Yes, turbine blades can introduce radar clutter and affect certain military systems; but this has been know since the 1990s and has been engineered around for decades.
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...
There could be new developments in the problem. For example, small scale drones using these areas as entry points. Not to say that's that, but I think it's not impossible that something new is being taken under consideration.
Under other circumstances I might be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. But when's the last time we saw any action from this admin that wasn't clearly self-dealing or ideologically motivated instead of science-based?
He has said that wind turbines cause cancer. He also said they make noise that bothers people and drives whales insane. He has also said that they kill birds, as if their spinning draws birds into the blades. But most of all, he thinks they're ugly.
There's actually some truth to the bird thing. Some of the first wind turbines in the 1980s had very short blades, 5-10 feet, and would spin at ~50rpm, sort of like a spinning baseball bat, ready to strike birds out of the air. Combined with not being very high off the ground, maybe 40 feet, birds would take off from the ground directly into the very fast spinning blades. Modern wind turbines neither look nor act like these early turbines, but that's where the data comes from. They only just retired those fast spinning, low to the ground turbines in like ~2017. Something like 80-95% of all bird strikes came from ~35 essentially prototype wind turbines, and virtually none come from modern, huge slow spinning turbines.
The real takeaway is when a big project can be paused entirely due to one presidents very specific / frivolous whims - we won’t be able to do big projects in the current order. We need a shift in the constitutional order where the whims of one person isnt fused with the bureaucracy
> We need a shift in the constitutional order where the whims of one person isnt fused with the bureaucracy
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.
The US has had worse structural power imbalances in the past. It’s gotten over them (after a generation or more) by
- 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.
Maybe but I think it’s more about they think in terms of unitary executive. So if there’s any discretion given the agencies - I don’t know in this case - SCOTUS lets the president decide.
In many ways this is more how a parliamentary democracy exists that a republic.
So we had this creeping loss of power to the president over time in the last 20 or 50 years, including investigations in the 1970s or dealing with Nixon. But Congress never really decided this in one big step, it just happened slowly by pushes from the heritage foundation and others. Congress can take back its power. There's a reason why the Republicans are trying to gerrymander the house so the Democrats don't get a majority. It wouldn't just fix it but it would be a start towards starting to block overreach
Half of the USA, or at least half of its voting population, now supports the idea that the role of government is simply to be an extension of the personality of the Chief Executive. Essentially, whatever Trump feels is the policy of the government and therefor is the law.
I guess you're being downvoted because either:
1) Too many conservative tech bros here or
2) independent voters may not be aligned with this crap yet many voted for him anyway.
Years ago, this very subject was an interview question at a national lab (at an undergrad level). The question was roughly:
> 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.
Perhaps if tip speed is X and radar installation is perpendicular to wind turbine, then an enemy can approach at speed X in the turbine's radar shadow. There would still be multiple pulses with timing differences but if there's a field of turbines then I'd guess there's enough interference/scatter to be a problem. Like using approaching from the sun causes problems for pilots.
The reflections from the turbines would pulse due to the blades so in theory their scatter could be cancelled out in processing?
Are wind turbines remotely similar? I would have thought something mounted high up on an always-moving top would have to be smaller, lighter, and sturdier than something that sits on the ground in a controlled environment. I'm not sure the two are in competition for production.
No. Thermal turbines turn steam into spin, they're not quite jet engines, but they need 24/7 reliability under stressful physics for extended periods of time. Wind generators are just like big electric car motors, I would think?
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
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.
Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later.
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.
Well not them, they're too old to die to that. The goal is to have a cushy life for the ~5-10 years they have left. After that, it's somebody else's problem.
Not all humans, just the ones that can't afford buy property in low risk areas, start companies to help people move, etc. and for those who can, appreciating investments galore!
They might be the "wrong" oil companies. (In the case of Empire Wind, the administration is probably at best indifferent about screwing over the Norwegian state oil company.)
Should we understand this to mean that you are suggesting productive citizens should go on strike against a current dystopian United States administration?
BPA is a federal agency. The Trump administration has been very supportive of zero carbon nuclear i believe they have promised $80 billion dollars to build new nuclear plants. Staff cuts dont mean they oppose using those energy sources.
US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors).
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.
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
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
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.
> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
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.
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
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.
> 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.
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)
Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.
> Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
>cutting costs at every corner
Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
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.
Yes but no. They wanted as many pilots to fly the new aircraft as possible without having to get them re-type certified which is pretty expensive. The issue is that pilots were completely unaware of the MCAS and when it malfunctioned there was not correct training in place because the system was "a hidden abstraction"
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.
There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.
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.
Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.
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.
I would like to enforce a coal ban, but nobody gave me an army with which to do so.
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.
> In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.
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.
Chernobyl happened while I was alive. It wasn’t that long ago. The leader of the Soviet Union who presided over the disaster (Gorbachev) died only 3 years ago.
Aside from that, “because communism” is not a serious answer.
Whether a deregulationist considers themselves communist or capitalist is a red herring: being in favor of dangerous deregulation spans many different national economic persuasions.
Why do you think I am more generous towards the coal industry? We are talking about nuclear power. If you would like my opinion on coal, I will gladly give it to you. You never asked.
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.
Operating a commercial reactor and keeping it up to regulations isn’t exactly cheap. It requires people, periodic inspections, maintenance, and lots of paperwork to prove you are not cutting corners.
I guess I should separate what I mean by this.
If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city, depending on where you live that could be a small portion of the cost or a large majority of the cost. I am not advocating for the removal of say skilled operators and technicians. I am against overwhelming bureaucracy with paper documents lengthy processing times and fringe regulations.
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
> If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city
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.
> 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
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.
> 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).
There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.
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.
> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper
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.).
People who attack the “public education system” as an argument pretty universally agree with every destructive neoliberal policy the American government pushes on the West.
Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.
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.
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.
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."
Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.
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.
Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.
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:
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:
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.
Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.
Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.
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.
How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.
Paid off nuclear plants produce quite cheap electricity. The problem is that it takes 10-15 years of building and then 40 years of paying $180-220/MWh to get a paid off nuclear plant as per modern western construction costs.
In terms of pure operating costs ignoring everything else it can look good vs other sources that include all costs.
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.
I don’t think nuclear waste is a huge deal, but it does increase fuel costs in a very meaningful way. The classic uranium is cheap therefore nuclear’s fuel is cheap is a tiny fraction of the story. Refueling generally means weeks of downtime, you can’t safely operate at extreme temperatures for maximum efficiency, you need enrichment, and fuel rods, and even with multiple trips through the reactor core a significant amount of fuel isn’t burned or economically useful, and when your done you also need processes do deal with highly radioactive material + the costs of dry casks, and then transport them offsite and then down into some tunnels.
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.
I know where the nuclear waste is stored here. Its storage is funded by the government for now (not included in electricity prices) and nobody can actually prove it will be safe for the centuries it will be dangerous.
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.
> I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence
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.
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.
Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...
> The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them.
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.
Those reactors were also very expensive, though, weren't they? I've heard lots of people look to them as a reason that SMRs might work, but not because the naval reactors were cheap. Plus they use uranium enriched to levels that we typically don't allow in civilian reactors...
Even at military contracting prices, estimates put them at $100-200M each IIRC. That's not terrible.
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.
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.
Honestly not a terrible idea. Just have your reactor on a huge barge and if it goes meltdown just drag it out into international waters and let the fish deal with it /s
An actual meltdown at sea would have the now-molten uranium come in contact with seawater, which would instantly flash to high-pressure steam, throwing the uranium into a cancer-causing cloud that the world has never yet seen.
This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.
Doing the math, it looks like the amount of uranium in pre-disaster Chernobyl is 200 metric tons. Apparently, that can bring 333ML (133 Olympic sized swimming pools) of room temperature water to a boil.
I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.
You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.
Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.
Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?
Allegedly the reason nuclear is expensive is that it's expensive to prevent Chernobyl. So I'm asking for a curve relating energy costs to Chernobyls per year. I'd like to read off the curve how many Chernobyls per year would be required to make nuclear energy as cheap as solar.
> 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
This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage.
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.
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.
I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher.
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.
I think it’s quite conceivable that nuclear would be cheaper for a 100% carbon free grid.
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 is prohibitively expensive and are still way more expensive than using fossil fuels to create hydrogen (called black hydrogen). Burning green hydrogen for electricity when we have yet to make green steel economical viable is not a good idea. Nuclear is still a magnitude cheaper than 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.
