• @bouh@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    01 year ago

    Wrong. The question is how expensive a determine MWh power is, not a single unit price ; prices for 2MWh of renewable or nuclear are comparable.

    Secondly, renewable and nuclear don’t mobilise the same resources, both human and material, thus it will always be faster to build both at the same time.

    Thirdly, renewable take a lot of space, which means it’s easy to build the first farms, but the more you have, the harder it is to find space for it to build ; not all countries are islands or massive continents with large deserts.

    • TWeaK
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year ago
      1. You’re not really making sense there. Prices in MWh is what the market charges at, and renewables are FAR cheaper per MWh than nuclear. However there is a disconnect between the generation market and consumer markets - as a consumer, you don’t see any difference. Regardless, I haven’t been saying that 1MW of renewables is the same as 1MW of nuclear. I’ve been saying we need to build an excess of renewables everywhere to account for the times it isn’t available in some locations.
      2. Yes, they do. There are only so many people in the industry. I say this as an electrical engineer who has worked throughout (renewables, nuclear, factories, basically anything with HV). There is also production capacity, but we haven’t reached this yet with renewables and it can be expanded - however when we do get closer to it then it will make more sense to put money into nuclear. Money is also a limiting factor, particularly when it comes to government finance, and is perhaps the biggest limiting factor of all.
      3. Wind farms take up a lot of space, solar can go on roofs, hydro requires bodies of water. Hydro is very location specific, wind somewhat, solar not very much. However the biggest obstuction of all is the NIMBY attitude.
      • @bouh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        01 year ago

        I’m talking prices to build 2MW power gen capacity, also considering the effective uptime, because wind or solar don’t have 100% uptime. Construction prices are equivalent for nuclear and solar. And nuclear doesn’t take 20 years to build, contrary to what anti-nuclear propaganda pretends.

        Finally electrical engineers are not the only people needed for these projects. And if electrical engineers are the limiting factor to build new stuff, we’re simply screwed.