stuff on the other side of the interfering equipment it is still a step down from not having any interference in the first place. Especially if you want to keep your listening equipment secret.
I’m clueless in this field tho.
I suggest you stop spreading misinformation.
The military will need to figure out how deal with off-shore wind no matter what.
So obviously the government can spend some of that $1T military budget on fixing their coastal radar.
I thought Massachusetts just won in court to get their money or construction resumed, wonder if this means they have to go back to court.
By has become, you mean always has been, right?
https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-natio...
Given that this is the same Supreme Court that ruled Biden (or Trump) could have them all shot[1], it seems near-certain that you're correct.
1. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf (JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR dissent, pages 29-30)
Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.
The orange shrimp pulling the “national security” card now, on the same day as he also creates a new Greenland debacle, is very clearly simply an attempt to strong arm the danish govt into Greenland concessions (in turn simply to please his fractile lille ego)
When these wind farms were permitted many years ago, shipborne drones were not part of the threat matrix. It was considered purely hypothetical even a decade ago because it was not an imminent capability for any country even though e.g. the US DoD had studied it. In the last few years shipborne drones have emerged very quickly as a substantial practical threat, largely due to the Russia/Ukraine war. Governments around the world are struggling to adapt to this new reality because none of their naval systems are designed under this assumption.
Whether or not this is convenient for Trump doesn't take away from the reality of the security implications.
First of all: occam's razor. Political theatrics seems simpler than the US defence/intelligence forces sudenly realizing that drones can be launched from ships. Esp. with the timing involved.
Second: Established/traditional radar systems cannot spot drones. Take it from someone living in a country that recently had its airspace violated by (assumingly) Russian drones, affecting national infrastructure. It was considered an attack at the time. I don’t think thats the word we use any more, for political reasons.
Third: Trump already shut down one of these windmill farms once this year. Until the danish company building the park sued and got the courts word that the shutdown was illegal, and resumed construction. The current shutdown has much larger impact for many multi-national companies. Usually there is a political process expected between allied countries before such a drastisc move. We havnt seen that ie no attempt to solve a concrete (security) issue before punching the red button ie probably because there was no motivation for a solution ie the security issue was probably not an actual issue)
Fourth: Earlier this week the danish intelligence services released a new security assesment of USA (that takes Trumps behaviour on the international scene into account). That probably hurt the little mans ego, and now we see a retaliation. This provides yet another motivation for Trumps action, besides factual, real security concerns.
Looking at this purely from the security aspect is naive, and fails to consider the context of the real world.
granted Trump probably isn't thinking that, but the concern should be real. We need better drone defense before someone (Russia, Iran...) starts anonymously shooting down airplanes.
Ukraine makes drones vastly cheaper than the current counters and so we can be bankrupted trying the current counters.
Using $1m a piece missiles
That is incorrect. There are any number of ways in which a clock might be broken such that its hands are not in the correct position even once per day.
The phrase more commonly starts with a ‘stopped’ clock, which works more clearly.
Can we stop overusing this term? It has already lost it's significance. Every political leader you don't agree with is a dictator nowadays. What kind of shitty dictator he is anyways if he is being shut down by courts left and right, and has to shut down the government waiting for the Congress to approve budget? You do know that dictators don't give a fuck about courts and parliaments?
Trump has been charging at windmills ever since he was defeated in UK courts in a case where he didn't like that wind turbines (that provide enough power for 80,000 homes) could be seen from his golf course.
Determining whether any pair of sequential samples represents the same entity or two unrelated entities is an extremely difficult inference problem with no closed or general solution. If there is too much clutter, it becomes almost unresolvable. Aliasing will create a lot of false tracks.
History has shown that any heuristic you use to filter the clutter will be used by your adversary as an objective function to hide from your sensors once they know you are using it (e.g. doppler radar "notching").
For this reason the inference algorithms are classified but they will degrade rapidly with sufficient clutter no matter how clever. It is a limitation of the underlying mathematics.
There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.
Off shore has always been politically contentious because it's much more dependent on subsidies, it's a battle for/against rent-seeking. One party is in favor of this particular kind of rent-seeking and the other party isn't (they will be in favor of a different kind, no doubt). The subsidies are necessary for these deployments to make financial sense, and if they went away, then it would just be a bad place to put a windmill.