I completely agree that green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive at the moment and it currently makes no sense to burn it for electricity generation. But it will likely be necessary in the future if we are to decarbonise aviation fuel, steel making, fertiliser production, etc. What matters at the end of the day is reducing total carbon emissions for the whole economy.
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.
Agreed. I misunderstood your comment and got too hot-headed. Sorry about that.
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 may have misinterpreted your original post as saying we should be going full renewables. I think we're basically in agreement about prices. We might just disagree about the percent of energy that should come from nuclear.
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.
Yeah, my opinion on how much should come from nuclear is that current levels (~20%) are enough to fill the rest in with renewables.
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!).
> We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power.
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.
When they calculate that Solar + battery would cost $50-131/MWh, how is that number reached? What is the number of charge cycles and over what time span? It seems obvious that the cost of producing, installing and operating a 1MWh system of solar and batteries will cost more than a one time payment of $50-131.
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.
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.
First. $120/MWh for new built nuclear power is cheaper than any modern western reactors. Real costs are ~180-220/MWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. As based on Vogtle, FV3, HPC, proposed EPR2s, proposed Polish reactors etc.
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.
> 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.
People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.
There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear.
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.
South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake.
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.
> US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity)
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).
That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.
As usual, explain how you're going to power heat pumps in the Northern half of the country during a 3 week bomb cyclone. There are answers and they cost money.
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.
Alternative to natural gas? Wind, geothermal, or nuclear. Wind is already in the northern half of the country and operates well when winterized, unlike the ones in Texas that broke since they were not winterized during that freeze a while back.
Natural gas and fossil fuels are not our only options, they are the easiest options.
It's also like to see a comparison to giving people/companies a discount if they have alternative methods of heating for 3 weeks and agree to be powered off. Places like hospitals and universities often have generators and do this. Sand "batteries" (aka electric resistive heaters in a few tons of sand heated to 1000°C) might be cost-effective if standardized. You keep it insulated and hot until the power goes out, then you let it bleed heat out to keep you from dying.
They get cheaper electric rates by agreeing to be the first loads shed if the grid is overloaded. This is a standard thing. If their generators didn't start, they wouldn't be cut off, but it'd be a big deal.
> 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?
Context is solar and pricing. You can't only build solar, because people will freeze to death. So you can't say "solar+batteries is only $X/W!!!” because you're ignoring that you must also have a rarely-used natural gas, or install a rarely-used long-distance transmission line, or install rarely-used storage capacity. Which is fine, but you're being dishonest about costs if you don't.
Yes, but you have to pay for a line you don't plan to use much, so its capital costs should be attributed to the generation method requiring it. Which is fine, but not including it is dishonest about the true costs.
I think if you designed and built it with the idea in mind that you're building your renewables in the sunny/windy centre/south of the US to be transported to a these places all year round it's a better idea than it being a backup. But I agree that the cost of over generation should be factored in to comparison pricing. But I also think we don't include enough of the costs in FF infra either.
The coal plant in my hometown was always running on cold days. It didn't need anything else to be available when needed besides several hours of lead time.
Mostly relying on long-distance transmission has high costs in capex, opex (losses), reliability, and security.
I'm not sure how often the upper Midwest gets Dunkelflaute. If rare enough, then overbuilding wind is a possible solution (especially combined with additional transmission) but, again, those costs must be accounted for or the solar costs are dishonest.
Those costs with storage are if you want 100% power from solar which is not reality. US alone gets 20% of power from nuclear today, we’re not going around tearing down the base load and adding solar. We’re keeping base load and adding renewables, which include wind.
Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?
No, they're not for 100% (it's impossible with the current technology) but in the framework of a renewable grid.
> 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.
This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner).
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...
this point is very important. trump will take all sides of an issue rhetorically so you can almost always find some quote of his supporting whatever position you favor but they have a very definite political program that is concentrating control, cutting federal workers, rolling back renewables, doing spectacular stunts to favor racists, and aggression overseas
So why make the cuts in the first place? There are so many things that could have been changed like getting rid of ALARPA for actual scientifically backed methods other than pointless gratitude's of X dollars for X industry. If the Trump admin truly believed in move fast and break things why is nothing moving
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.
Promises are cheap with this admin, don't count any money until it's actually being paid out. Used to be I'd say until it's in a bill but this administration claims the unilateral right to cut any funded program.
Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws, facts, and balance checks. Just like the word "terrorist." It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
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.
>It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
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.
Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence.
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.
Since it’s all classified o honestly don’t have a clue. But passive radar is also a thing and something that the Swedish defense industry is fairly good at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar.
It probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.
That makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.
Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago.
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 construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances.
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)
They were approved before the invasion of Ukraine and before our politicians could see how devestating drones can be. Just because the orange dictator did something does not mean it necessarily was wrong. Even a broken clock is right two times per day.
>"Even a broken clock is right two times per day."
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.
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?
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.
Before Ukrain everyone though drones were easy to counter. Now that has proven false.
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.
The problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy.
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:
Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US.
That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end.
It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.
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.
> Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US
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.
Why do you say it's rent seeking? 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.
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.
Yea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.
Yea; it will be obvious if you've accidentally locked into one, then look at it with eyes or other equipment. And the 0 ground speed. But UAS could hide in them effectively I speculate?
It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.
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.
> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
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.
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.
These things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.
Deployment of radars on the turbine farms themselves? I don't see how that's supposed to be a good idea. In the scenario we're talking about, war, electricity is one of the first targets. And those relatively defenseless turbines themselves are going to be targeted, and not only by air. The enemy getting to knock out military quality radar setups (which tend to be absurdly expensive), at the same time, is just icing on the cake.
UK has a much smaller coastline, so it might be more cost efficient for them to install extra radars. Also I'm sure the wind turbines interfere in acoustic submarine detection due to the noise they generate.
> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
No, they aren't any more difficult to defend than any other offshore platform. They do interfere with long-range land-based radar in a way that is problematic with the emergence of shipborne drones.
Order of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability
Only reason is that orange mussolini does not like seeing wind turbines. That's it.
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.
This may be the major reason, but I can think of another. How will you protect far away sprawling wind fields from attacks in case of war? They can be attacked by ships, aircraft and subs. You can expect them to be taken out almost immediately imo.
Wind seems like a waste of money compared to solar. We aren’t the UK where they are a tiny island holding on.
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.
That you could come up with one reasonable-sounding explanation while they offered nothing makes me wonder if the administration is too lazy, or too inept.
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more. Denmark is big in the wind industry and blocking this construction keeps money out of the Danish economy. Another pressure move to get Denmark to give up Greenland.
You're assuming they want to sell the oil in the US markets, they don't. Corporations want to sell it to other countries but they want the US to do the heavy lifting with minimal risks.
I still find it very curious that after Russia invaded Ukraine, now Trump is using rhetoric that makes it look like the US is ready to invade some other country, too, they just have not decided on the victim yet.
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.
Trump seems to have been following Russian advice throughout his political career. It started in 1987:
> 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.
Venezuelan oil is more about US refineries that can only use very heavy oil, and US wells for such oil running out. Those refineries decided it is cheaper to bribe Trump than to invest into converting their factories. They are using US tax payer dolars (in a war with Venezuela) to avoid having to invest into their own conpanies.
That makes no sense. Any US refinery that can process heavy sour can also process any other kind of crude. It isn’t the 1950s.
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.
Is there a similar ostensible classified reason why OCO-2 and OCO-3 are requested to shut down operations? 700+ M invested in space based observatories with ~ 15M yearly operating cost. Just doesn't make sense to disable perfectly working observatories to save less than ~75M in a timespan of 5 years while losing a 700+M investment.
I've been wondering all year about what happens when an executive-branch office issues orders that it is not legally qualified to issue; by and large everybody has just... followed them. This may be another example (I don't know quite enough of the legal specifics in this case, though there are certainly others that are more slam-dunk-y in this respect).
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?
Short term punishment for states: ICE and the National Guard get sent into cities to make people feel unsafe, under the guise of an ‘immigration emergency’. Perhaps also Marines!
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.
Don't worry, there is a plan. CNN will be in new hands by that point. Reddit's r/all will be, or already is gone from the app's defaults, and much more to come!
No one said people aren't dumb with their money, but seriously look at some of the numbers that prime time CNN pulls. Twitch streamers have a large audience than prime time shows. There is a reason why cable has been dying and cable news has already dead.
The doctors offices want none of it. It's all FoodTV and HGN.
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.
> just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building?
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:
These things take large amount of money from upstream, if the money is cut they can "say" what they want, nothing is getting done, from my understanding
Just something to keep in mind - the actual site of these wind farms is offshore in federal waters, and construction is subject to federal (as well as state) permits.