There is no national security issue, there is no real case for energy infrastructure either. This use case needs government money to make sense, and is therefore sensitive to political fluctuations.
You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
Because that's what economists call it when you get something for nothing, as is the case with any subsidy. I'm not going to argue this point; interested readers can look up how these energy projects are financed. Windmills that are privately funded, including debt and risk show you where it actually makes sense to put a windmill.
> Offshore wind is efficient, turbine blades can safely be much larger giving 3x the output, turbine arrays have unobstructed space giving twice the capacity factor. It's more efficient than onshore.
Not going to argue with any of this, although you left out maintenance costs, and larger blades means more value at risk. I'm not convinced that your efficiency calculation is measured in dollars and not windmill hours.
I would caution any engineer types reading from pressing their nose too close to the details of a particular energy technology. Instead, it's better to focus on the business plan or economic shadow that a particular energy project leaves. Dollars go in and energy comes out. A bunch of money has to go in up front, then trickles of money slowly over time, and occasionally spikes of money have to go in randomly. In exchange there is a modest, predictable flow of money out, which eventually is larger than all the in-flows in the bull case. The question to ask is: how much in and out of dollars and of Joules at each point in time? How does that compare to hamsters on wheels, people on bicycles, and lighting things on fire?
> You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
This was never a stated premise, and my post starts with the opposite sentiment.
Idk what you mean by that. I pulled up a map and saw dots all over the place. They are concentrated on the east coast because you can’t build fixed on west coast (has to be floating) but they are pretty much anywhere on the east coast.
We have a massive land area on which we can build solar and plug it into existing power lines or build that part out. Probably way more feasible and better power generation results than building wind out in the ocean.
I approve of this, because they were going to come up with an excuse one way or another, but "it's classified" has been a BS excuse that has received far too much deference to cover for all kinds of nonsense going back many decades, and being sufficiently flagrant about it is exactly what it takes to create enough of a backlash to finally do something about it.
Meanwhile, we even have Michael Burry pointing out the obvious: we're losing to China because we're not building up every bit of energy capacity that we can. But, sure, why not just ban windfarms in a location perfectly suited to them:
This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.
The oil price is too low. Venezuela and now this, it is all part of selling fossil fuels.
He sees them on Scotland's shores while flying to his resort - like a child he needs to have a personal vendetta on something he does not like, especially now when he has power to do it. God forbid he will need to see such monsters on God loving free country of US of A.
There's obviously some sort of arms race occurring and some of it is public.
The world in on the precipice of many technologies advancing at an all too rapid pace. The idea that technology will become tightly regulated isn't inconceivable.
FYI Sweden did the same thing last year. There is likely a (drone) reason, it's all but completely clear.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
It's not comparable at all. US defence agencies have had thorough involvement in the permitting process of these US developments.
But thats nothing to do with turbines. Its not like russia are hiding behind wind turbines launching drones between them.
They are just sitting there, well within radar range launching away. they also have AIS on, so its not like they are hiding.
Also if you look at where they are: https://openinframap.org/#8.13/51.48/1.67 there is plenty of overlap for existing radar to overlap.
Also they are the perfect platform for extending your radar network. they are tall, well connected and widely spaced.
What are the enforcement mechanisms here if the states in question---MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, and VA---just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building? I'm not saying they should but at this point rule-of-law has fallen apart so badly that I literally don't know what happens when the government invents a new rule and people just... disregard it. (Particularly if state-level enforcement decides not to play along.) Do they bring in the FBI? Military?
To punish more fully, just illegally withhold federal funds for whatever is most hurtful. Highways? Education? Healthcare?
And to your direct point, I’m sure someone could whip up a reason for the military to take over and shut down the sites if they don’t comply - this _is_ a national security matter after all.
Court system stops any of that? Just comply (or pretend to) with the letter of the ruling and try another barely-distinguishable but arguably different illegal method for the next few months while the gears of the court system grind.
What is _meant_ to stop the executive branch (meant to ‘execute’ the will of Congress, not just follow its own desires) going rogue is impeachment by Congress, but that seems like a far off prospect.
There is no utility in pissing off 75% of your customers. I'm thrilled that my kid's doctor doesn't even allow patients that aren't vaccine schedule compliant.