Don't expect any sort of mass disobedience here. Doing anything in offshore wind requires a large, highly-skilled organization and lot of time. One firm "ahem!" from the Coast Guard, Navy, or Treasury, and that kinda org will back down.
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?
The Saudis have enormous influence over Trump through business deals. So does Qatar through the jet they gifted Trump, and the UAE through crypto deals.
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.
It's more the Scottish that caused this than the oil princes, the windmill stuff is all about petty hatred from losing a court case and now one of his precious golf courses has windmills visible out on the ocean for a few of the holes
But he didn't just cancel wind projects. He cancelled solar. He cancelled EV tax credits.
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 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.
It's actually the other way around; the Saudis are only able to sell their oil because the oil money is flowing into US treasuries and other financial instruments, and it has been like this since the 70s.
not just that. Fossils are/were the guarantee of US dollar dominance. Huge $ are made purely by the fact most fossils transactions are in $. It's not in the interest of US to reduce the influence of fossils, especially now when it's the biggest exporter. Trump is ... trump... his actions can be anyway between personal biased hate or US strategical decision...
As one who worked on over the horizon radar (OTH-B), ground clutter is a major impediment to accurate detection, identification, and correlation of an object.
I found this article interesting as someone still learning about how energy policy and renewable projects interact with government decisions. It’s surprising to see how national security concerns are being used to pause offshore wind construction, and I’m curious how this will affect both the industry and broader energy goals. Thanks for the clear overview!
haha, amateurs. California is way ahead of the game here. We've been blocking our own offshore wind fields for years, using our own environmental regulations, and we're going to keep doing it for the foreseeable future.
What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
I'm reminded of threatening tariffs to successfully derail global carbon levy on ship emissions.
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.
> 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.
If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners:
Those "savings" have not withstood careful analysis. Essentially they're nonsense and with the damage they have done the final bill will be much higher than any savings.
Which one had a greater 2025 net worth increase than the president? Which one pardoned people who donated to his campaign or ballroom? Which one is subject to legal reprisal for corruption?
there are at least two reasons trump is pushing for oil:
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.
> 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 them not in USD.
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.
it could very well be that it backfires. I guess time will tell. A lot of his actions seem to be trimmed into this direction, and it's not a new one. He left the paris climate agreement quite a while back as far as I remember. blocking offshore wind construction just fits this agenda, as supporting companies to manufacture these windmills would just make everything cheaper (more demand, rising production capacity etc.) and demonstrate actual use of it.
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.
You could be right. I try to abstain from making any predictions, because I see the world is such a complicated mess where even stupid decisions could get a positive outcome due to unforeseeable events. (a new pandemic? a war breaks out? someone decided to retaliate? the suez canal gets occupied? a volcano erupts?)
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.
I know plenty of people personally who can rant about energy prices being high while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy and even namedrop whichever foul devil bogeyman it is this week that is said to be the cause of this disjointed trauma that they find so overwhelming.
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.
"while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy "
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.
I consider that I'm intertwined in the evolution of a very different friend's very local efforts, with their own hybrid battery-backed grid-tied offline-capable solar power system.
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.
"entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period."
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.
Most grown men are influenced by this. The patriachy is strongggg.
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.”
china runs with everything. They are still expanding coal units for firming and they'll build a ton of new gas units too. But to ban deployment of wind turbines without any explanation is ... expected from current administration...
Being blind with bias is also expected. I don't like what is going on either, but please consider that if it was only about "damaging" as others have implied, it would not just be off shore wind turbines. I can assure you there are other reasons.
I hope you realize that China's coal and oil use for electricity is at an all-time high and increasing. They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total. US coal usage peaked circa 2000 and has decreased for the last 2 decades.
That article is about emissions, not admixture. If you look at the source of that article, which they link to: https://carbonmonitor.org/variation
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.
A 3% GDP growth this year is a slowdown from 2024. Did you read this paper? I encourage you to at least read the abstract. It discusses whether "China's 2025 economic growth story turns on whether investment merely declined in the second half of the year or collapsed."
China had an emissions decline in 2025 that is substantially attributable to a decline in industry, per their first source. The decline in industry is plausible so long as GDP growth in 2025 is lower than GDP growth in 2024, and is additionally supported by the newly introduced source that the commentor did not read. Yes, it is possible to have an economic slowdown and a positive GDP print.
In general it's weird to say '"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration' and then link to something that talks about the economic slowdown.
I don't know what "decline in industry" means here tbh. Emissions from industry went down, but GDP still went up. Does that mean there's "less industry" or "more industry"? How do you measure "industry"? Maybe their industry just became more efficient.
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.
New coal data is out just a few days ago [1], it's plateaued globally and expected to start to decline.
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).
But USAID needed to be destroyed. 'AID' never stood for aid, it was
an organization for international development and spent vast amounts of money on cultural programs for countries that didn't want them.
91 million lives were saved over the last two decades. The vast majority of that wasn't "international development" fluff; it was basic survival. We’re talking about stopping tuberculosis, malaria, and starvation.
Framing this as getting rid of unwanted "cultural programs" is a convenient way to ignore the fact that we pulled the plug on the life support system for 30 million children.
Yes I'm sure that the regime and its cronies who have spent the past 50+ years fabricating evidence for illegal wars to enrich themselves and their friends in the military and energy industries, trafficking arms and sponsoring regime change, destabilizing and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying Syria and Libya, droning Africa and Pakistan, arming and funding terrorist "JV teams" like ISIS, all uniquely care so deeply about the welfare of "the poor brown people" that they just desperately wanted to give the very shirts from their backs to this noble cause, if only the horrible government had not just forbidden it. Sure, that is the most likely explanation for all this.
Come on now. These programs are rife with corruption and ulterior motives. People have moved on from "think of the starving children" being able to shut down any questioning of it.
And really that's just silly when you think about it. If that's supposed to be an argument then we might ask why did previous governments practically murder 100 million people by not spending even more money on all these wonderful programs? Why are the European countries that have funded this paper you linked to murdering these orphans right now by not stepping in to replace the lost funding? It's just not really the way to have a reasoned discussion about it.
Interesting introduction to the paper too:
> Evidence before this study
> Despite the US Agency for International Development (USAID) being the world's leading donor for humanitarian and development aid, there is scarce evidence in the literature assessing its impact on global health. Few evaluations have attempted to estimate the effects of USAID funding on maternal and child mortality in selected low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), and some reports have offered only approximate estimates for specific diseases.
Strange that the American public was being made to fund these vast expenditures for so many decades, on apparently scarce scientific evidence for its effectiveness. You don't think anybody could possibly have any negative feelings about how the ruling class has been spending their money?
More like "if we can't be partners we'll find your enemies and fund them instead." or, "we'll partner with your next of kin who may be more sympathetic [or suggestive] to our concerns."
Reminiscent of how most water which used to melt into the Great Salt Lake is now being used to farm Alfalfa, which only makes up 1% of their GDP and far fewer jobs than other industries. Of course if this continues for another generation, toxic arsenic dust will pollute and force the failure of Salt Lake City and surrounding regions. Luckily this will cause the agricultural industry to fail (after killing many people) and nature will heal itself.
>It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
"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...]
Sadly wind turbines don’t really scale down like PV panels. The energy produced by PV panels is a linear function of their surface area. For wind turbines, it scales with the square of the blade length.
This is true, but if you already have a battery, getting an extra 200-400w when the sun isn't shining is really useful. (for a UK based house. Not so sure about the USA.)
The cost isn't as good as solar though. a 1kw turbine is expensive.
It's a siren call for us techies, but reality is less pretty than our fantasies of "cheap base load".
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.
Doesn't the area described by a turbine's motion scale with the square of the blade-length, so given a circular area covered by a turbine, the power will scale linearly with that area?
Yes but you’re not paying for the area the blade covers - you’re paying for the blade. Simplifying (to an extreme) for the sake of illustration - a 20m blade costs twice as much as a 10m one but produces 4 times the energy.
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.
Unlike solar, wind at the utility scale virtually always improves load factors, lcoe, and a host of other economics vs a personal installation.
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.
Control over oil and gas keeps monetary values high.
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).
TBH the fact renewables haven't or can't cut big cheques to change Trumps mind is a little baffling. Surely he can double dip from big oil and small renewable.
That graph is not inflation-adjusted and basically says to avoid using it like this in the description:
> 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
The UK has tons of wind power but prices there are exceptionally high. Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy
> Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy
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.)
There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere. Once the infrastructure is adapted to that, costs should normalise again.
> There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere.
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.
Which also sets broken incentives where nobody (not even renewables) are actually incentivized to dethrone gas/etc as it would reduce their own profit margin.
But everyone are incentivized to build another wind farm, solar plant, battery etc to make profit on the current fossil gas based margins. Pushing the price lower for more hours.
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.
Uk energy costs are high because the highest cost marginal producer sets the rate i.e. gas powered stations
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
energy development is complex, but it cannot be your idea, which boils down to, "whatever is cheapest," especially for government policy. it would be cheapest to not use energy at all, which is the exact opposite of the mercenary POV you are talking about, without having to use the word environment at all.
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.
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
> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.
“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.
We don't say solar is non-renewable because using every single available bit of solar today has no impact on the solar energy available tomorrow. This is not true of nuclear, even if you increase the total quantity of available fission-derived energy by 50 or 100 or whatever the outer estimate is for breeder reactors compared to non-breeder fission.
Based on the math in this paper[1] there's enough uranium floating around to keep the planet running on the order of hundreds of millions of years at modern energy consumption levels. The price of the material would go up compared to what it costs currently, but the raw material costs are a small fraction of bottom line anyway.
Why do you think your particular mercenary point of view does not prevail? Because people are stupid?
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.
The problem is you build all of these offshore wind turbines and none of them are lowering our bills. As a politician I would try and lower my constituents' bills
It's interesting that people are very incredulous of there being a legitimate defense reason for this when we have had unilateral unanswered drone incursions all over Europe and the US.
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.
This is part of the problem with having an administration that so obviously corrupt and so frequently tells the most obvious lies and consistently acts with such obvious, naked partisanship. You can't trust them about anything.
You framed it that way. This is an article about how the US shut down every offshore wind farm project. People are here discussing the fact that the us shut down every offshore wind project. You came in and said Sweden did it too. Setting aside the fact that they did not do that, they blocked some projects, not all - you don’t even know what “it” is because the US did not give a rationale.
There's obviously transparently political antipathy from the Trump administration towards offshore wind development in the US. It's far more likely this is gross political interference by an unserious and vendetta-driven administration.
drones are invisible to radar.......or clearly russia(or ukrain) would not be dealing with strikes far from the front lines
also, hypersonic missles are now a thing, and the hit faster than any radar or interceptor can register
but yes if you were worried about Portugal trying a sneak attack, then clearly they would use the wind turbine shielding attack vector from weaponised shipping cans placed on container ships
Can we summon the Trumphole licking HN users that spent their reputation insisting that us "libtards" were freaking out, and get them in here to explain how this fits in the MAGA 4D Chess?
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?
Global human populations are in decline; fossil fuel use will decline along with us.
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?
> Global human populations are in decline; fossil fuel use will decline along with us.
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.
To be fair, there could absolutely be national security issues. One example might be undersea (or even surface) navigation. If the coastline is littered with windmills off shore, this might create a negative of submarine navigation routes. That's clearly information we don't want shared with adversaries. There might be undersea classified cables. There might be classified sonar stations. It might be hard to detect adversary subs within a windmill field due to extra noise, etc.
Sweden is worried about a hostile neighbor. They're freaked out enough that they joined NATO after generations of non-alignment.
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.
> If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending.
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.
humans already gave nuclear buttons to politicians and dictators with questionable intelligence, so it doesn't matter what you are pretending to be exactly.
> do you believe that Sweden of all countries is under Trump's direct influence re: wind aversion?
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.
They were approved by a prior administration that prioritized green energy over national security.
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.
The reasons are clearly stated and widely reported by multiple news sources: The Trump administration ordered an immediate pause on five major offshore wind projects, citing national security risks due to radar interference.
Not much on details besides a “classified study“ but sounds pretty transparent to me?
> They were approved by a prior administration that prioritized green energy over national security.
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.
If the US had a normal, rational Administration, then yeah, I'd probably accept the "national security" explanation. But when the Administration claims completing the White House ballroom is a matter of "national security", and Antifa is the current largest threat to "national security", then credibility for these claims is completely lost.
> But when the Administration claims completing the White House ballroom is a matter of "national security"
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.
>To be fair, there could absolutely be national security issues.
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.
Yeah, especially enemy submarines. A windmill farm presents opportunities for defense: as a platform to mount and power sonar, radar arrays or other early warning systems, the power cables are actual decoys for comms infra, the farm itsrlf is an obstacle for drones and enemy subs.
Are the areas that we are placing windmills regularly navigated by submarines? And wouldn't windmills cause as much, or more, issues for an adversary submarines?
Perhaps worth recapping that he hates them due to a specific personal event (the same is true for everything he does, if you dig deep enough to find the reason). In this case he developed a golf resort on the East Coast of Scotland. Meanwhile wind generators were also being deployed immediately offshore. He became enraged that the view from his new development was blighted by the turbines. So it isn't even due to oil industry bribery. It's personal.
Occam's Razor: offshore wind requires a lot of rare earths for their magnets and whatnot. US military-industrial complex needs the little remaining global supply not under China's export controls.
Any electricity produced by turning generators will require rare earths. This includes, every current non-trivial electricity source with the exception of solar. Gas, oil, coal and nuclear all work by heating steam and running it through a turbine that turns a generator that makes electricity. For hydro, the falling water turns the turbine/generator.
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, modern wind turbines use types of induction motors because it allows them to adjust the rotation speed by applying a counter-rotating stator field (which is a very neat trick) - older turbines had to rotate at a fixed divisor of 3600 rpm (grid frequency).
This could very well be the excuse they're using. The reality is almost certainly more petty than that given the great one's irrational hate of wind power.
I actually believe the radar surveillance excuse (on a technicalities only), if that's what this is going to come down to. The ocean is a big empty place and prime for picking up radar reflections as the background is pretty quiet.
However... how on earth was this not identified like 10 years ago way before these projects were even started? Seems pretty obvious in hindsight.
Sounds plausible but it would have been identified 10 years ago which is why everyone in the thread thinks it's a dubious claim.
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.
There is a Belgian company that can use temperarure & other fluctuations in underseas power & cimmunication cables to detect nearby objects etc. I'm sure they are willing to help the US navy if they can convince them the US is a solid NATO partner… ( oh, wait, that might have become difficult…)
Wind and solar are highly complementary. Wind tends to be peak during evening and morning, and is often stronger at night than during the day. Wind is cheaper than overbuilding solar and adding batteries.
If its a dumb idea, why waste billions of dollars on it? Do you know how much pollution that shutted down plant is? It was HugE I've gone past it. So much waste for a "dumb idea"
This is what's wrong with Americans in one succinct example. "Look at all the pollution from this field of mirrors" he thinks while driving on the freeway to Las Vegas.
Yes, turbine blades can introduce radar clutter and affect certain military systems; but this has been know since the 1990s and has been engineered around for decades.
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...
There could be new developments in the problem. For example, small scale drones using these areas as entry points. Not to say that's that, but I think it's not impossible that something new is being taken under consideration.
Under other circumstances I might be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt. But when's the last time we saw any action from this admin that wasn't clearly self-dealing or ideologically motivated instead of science-based?
Yup. And Trump very specifically has had a very irrational obsession and hatred for windmills for years now.
He has said that wind turbines cause cancer. He also said they make noise that bothers people and drives whales insane. He has also said that they kill birds, as if their spinning draws birds into the blades. But most of all, he thinks they're ugly.
There's actually some truth to the bird thing. Some of the first wind turbines in the 1980s had very short blades, 5-10 feet, and would spin at ~50rpm, sort of like a spinning baseball bat, ready to strike birds out of the air. Combined with not being very high off the ground, maybe 40 feet, birds would take off from the ground directly into the very fast spinning blades. Modern wind turbines neither look nor act like these early turbines, but that's where the data comes from. They only just retired those fast spinning, low to the ground turbines in like ~2017. Something like 80-95% of all bird strikes came from ~35 essentially prototype wind turbines, and virtually none come from modern, huge slow spinning turbines.
Ideallism, delusion and a hatred of windmills. Donald Trump is starting to sound a lot like Don Quixote.
The real takeaway is when a big project can be paused entirely due to one presidents very specific / frivolous whims - we won’t be able to do big projects in the current order. We need a shift in the constitutional order where the whims of one person isnt fused with the bureaucracy
> We need a shift in the constitutional order where the whims of one person isnt fused with the bureaucracy
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.
The US has had worse structural power imbalances in the past. It’s gotten over them (after a generation or more) by
- 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.
Don't overlook the influence of global soft power and the non-profit sector.