Also, we are pushing hard to make sure kids aren't vaccinated at a state level it seems.
I wish I didn't have so much extended family in the area that I'd be moving away from if I left.
They can take precautions & insist on proper treatments, of course.
As the article also touches upon, this already happened in the particular case of Revolution Wind: There, work, was forced to stop in August, then in September a federal judge blocked enforcement of the block, and work continued:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/22/judge-orsted-revolution-wind...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/offshore-wind-develo...
And “what happens” seems to be that rather than appeal, the rule-of-law deniers apparently choose to not care? Work has stopped again:
https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2025/12/revolution-wind-and...
If things fall apart so badly that the CG, USN, and Treasury don't matter - then who's paying the bills for any offshore construction, and who's protecting anything that is built from looting or seizure?
If they ordered sloppy joes in the white house cafeteria a federal judge would stay the order by noon the next day.
Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.
That occurred a long time ago with the destruction of USAID and arbitrary firing of large numbers of federal workers.
"The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande ... The dismantling of USAID, according to models from Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, “has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children,” Gawande wrote. He noted that the toll will continue to grow and may go unseen because it can take months or years for people to die from lack of treatments or vaccine-preventable illnesses—and because deaths are scattered." [https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...]
Seriously, the pardons alone make this the most pro-crime administration in my lifetime. Probably ever.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/jun/12/stuckart-relea...
[1] Apparently, if Tank Man[2] was present in the US in 2025, he'd be guilty of 'Unlawful imprisonment'.
If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners:
* https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
Yoga instructors, assemble!
That began almost the moment this administration came into power.
1) the US has lots of oil reserves, which would lose lots of value if everybody was using renewables 2) oil is the main driver for dollar demand, as oil is paid in dollar, allowing the US to have lots of debt relatively cheaply
That's also the reason why he wants to tell Europe to stop using renewables, and that's the reason why he is threatening Venezuela - because they have the biggest oil reserve and started selling it in different currencies.
Now whether that whole genius strategy to gain wealth through geopolitics is worth an extinction event is a different story.
What's interesting is that the strategy you suggest (tell Europe to stop using renewables, attack nations that compete with US oil sales) only motivates other nations to move away from oil. It's a terrible strategy if the intent is to sell more US oil. Renewables are far more sustainable in many regards, and bolster national energy security while remaining on fossil fuels leaves them weak wrt energy security.
At least that's how I see this.
It's kind of hard to see the strategy you outlined as doing anything other than backfiring. Oil and other fossil fuels are consumables. Once burned, they're gone. For strategic reasons, most nations with any sense and the economic ability to do so are turning away from fossil fuels precisely due to this fact. European nations are not exceptional here, the US is actually the outlier.
Your suggested strategy is that the US wants European nations to buy more US oil, and in order to motivate them the US is demonstrating how bad oil dependence is. See Cuba (they depend on Venezuelan oil there).
How could a demonstration of the flaws of oil dependency possibly motivate the sale of US oil rather than hasten the move towards solar, wind, and other power sources?
This is why I said it's a terrible strategy. Only the non-thinking would go for it.
That being said, he is obviously aware that Europe is planning on greener energy. This administration also tries to break down the EU by pulling out countries like Italy and Poland. They are clearly promoting right wing parties all over Europe which align more with his agenda and are more EU sceptic. They might try to use social media for propaganda. The goal is divide and conquer. Europe has to pay attention to this and be aware of the risk. The strategy may seem stupid, but it would be even more stupid to ignore it and not make sure it fails.
That's my personal opinion on this subject.
This is just more of that, contracts in the US are suddenly subject to political winds.
In the end, this will probably be unblocked by the legal system, and eventually the US tax payers will pay for damages. But it'll be a long time.
For some reason, oil has masculine aesthetics but wind power doesn't. I don't think this is a calculated play
In the next breath, they pick something else from the deck to be upset about: These days, that's usually brown people, emails, laptops, the American cities that people in frog costumes burn to the ground every night, brown people, guns, laptops, and Hillary.
Sometimes, they then take a break to hear themselves talk about baseball, praise the president for getting so much done that he doesn't even have time to sleep, or to complain about the plot from the episode of The Dukes of Hazard -- from 1983 -- that they watched for the 14th time last night on Pluto.