Demographic shifts and a robust social safety net are also naturally reshaping the landscape
The laws exist, SCOTUS majority just doesn’t want to enforce them because their guy is in power.
Maybe but I think it’s more about they think in terms of unitary executive. So if there’s any discretion given the agencies - I don’t know in this case - SCOTUS lets the president decide.
In many ways this is more how a parliamentary democracy exists that a republic.
POTUS power has already extended well beyond even congress.
How? Congress has given tremendous discretion to POTUS. This President is actually using it.
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.
So we had this creeping loss of power to the president over time in the last 20 or 50 years, including investigations in the 1970s or dealing with Nixon. But Congress never really decided this in one big step, it just happened slowly by pushes from the heritage foundation and others. Congress can take back its power. There's a reason why the Republicans are trying to gerrymander the house so the Democrats don't get a majority. It wouldn't just fix it but it would be a start towards starting to block overreach
Tariffs is the obvious example.
Half of the USA, or at least half of its voting population, now supports the idea that the role of government is simply to be an extension of the personality of the Chief Executive. Essentially, whatever Trump feels is the policy of the government and therefor is the law.
I guess you're being downvoted because either: 1) Too many conservative tech bros here or 2) independent voters may not be aligned with this crap yet many voted for him anyway.
Probably both.
Years ago, this very subject was an interview question at a national lab (at an undergrad level). The question was roughly:
> 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.
Realistically, isn't it a known presence on radar? It's static - you can't just ignore signals from that area in space?
Yes, and more...
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
Curly blades makes it harder to lower its radar surface areas.
The enemy could be hiding precisely at the windmills /s
Perhaps if tip speed is X and radar installation is perpendicular to wind turbine, then an enemy can approach at speed X in the turbine's radar shadow. There would still be multiple pulses with timing differences but if there's a field of turbines then I'd guess there's enough interference/scatter to be a problem. Like using approaching from the sun causes problems for pilots.
The reflections from the turbines would pulse due to the blades so in theory their scatter could be cancelled out in processing?
Jets don't tend to fly around in little circles so there's that. And windmills don't move around a lot. I'm sure this is a solved problem.
It has been solved. Get rid of all the windmills. Easy.
Who raised you?
>It has been solved. Get rid of all the windmills. Easy.
You dropped this: /s
Meanwhile, we're in a multi-year shortage of turbines for thermal electrical plants. Electric bill beatings will continue until morale improves.
Are wind turbines remotely similar? I would have thought something mounted high up on an always-moving top would have to be smaller, lighter, and sturdier than something that sits on the ground in a controlled environment. I'm not sure the two are in competition for production.
No. Thermal turbines turn steam into spin, they're not quite jet engines, but they need 24/7 reliability under stressful physics for extended periods of time. Wind generators are just like big electric car motors, I would think?
https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...
I think it's more a shortage of electricity generation in general.
I asked Gemini if this was true and my city blacked out.
I looked into this a little because I was curious. I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
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.
Result first (kill anything not carbon-based), find rationale later.
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...
>in service of one outcome - kill renewable energy.
Also killing all humans, what idiots.
Well not them, they're too old to die to that. The goal is to have a cushy life for the ~5-10 years they have left. After that, it's somebody else's problem.
Not all humans, just the ones that can't afford buy property in low risk areas, start companies to help people move, etc. and for those who can, appreciating investments galore!
they're not idiots. they're sociopaths.
Boggles my mind a bit given much of the oil companies own the new renewable tech too. Why not keep investing in the future.
They might be the "wrong" oil companies. (In the case of Empire Wind, the administration is probably at best indifferent about screwing over the Norwegian state oil company.)
Atlas shrugged
Should we understand this to mean that you are suggesting productive citizens should go on strike against a current dystopian United States administration?
BPA is a federal agency. The Trump administration has been very supportive of zero carbon nuclear i believe they have promised $80 billion dollars to build new nuclear plants. Staff cuts dont mean they oppose using those energy sources.
US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors).
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.
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
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/
> overregulation.
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.
> We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
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.
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
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.
> 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.
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)
Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.
Arguing the EU has less regulation than the USA on anything is 99.9999% always wrong.
Is the 0.0001% kinder eggs?
> Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner.
>cutting costs at every corner
Costs like those incurred when adhering to safety standards set by regulations?
> The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers
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.
> Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine.
Yup: It really is big, it really is scary.
> and trying to avoid costs to carriers
Isn’t that just code for trying to violate regulations without getting caught?
Yes but no. They wanted as many pilots to fly the new aircraft as possible without having to get them re-type certified which is pretty expensive. The issue is that pilots were completely unaware of the MCAS and when it malfunctioned there was not correct training in place because the system was "a hidden abstraction"
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.
So cutting costs in a way that is explicitly unsafe. Seems a little bit like splitting hairs but I get what you’re saying
There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation.
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.
With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.
But why not same scrutiny for coal?
Correct operation of a coal plant has global impact, and therefore coal should be phased out entirely.
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.
But one is enforced (nuclear security) and coal is not.
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 would like to enforce a coal ban, but nobody gave me an army with which to do so.
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.
Except that modern car engines are vastly improved over their 1970’s carburettor fed, catalytic convertered, counterparts.
Go and run your car in garage lol.
I swear HN is infested with bots now.
That’s going to kill me because the exhaust is dominated by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
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.
You probably wanna look up benzene to start.
You think benzene is toxic?
Wait till you meet your attitude!
> toxic
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?
Merry Christmas, here’s your pound of tetraethyl lead.
In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.
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?
> In the entire history of civil nuclear power "unknown parties stole the radioisotopes" has never happened.
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.
> The Chrenobyl reactors weren’t even housed in containment buildings, they were housed in what’s best described as a shed.
And why was that allowed? Because of quality regulation?
Got any examples of any presently operating civil power reactors that don’t have their reactor cores in some kind of containment structure?
Others I guess the answer to your question is: fuckwit communists were running the place at the time.
Chernobyl happened while I was alive. It wasn’t that long ago. The leader of the Soviet Union who presided over the disaster (Gorbachev) died only 3 years ago.
Aside from that, “because communism” is not a serious answer.
Whether a deregulationist considers themselves communist or capitalist is a red herring: being in favor of dangerous deregulation spans many different national economic persuasions.
Why do you think I am more generous towards the coal industry? We are talking about nuclear power. If you would like my opinion on coal, I will gladly give it to you. You never asked.
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.
Over regulation of nuclear energy in the US made it so expensive we didn't replace all fossil fuels with it.
I don't think this is true at all.
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.
A fully paid off nuclear reactor is extremely profitable because of little fuel cost.
Operating a commercial reactor and keeping it up to regulations isn’t exactly cheap. It requires people, periodic inspections, maintenance, and lots of paperwork to prove you are not cutting corners.
When the cost of people is more than the cost of equipment, upkeep and maintenance that is arguably exactly when overregulation becomes burdensome
"upkeep and maintenance" is largely composed of people costs – the people doing the upkeep and maintenance.
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.
I guess I should separate what I mean by this. If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city, depending on where you live that could be a small portion of the cost or a large majority of the cost. I am not advocating for the removal of say skilled operators and technicians. I am against overwhelming bureaucracy with paper documents lengthy processing times and fringe regulations.
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
> If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city
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.
Operating a nuclear reactor is in fact very cheap since there is very little fuel cost.
Nuclear power in a the US was collapsing due to cost and schedule overruns already before TMI.
Blaming regulations seems like trying to find a scapegoat rather than admitting reality.
> 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
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.
> 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).
Different people
There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry.
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.
This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things.
Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.
> Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper
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.).
The dunning Kruger effect on full display here. I love the mix of anti-American sentiment and BBC-tier soundbite nonsense.
People who attack the “public education system” as an argument pretty universally agree with every destructive neoliberal policy the American government pushes on the West.
Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture.
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.
>I’d argue
You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.
Regulatory capture is not an argument against regulation, it's an unavoidable externality that has to be managed.
So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe.
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."
Sounds like the other systems are under regulated.
Many countries shut down all their coal plants over a decade ago. Why didn't yours?
Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.
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.
Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.
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.
Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.
Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.
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.
How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.
Subsides, the cost to produce electricity and the cost charged for that energy end up very different.
Paid off nuclear plants produce quite cheap electricity. The problem is that it takes 10-15 years of building and then 40 years of paying $180-220/MWh to get a paid off nuclear plant as per modern western construction costs.
In terms of pure operating costs ignoring everything else it can look good vs other sources that include all costs.
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.
And don't forget the cost of storing nuclear waste for the next 10000 years, which is never included in the "cost of nuclear".
What nuclear waste? Where is it?
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.
I don’t think nuclear waste is a huge deal, but it does increase fuel costs in a very meaningful way. The classic uranium is cheap therefore nuclear’s fuel is cheap is a tiny fraction of the story. Refueling generally means weeks of downtime, you can’t safely operate at extreme temperatures for maximum efficiency, you need enrichment, and fuel rods, and even with multiple trips through the reactor core a significant amount of fuel isn’t burned or economically useful, and when your done you also need processes do deal with highly radioactive material + the costs of dry casks, and then transport them offsite and then down into some tunnels.
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.
I know where the nuclear waste is stored here. Its storage is funded by the government for now (not included in electricity prices) and nobody can actually prove it will be safe for the centuries it will be dangerous.
> What nuclear waste? Where is it?
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.
> around nuclear power plants
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.
> I mean, if you’re going to dispute my point without providing any evidence
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.
Awesome. So how does one go about diverting this from nuclear waste storage to the diet of average citizens, as an act of terrorism?
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.
> diverting this from nuclear waste storage
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.
> Exactly what I said
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.
Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...
> The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them.
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.
> per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high
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.
Those reactors were also very expensive, though, weren't they? I've heard lots of people look to them as a reason that SMRs might work, but not because the naval reactors were cheap. Plus they use uranium enriched to levels that we typically don't allow in civilian reactors...
Even at military contracting prices, estimates put them at $100-200M each IIRC. That's not terrible.
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.
I'm not finding much support costs being that low... best collection of info I have seen is here:
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.
Honestly not a terrible idea. Just have your reactor on a huge barge and if it goes meltdown just drag it out into international waters and let the fish deal with it /s
An actual meltdown at sea would have the now-molten uranium come in contact with seawater, which would instantly flash to high-pressure steam, throwing the uranium into a cancer-causing cloud that the world has never yet seen.
This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.
Doing the math, it looks like the amount of uranium in pre-disaster Chernobyl is 200 metric tons. Apparently, that can bring 333ML (133 Olympic sized swimming pools) of room temperature water to a boil.
I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.
You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.
Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.
Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?
How many cities per year does solar destroy?
What?
Allegedly the reason nuclear is expensive is that it's expensive to prevent Chernobyl. So I'm asking for a curve relating energy costs to Chernobyls per year. I'd like to read off the curve how many Chernobyls per year would be required to make nuclear energy as cheap as solar.
I see, thanks for clearing that up.
>Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.
Would to prefer underregulating it?
How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
> Would to prefer underregulating it?
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
Changes to bring regulation in line with actual risk would be a good start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc
nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.
Run out of what? The fuel? Given its energy density, and uranium availability, that seems unlikely, but I haven’t done math on it.
This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage.
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.
My comment is not misleading, you're just using outdated data from 2022.
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.
I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher.
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.
I think it’s quite conceivable that nuclear would be cheaper for a 100% carbon free grid.
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 is prohibitively expensive and are still way more expensive than using fossil fuels to create hydrogen (called black hydrogen). Burning green hydrogen for electricity when we have yet to make green steel economical viable is not a good idea. Nuclear is still a magnitude cheaper than 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.
I completely agree that green hydrogen is prohibitively expensive at the moment and it currently makes no sense to burn it for electricity generation. But it will likely be necessary in the future if we are to decarbonise aviation fuel, steel making, fertiliser production, etc. What matters at the end of the day is reducing total carbon emissions for the whole economy.
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.
Agreed. I misunderstood your comment and got too hot-headed. Sorry about that.
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 may have misinterpreted your original post as saying we should be going full renewables. I think we're basically in agreement about prices. We might just disagree about the percent of energy that should come from nuclear.
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.
Yeah, my opinion on how much should come from nuclear is that current levels (~20%) are enough to fill the rest in with renewables.
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!).
> We will always need a source of reliable, uninterrupted power.
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.
When they calculate that Solar + battery would cost $50-131/MWh, how is that number reached? What is the number of charge cycles and over what time span? It seems obvious that the cost of producing, installing and operating a 1MWh system of solar and batteries will cost more than a one time payment of $50-131.
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.
Those are American prices with tariff insanity.
It is much cheaper in the rest of the world. Recent Chinese storage prices are down to ~$50/kWh.
Thanks for that.
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.
First. $120/MWh for new built nuclear power is cheaper than any modern western reactors. Real costs are ~180-220/MWh when running at 100% 24/7 all year around. As based on Vogtle, FV3, HPC, proposed EPR2s, proposed Polish reactors etc.
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.
> 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.
People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.
There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear.
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.
South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake.
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.
"They haven’t even started building."
Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.
> US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity)
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).
That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way.
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
As usual, explain how you're going to power heat pumps in the Northern half of the country during a 3 week bomb cyclone. There are answers and they cost money.
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.
Alternative to natural gas? Wind, geothermal, or nuclear. Wind is already in the northern half of the country and operates well when winterized, unlike the ones in Texas that broke since they were not winterized during that freeze a while back.
Natural gas and fossil fuels are not our only options, they are the easiest options.
It's also like to see a comparison to giving people/companies a discount if they have alternative methods of heating for 3 weeks and agree to be powered off. Places like hospitals and universities often have generators and do this. Sand "batteries" (aka electric resistive heaters in a few tons of sand heated to 1000°C) might be cost-effective if standardized. You keep it insulated and hot until the power goes out, then you let it bleed heat out to keep you from dying.
You’re ok if governments give up and simply tell consumers “you deal with it”?
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.
They get cheaper electric rates by agreeing to be the first loads shed if the grid is overloaded. This is a standard thing. If their generators didn't start, they wouldn't be cut off, but it'd be a big deal.
> 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?
Context is solar and pricing. You can't only build solar, because people will freeze to death. So you can't say "solar+batteries is only $X/W!!!” because you're ignoring that you must also have a rarely-used natural gas, or install a rarely-used long-distance transmission line, or install rarely-used storage capacity. Which is fine, but you're being dishonest about costs if you don't.
Couldn't this also be solved with transmission from other parts of the country? or is that what you're saying?
Yes, but you have to pay for a line you don't plan to use much, so its capital costs should be attributed to the generation method requiring it. Which is fine, but not including it is dishonest about the true costs.
I think if you designed and built it with the idea in mind that you're building your renewables in the sunny/windy centre/south of the US to be transported to a these places all year round it's a better idea than it being a backup. But I agree that the cost of over generation should be factored in to comparison pricing. But I also think we don't include enough of the costs in FF infra either.
The coal plant in my hometown was always running on cold days. It didn't need anything else to be available when needed besides several hours of lead time.
Mostly relying on long-distance transmission has high costs in capex, opex (losses), reliability, and security.
> a 3 week bomb cyclone
Sounds pretty windy to me.
I'm not sure how often the upper Midwest gets Dunkelflaute. If rare enough, then overbuilding wind is a possible solution (especially combined with additional transmission) but, again, those costs must be accounted for or the solar costs are dishonest.
https://www.ehn.org/europe-faces-challenges-from-low-wind-an...
> That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test.
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.
Those costs with storage are if you want 100% power from solar which is not reality. US alone gets 20% of power from nuclear today, we’re not going around tearing down the base load and adding solar. We’re keeping base load and adding renewables, which include wind.
Also if renewables are so dumb and are so problematic why were they 95% of new power generation installed in the US last year?
No, they're not for 100% (it's impossible with the current technology) but in the framework of a renewable grid.
> 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.
This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner).
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...
on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment and reduced action in exchange for cheap promises. judge actions, not words.
> on the nuclear front, the administration has cut investment
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...
this point is very important. trump will take all sides of an issue rhetorically so you can almost always find some quote of his supporting whatever position you favor but they have a very definite political program that is concentrating control, cutting federal workers, rolling back renewables, doing spectacular stunts to favor racists, and aggression overseas
So why make the cuts in the first place? There are so many things that could have been changed like getting rid of ALARPA for actual scientifically backed methods other than pointless gratitude's of X dollars for X industry. If the Trump admin truly believed in move fast and break things why is nothing moving
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.
Promises are cheap with this admin, don't count any money until it's actually being paid out. Used to be I'd say until it's in a bill but this administration claims the unilateral right to cut any funded program.
Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws, facts, and balance checks. Just like the word "terrorist." It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
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.
> Seems like "national security" has become a phrase that can be used to circumvent many laws
By has become, you mean always has been, right?
I guess I think it used to be more believable that it was used for security, but maybe I wouldn't if I knew better history.
I’m inclined to believe always — as the case establishing “state secrets” for national security was actually about covering up negligence.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/48-crash-us-hid-behind-natio...