After the break, it's time for them to complain about how they can't afford visit a doctor or buy eyeglasses, but they sure as hell don't want them any of those librawls to take any of their hard-earned money so everyone can go to the doctor.
Then things shift back to being weirder again: Schools turning boys into girls, kids using litter boxes in the classroom, men wearing dresses, God's Perfect Plan, guns, brown people, groceries, brown people, and blue hair dye.
This tiresome process repeats until I manage to escape, or I tell them very pointedly to shut the fuck up (hints don't work).
None of the people I know who act this way seem to be particularly bright, but I know them anyway.
And they vote. (Yes, I've checked.)
Did you ever consider that all the money spent on expensive renewables is money not spent on cheaper forms of power? Did you ever consider that they are correct and that spending on renewables drives up power costs? Because that's what the data says is happening. Now, I am aware that the amount of FUD on this topic is very different to get through. But if you learn about the differences between capacity and utilization costs and the other accounting games that are played with energy costs, you will learn how to see through the FUD. But I'm sure it is more psychologically comforting to just look down on them which is what you are actually doing.
That rig is pretty sweet.
It pays for itself, and in present form and with their present use (wherein: they're not trying to live particularly-efficiently) it is almost entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period.
But, sure: We can talk about games, instead, if what you want to chat about is just games.
What games might you have in mind?
You do know that batteries have a capacity right? And powerplants have something called a capacity factor. That means for a given amount of capacity, you generate on average a certain amount of power. For nuclear that factor is .9. For renewables its .1. So 1 watt of nuclear provides the same power as 9 watts of renewables. That's why when you say that renewables have 1/3 the capacity cost, it really means its 3x more expensive than nuclear. That means higher bills for people, which is what we mean when we say utilization cost. That's the real cost that people pay and actually counts. And all this is before we talk about siting issues with renewables. Fun fact, most PV is sites (located) somewhere with an albino factor of less than .25. But since you connected a battery terminal to a PV panel, you must know what that means. Seriously, you are just spreading misinformation that transfers cost from the rich to the poor, such a hero you are.
And I'm a big fan of nuclear power. I, for one, am completely in favor of having as many nuclear power plants in my back yard as possible.
You seem to be having an argument with someone who is not present -- as if you have some unseen enemy.
This delusion has been noted.
There is nothing here for us to discuss.
Good day.
Just like you can manipulate women en-masse by appealing to patriarchal attitudes around femininity and beauty, maybe by talking about weight or hair, you can influence men by appealing to patriachal attitudes around masculinity.
I mean, you can convince the average American man to drop an extra 20K on a truck he doesn't need and a multiply his gas cost by 2x just by convincing him it's manly. You can discourage men from drinking cosmopolitans and instead have them drink the equivalent of cat piss by telling him it's unmanly.
“Last week, Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social that is majority-owned by the president, said it was getting into the energy business, announcing a merger with a fusion firm TAE Technologies.”
This stupid meme needs to die.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
80% or more of new electricity generation in China is renewable. They build coal capacity but they don't use more of it.
This year their absolute carbon emissions decreased.
First off we can now look at the full year instead of 6 months of data, its no longer US +4.2% and China -2.7%, its US +2.0% and China -2.3%
China's 2025 YoY emissions decline is almost all due to a decline in industry, not power (1.8% of their 2.3% decline, in other words, most of it). It's understandable to have a lower year if you have an economic slowdown. Russia also had a decline, not for green reasons.
"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration.
In general it's weird to say '"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration' and then link to something that talks about the economic slowdown.
Total emissions also went down. Yeah GDP went up less than last year but that hardly matters when we're talking about an emissions reduction. Not "less emissions growth than last year", an absolute decrease.
What is your point? Can you elaborate how this is relevant?
China's consumption this year was about the same as last, and looking to drop a bit, so likely old coal plants were being retired at about the same rate as newer ones were built, and that will start to go the other way (more retired than built).
1. https://www.iea.org/news/global-coal-demand-has-reached-a-pl...
He's been doing that since January.
No, not for jobs. Profits, stock bumps, and bonuses for the execs at oil companies and friends of the admin.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-fusion-power-company-...
China understands and is gunning for Nuclear and Solar. Geothermal and wind are nice but too location dependent.
People don’t mind solar as much.
Wind cannot compete on solar for price especially with China reducing solars base cost each year.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2025/02/07/half-of-global-opera...
I still thinks it's missing important details, but the US making wars to get more oil doesn't fit reality at all.
Again, I don't think the explanation is linked to oil prices.
The US has very advanced refinery tech that can adaptively refine everything from heavy sour to light sweet. The reconfiguration for the customer is highly customizable and largely automated. It is why so many countries send their crude to the US for refining. The US refiners make money no what kind of crude you send them.
And of course "start a war with another country" is an excellent example of how to control your country in case you have to, because, say, elections are coming up and you may loose.
> Moscow at the invitation of Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin, in a private jet accompanied by “two Russian colonels”
and then after he ran full page ads attacking NATO. Not much has changed there really.
I'm surprised that all he has to do is say "russia russia hoax" and then the voters forget about it. I think maybe people have some similar failure modes to LLMs.
Between MAGA blocking wind and Progressives blocking nuclear, the US is left with solar and carbon.
Solar is fine, but it needs a 24/7 base. Unfortunately it increasingly appears that base will remain carbon.
Worse? An energy shortage is an opportunity to increase prices and make more money! Think about the hyuge profits!
The price of new solar+battery and wind should be pushing fossil fuel energy prices off a cliff right now, unless you live in a petrostate.
But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
I like nuclear. The funny thing about nuclear power and the mercenaries promoting their startups about it is, you will still have to convince democrats about it. Because occasionally they are in power, and nuclear, as is often criticized, takes a long time to build and a short time to turn off haha.
Close, but one minor correction.
Multiple studies have found that it would be cheapest to DEstruct coal plants.
Literally demolishing them and replacing them with battery + solar is more cost effective than continuing to operate them in 99% of cases.
“Cheap” only if you exclude indirect costs due to emissions (both localized effects and less-localized.)
> we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear
nuclear is not renewable (it is low carbon, a feature that is also true of renewables in general, but it is not, itself, a renewable.)
It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors. Over 95% of the existing 'waste' could also be consumed by breeders.
Breeder reactors reduce long-term waste issues, but they don't make nuclear renewable.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
Its not clear cut.
Part of the reason why electricity is so expensive in the UK is that its tied to natural gas prices. some of it is CFD, but most of it is because a lot of our power comes from natural gas.
We pay for gas on the open market because we aren't self sufficient for gas any more.
Yes solar is cheaper to deploy, but its not as useful on its own. Wind is far far better in the winter.
What we should be doing is getting nuclear plants built. Small ones ideally, but a few bigguns will do. Then we won't be so reliant on natural gas. We also need to get those extra transmission cables built.
(note we could have built 10 nuclear power plants, well EDF at 2002 power prices, but the present government balked because nuclear is bad yo.)
Correct, but that cost is a negative number.
When the generation happens in the same location where the electricity is used, you don't get the significant transmission losses. You don't have to build and maintain big transformer substations. Obviously this doesn't count for big utility-scale solar arrays. However, every commercial warehouse, for example, could cover its roof and have near-zero transmission losses for most or all of its energy usage.
Many of the new wind farms get a fixed price for energy and when the wholesale price is about that the excess gets channeled into a fund that is used to reduce consumer prices
Equilibrium is met when new production becomes too expensive vs. the existing profit potential.
All resource markets globally run on marginal price. The other option for electricity would be that everyone instead does their own research and predicts the clearing price leading to even higher waste and more volatility.
> Average prices are best used to measure the price level in a particular month, not to measure price change over time. It is more appropriate to use CPI index values for the particular item categories to measure price change.
I’m not doubting that (inflation-adjusted) energy prices have gone up but this graph is misleading to represent it
FRED actually has a blog post about how you would go about calculating an inflation-adjusted priced graph here: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/11/fred-gets-real-unles...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...
compared to the general motor market in the USA? I think thats out by a few orders of magnitude.
Radar shadow is vaguely plausible, if your radar is shit and needs replacing.
it also requires your hydrophone network to not be working that well either.