Since 2001 at least.
Since WWII and the bomb. See Bomb Power by Garry Wills
Behind the Bastards had a great series about this too (it was either that book, or another).
Don't forget "war on" something that isn't a nation state.
I think the Washington Generals have a better record than the USA on “wars on” non nation states
>It seems like if these ever get challenged to the Supreme Court the current judges will rule with something like it being at the president's discretion.
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)
Here in Sweden a bunch of offshore wind farm project and even residential PV installations are blocked by the military for unspecified reasons that everyone assumes is that it blocks radar and other signal intelligence.
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 surprised residential PV even interacts with radar -- or is that the other signal intelligence part?
Since it’s all classified o honestly don’t have a clue. But passive radar is also a thing and something that the Swedish defense industry is fairly good at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_radar.
It probably has more to do with the fact that solar that far north is a non-starter. Any PV installed there will actually make AGW and carbon emissions worse, not better. Basically, the amount of carbon emitted due to manufacturing is greater than the carbon savings over the lifetime of the panel in those locations.
Even it that was true, why would the military concern itself with that, and why only for the coasts?
Solar is anti-cyclical with wind both daily and seasonally and an amazing resource during ~8 months of the year in Sweden.
I suggest you stop spreading misinformation.
Big flat conductive panels make good reflectors.
That makes sense but my first thoughts were that panels wouldn't be oriented so that the majority of that flat surface was perpendicular to the radar but instead much closer to parallel, and that aviation radar would be higher up than a house roof to avoid ground clutter.
Wonder if it can be leveraged as for passive radar. Synthetic aperture also comes to mind.
I’m clueless in this field tho.
The best part is that Danish, German and Polish parks are planned mere kilometers away from the denied Swedish ones.
The military will need to figure out how deal with off-shore wind no matter what.
I did the same thing in Sim City: put my coal plants in the corner of town
Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago.
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 construction on some of these windmill farms started years ago. Before that permits & legal has been in the works for a long time. This surely included security clearances.
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)
They were approved before the invasion of Ukraine and before our politicians could see how devestating drones can be. Just because the orange dictator did something does not mean it necessarily was wrong. Even a broken clock is right two times per day.
>"Even a broken clock is right two times per day."
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.
Not incorrect so much as underspecified?
The phrase more commonly starts with a ‘stopped’ clock, which works more clearly.
Should be “a stopped clock is right twice a day”
> dictator
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?
This reply doesn't address any core point.
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.
Yes, it does.
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.
Before Ukrain everyone though drones were easy to counter. Now that has proven false.
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.
That's nonsense. Many countries have been using drones before. (Starting with Nazi Germany during WW 2.)
We have learned counters for them over the years.
Ukraine makes drones vastly cheaper than the current counters and so we can be bankrupted trying the current counters.
> We have learned counters for them over the years.
Using $1m a piece missiles
The problem is that we have a Congress that cares more about in-group loyalty than they do about idiocy.
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:
https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2002285483158569147
Why is whatever Michael Burry’s opinion is particularly notable?
The argument, not the man is important.
Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US. That is where it actually makes sense to deploy windmills, and people will continue to put them there even if subsidies end. It makes sense for the area, the amount of wind, the serviceability of the deployments, etc.
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.
> Bringing up a map of wind power deployments tells the story; what you will see is a hot vertical strip in the center of the US
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.
Why do you say it's rent seeking? 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.
You appear to be starting from a premise that wind turbines don't generate profits?
> Why do you say it's rent seeking?
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.
Taiwan strait is filled with offshore wind turbines from both sides. This is not an issue for PRC nor Taiwan.
Either it is not, or is a huge issue. Those windmills could be deployed on purpose
Yea... I don't trust the motivations, but can confirm that on AA radars looking low (Where you might find UAS or just low-flying aircraft), wind farms show up as clusters of false hits.
It's not like they're moving around though.
Yea; it will be obvious if you've accidentally locked into one, then look at it with eyes or other equipment. And the 0 ground speed. But UAS could hide in them effectively I speculate?
But if they're just false hits it's easy to filter them out, right?
It is more difficult than you may be assuming. How do you know the hits are false? These "hits" are collections of samples at points in time, not continuous tracks. The "tracks" are reconstructed by making inferences from the samples.
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.
That's a great explanation, thanks.
Yes, but it increases the difficulty of finding an aircraft moving near them.
> So clearly this is politically motivated, and they're using what seems to be a real but solveable concern as a scapegoat.
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.
So clearly this is politically motivated
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
Combination of he's vindictive and he's making an example of what happens when you don't preemptively pay him a bribe.
It's well known ol' Don Quixote doesn't like windmills, I mean wind turbines.
> So clearly this is politically motivated
The oil price is too low. Venezuela and now this, it is all part of selling fossil fuels.
This administration is entirely founded on lies. Irrespective of any merits, of any, of its actions it has zero credibility.
These things are also probably really loud if you happen to have a sensitive set of sonar buoys. I'm not entirely sure how you solve that one, because putting them in deeper water would also make them less effective.
This seems like maybe the least BS answer. Sub detection.
Should be easy enough to use some form of active noise cancelling for that.
Deployment of radars on the turbine farms themselves? I don't see how that's supposed to be a good idea. In the scenario we're talking about, war, electricity is one of the first targets. And those relatively defenseless turbines themselves are going to be targeted, and not only by air. The enemy getting to knock out military quality radar setups (which tend to be absurdly expensive), at the same time, is just icing on the cake.
UK has a much smaller coastline, so it might be more cost efficient for them to install extra radars. Also I'm sure the wind turbines interfere in acoustic submarine detection due to the noise they generate.
> I guess the ostensible "national security" rationale (which clearly is not the only reason!) for this is that turbines severely degrade the utility of radar surveillance along the coastlines.
Could it be that they just feel that offshore wind infra is difficult to defend militarily?
No, they aren't any more difficult to defend than any other offshore platform. They do interfere with long-range land-based radar in a way that is problematic with the emergence of shipborne drones.
Are they shutting down offshore oil drilling too?
Order of magnitude increase in difficulty to defend a wind farm vs an oil rig. Wind farms are dispersed, not continuously manned, harder to monitor/enforce a 500m maritime safety zone of exclusion, have a greater attack surface (subsea cables, substations), and are easier to sabotage with plausible deniability
https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/14/3541/2021/
There is data on what wind turbines do to radar.
I feel like the defense against drones is denser, sharper turbines.
This. Also, drones can be jammed pretty easily so making jamming stations on those platforms would be something too.
The Brit’s have the right approach, just put radar on them so now you can see past them.
Jamming drones has gotten much harder. Ukraine and Russia have worked hard at defending against jamming.
Those drones trail fibre optic cable
The drones could fly over them.
You could mount interceptor drones on them though. Like https://youtu.be/bsy5xzdKahU?t=80
Only reason is that orange mussolini does not like seeing wind turbines. That's it.
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.
This administration is all about wielding any form of executive power that they can get an unscrupulous lawyer to cook up.
I'd imagine subsurface detection faces issues with the large electromagnetic fields from generation and transmission too.
Yep. I worked with France's EDF on their offshore turbines https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/inventing-the-future-of-... .
This rationale by the U.S. is total BS.
yes i found that take as well, i also found it interesting that potential for an industrial colony, and early warning infrastructure is undervalued.
It's entirely because Scotland put a windfarm off the coast of his golf course. Trump is a child throwing a tantrum.
This may be the major reason, but I can think of another. How will you protect far away sprawling wind fields from attacks in case of war? They can be attacked by ships, aircraft and subs. You can expect them to be taken out almost immediately imo.
Wind seems like a waste of money compared to solar. We aren’t the UK where they are a tiny island holding on.
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.
That you could come up with one reasonable-sounding explanation while they offered nothing makes me wonder if the administration is too lazy, or too inept.
Also look at how defensible having your power generation outside your coastline is. This is creating a big vulnerability in your power grid.
This is because King Pedophile wants to destabilize the American power grid in order to enrich his donors.
It was an explicit campaign promise that the tech industry completely endorsed and he is fulfilling it.
Local news (Australia) is reporting this as extra pressure on Denmark relating to the rhetoric around Greenland
https://aapnews.aap.com.au/a/XVWrainrX
It's to reapply pressure on Denmark with respect to Greenland.
I'm surprised this isn't mentioned more. Denmark is big in the wind industry and blocking this construction keeps money out of the Danish economy. Another pressure move to get Denmark to give up Greenland.