So any source of electricity that may replace these wind turbines (other than solar) will require about the same amount of rare-earths. And lets face it, Trump is doing his best to hamstring solar as well. He has cancelled all solar subsidies and has hit solar with major tariffs.
I think Occams Razor would lead to a very different conclusion.
AFAIK, not all kinds of rotating generators require rare earths; IIRC, induction motors don't need any permanent magnets.
Also, hypersonic missiles are perfectly vusible on radar.
Drones and cruise missiles often fly very low, which makes them much harder to detect and intercept.
It was an explicit campaign promise that the tech industry completely endorsed and he is fulfilling it.
However... how on earth was this not identified like 10 years ago way before these projects were even started? Seems pretty obvious in hindsight.
One I would have believed more is that they're worried about being too reliable on the offshore wind which can be easily attacked by a foreign navy or maybe a smaller group.
China, the UK, Germany, and Denmark operate gigawatts of offshore wind in close proximity to military-grade and NATO air-defense radar without much issue...
https://www.project2025.observer/en?agencies=Dept.+of+Energy
What would be the most woke thing for machines to do? To protest and demand machine rights?
> the ends of windmill blades look a lot like a jet on radar. If you were assigned to this project, what would your approach be to avoiding false positives?
This was in 2011/2012. I find it difficult to believe the problem is not solved.
The reflections from the turbines would pulse due to the blades so in theory their scatter could be cancelled out in processing?
You can use different antenna designs for a more directional radar beam. Or tilt the beam upwards to steer it around obstacles.
You can also build a moving-target detector by looking at doppler shift to filter out objects that are moving too slowly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_target_indication
You dropped this: /s
Correct me if I'm wrong, though there are already protections there. It's just president, senate, congress, SCOTUS all agree on this.
IMHO - most effective constitutional change would be to get rid of first past the post election system, electoral colleges, gerrymandering, etc. I think USA's two party system made it to the place where it is right now, seemingly on the verge of turning into one-party system.
- coalition shifts - every election, new groups going and out of each party
- demographic shifts - shrinking / growing / moving around of different groups
- external shock - war / depression / ?? changes incentives of governance (see Civil War, Great Depression)
- hegemons dilemma - the in power party over time goes through in fighting, over confidence, etc (see Republicans becoming corrupt in The Gilded Age)
Alternate constitutional order can mean a lot besides amendments - or even using Federal power. It can be about organizing economic power to reject illegitimacy. It can mean organizing the Democratic Party differently as more of a shadow set of social institutions that support people. It can mean leveraging state power, and building coalitions of blue states. Or other creative approaches to power.
Demographic shifts and a robust social safety net are also naturally reshaping the landscape
In many ways this is more how a parliamentary democracy exists that a republic.
Congress assumed
- it had a legislative veto (any committee could override an agency)
- independent agencies existed.
So it gave broad authority with those assumed checks.
SCOTUS declared legislative veto unconstitutional in 1982. And administrative state is actively going away.
So POTUS can do a lot of damage using the law itself.
This is the new system. Dems need to use it too.
Probably both.
Or is it against HN decorum to point out just how much of that shit-headery fart-huffing was allowed and transpired here, on HN?
If humans no longer use as much carbon (because they no longer exist in large numbers), doesn’t that alone adequately address the climate change concerns? Does it really make sense to overhaul the global energy generation infrastructure given these conditions?
That doesn't follow as the per capita consumption trends are still steadily increasing ... large numbers of people across the planet barely using any resources is far less of a problem than substantially fewer people all consuming like central north americans (which is increasingly the aspiration goal).
> doesn’t that alone adequately address the climate change concerns?
No.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already problematic and will remain there for hundreds of years (unless removed).
The amount added each year by human activity is still increasing .. it needs to stop increasing, and to fall substantiatly, and probably something done about extraction or other mitigation.
> Does it really make sense to overhaul the global energy generation infrastructure
Yes .. and on the plus side that's already happening thanks to China, the EU, past US administrations, etc. THe current US administration isn't helping .. they appear to be doing very much the opposite of helping given the cosy relationship with existing fossil fuel companies.
Same principle applies for water as it is in air.
Green energy is much harder to control because you can’t force the market into artificial scarcity and re-inflate the value of gas to drive the economy back up (and keep rich people rich).
ChrisArchitect•1mo ago