Next step is invade Venezuela and pump as much oil as possible
The theory that the US government does those wars to keep oil prices high fits the timing way better than the opposite.
I still thinks it's missing important details, but the US making wars to get more oil doesn't fit reality at all.
You're assuming they want to sell the oil in the US markets, they don't. Corporations want to sell it to other countries but they want the US to do the heavy lifting with minimal risks.
trump literally said he wants venez to return the oil it 'stole' when it nationalized.
I still find it very curious that after Russia invaded Ukraine, now Trump is using rhetoric that makes it look like the US is ready to invade some other country, too, they just have not decided on the victim yet.
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.
Trump seems to have been following Russian advice throughout his political career. It started in 1987:
> 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.
Agreed, and it's easy to understand why the US is doing what it is doing in Latin America by reading the new national security strategy.
Venezuelan oil is more about US refineries that can only use very heavy oil, and US wells for such oil running out. Those refineries decided it is cheaper to bribe Trump than to invest into converting their factories. They are using US tax payer dolars (in a war with Venezuela) to avoid having to invest into their own conpanies.
That makes no sense. Any US refinery that can process heavy sour can also process any other kind of crude. It isn’t the 1950s.
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.
Yet this is yet another attack that happens while the oil price falls, successfully making it stop falling.
Again, I don't think the explanation is linked to oil prices.
Is there a similar ostensible classified reason why OCO-2 and OCO-3 are requested to shut down operations? 700+ M invested in space based observatories with ~ 15M yearly operating cost. Just doesn't make sense to disable perfectly working observatories to save less than ~75M in a timespan of 5 years while losing a 700+M investment.
The reason is observatories are woke, apparently
I've been wondering all year about what happens when an executive-branch office issues orders that it is not legally qualified to issue; by and large everybody has just... followed them. This may be another example (I don't know quite enough of the legal specifics in this case, though there are certainly others that are more slam-dunk-y in this respect).
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?
Short term punishment for states: ICE and the National Guard get sent into cities to make people feel unsafe, under the guise of an ‘immigration emergency’. Perhaps also Marines!
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.
Midterms are coming up next year.
Don't worry, there is a plan. CNN will be in new hands by that point. Reddit's r/all will be, or already is gone from the app's defaults, and much more to come!
I don’t even know liberals that watch CNN. It’s already irrelevant.
If it was truly irrelevant, then there wouldn't be billions being thrown at it.
No one said people aren't dumb with their money, but seriously look at some of the numbers that prime time CNN pulls. Twitch streamers have a large audience than prime time shows. There is a reason why cable has been dying and cable news has already dead.
Do Twitch viewers vote? Really doesn't seem like it.
It's the airport TV's and doctor's office waiting rooms that they are bidding for at this point.
The doctors offices want none of it. It's all FoodTV and HGN.
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.
Doctors should never deny patients.
They can take precautions & insist on proper treatments, of course.
It’s this attitude that’s led to us being in this mess. Don’t want to listen to the doctor about basic medical advice? Don’t go to that doctor.
I'm in Hell (FL), so more "professional offices" than not have Fox on.
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.
> just said "no go ahead, keep building"? What happens to the companies if they just keep building?
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...
I would imagine that most if not all will comply with illegal orders out of fear of retaliation, which is a very valid fear.
These things take large amount of money from upstream, if the money is cut they can "say" what they want, nothing is getting done, from my understanding
Power of the purse, given to the executive
What orders is the executive branch legally qualified to issue?
If they ordered sloppy joes in the white house cafeteria a federal judge would stay the order by noon the next day.
Just something to keep in mind - the actual site of these wind farms is offshore in federal waters, and construction is subject to federal (as well as state) permits.
Don't expect any sort of mass disobedience here. Doing anything in offshore wind requires a large, highly-skilled organization and lot of time. One firm "ahem!" from the Coast Guard, Navy, or Treasury, and that kinda org will back down.
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?
The Saudis have enormous influence over Trump through business deals. So does Qatar through the jet they gifted Trump, and the UAE through crypto deals.
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.
It's more the Scottish that caused this than the oil princes, the windmill stuff is all about petty hatred from losing a court case and now one of his precious golf courses has windmills visible out on the ocean for a few of the holes
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
But he didn't just cancel wind projects. He cancelled solar. He cancelled EV tax credits.
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...
the rest are more "a bonus" than the RCA, which is pettiness at his core and a constant seeing anything and everything as a slight against him
how and why the republican/maga party wholeheartedly adopted Trump's grievances as their own is beyond me
The Arab Gulf states have also been pumping billions into Jared Cushner investment vehicles.
https://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-says-15bn-qatar-uae-c...
> jet they gifted Trump
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.
Stop giving him ideas. He’s gonna put a hangar right next to the east wing ballroom and shove it in there like the Spruce Goose
It's actually the other way around; the Saudis are only able to sell their oil because the oil money is flowing into US treasuries and other financial instruments, and it has been like this since the 70s.
not just that. Fossils are/were the guarantee of US dollar dominance. Huge $ are made purely by the fact most fossils transactions are in $. It's not in the interest of US to reduce the influence of fossils, especially now when it's the biggest exporter. Trump is ... trump... his actions can be anyway between personal biased hate or US strategical decision...
It’s always personal hate, or personal grift. There is no strategy here
i have the feeling the real reason is "drill baby drill". The actual administration does not hide it's love for carbon based energy
The $445 million campaign contribution / bribe from Big Oil is clearly paying off.
As one who worked on over the horizon radar (OTH-B), ground clutter is a major impediment to accurate detection, identification, and correlation of an object.
Same principle applies for water as it is in air.
Of course they'll classify the actual reason - government corruption.
It's a matter of national security that the public not know the government is illegitimate.
The US doesn't want to piss off all the USO's zipping around underwater.
Yep, this is what I was thinking. It was part of the detente negotiated to end the "drone" hysteria about this time last year.
US bribery system eh I mean fossil fuel lobby strikes again
I found this article interesting as someone still learning about how energy policy and renewable projects interact with government decisions. It’s surprising to see how national security concerns are being used to pause offshore wind construction, and I’m curious how this will affect both the industry and broader energy goals. Thanks for the clear overview!
Pure idiocracy.
Trump Media merging with a fusion energy firm.
The weirdest part was that it increased share value, when realistically it should have decreased it…
Not sure why this was downvoted. This was announced last week.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-media-fusion-power-company-...
haha, amateurs. California is way ahead of the game here. We've been blocking our own offshore wind fields for years, using our own environmental regulations, and we're going to keep doing it for the foreseeable future.
How many golf courses is he planning to build?
If fent is a WMD then so are turbines!
What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage. I'm reminded of threatening tariffs to successfully derail global carbon levy on ship emissions.
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.
> 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.
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...
That headline really deserves a literary prize.
Yoga instructors, assemble!
Also coal mining is a shitty ass job. Those people would be much better served working in green energy.
And that was in 2017! The population of working coal miners shrank by 20% in the last decade, from 50k to 40k
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CEU1021210001#0
We've been in the realm of intentionally doing damage for a while now. But we got these cool red hats.
Intentionally doing damage started with DOGE. So, roughly day 1.
you forgot this is part 2
Ok, right. Intentionally doing damage started at least as early as Jan 6 2021.
Eliminating government waste damages the wasteful and corrupt.
https://doge.gov/savings
Those "savings" have not withstood careful analysis. Essentially they're nonsense and with the damage they have done the final bill will be much higher than any savings.
Do you honestly think federal employees are more corrupt than this administration?
Yes.
Which one had a greater 2025 net worth increase than the president? Which one pardoned people who donated to his campaign or ballroom? Which one is subject to legal reprisal for corruption?
Just because they call it waste, doesn't make it so. You could cut anything and then justify it by calling it waste.
It's all bullshit.
14 million dead kids.
Just uh... just waiting for those saving to hit.
Yup, ahh... any day now.
The group that was found to be massively lying every time they released stats in easy to catch ways and wasted more money then they saved?
there are at least two reasons trump is pushing for oil:
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.
> 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 them not in USD.
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.
Also the US is increasingly proving itself as an unreliable partner. Do you want that for your energy supply?
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.
it could very well be that it backfires. I guess time will tell. A lot of his actions seem to be trimmed into this direction, and it's not a new one. He left the paris climate agreement quite a while back as far as I remember. blocking offshore wind construction just fits this agenda, as supporting companies to manufacture these windmills would just make everything cheaper (more demand, rising production capacity etc.) and demonstrate actual use of it.
At least that's how I see this.
> it could very well be that it backfires.
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.
You could be right. I try to abstain from making any predictions, because I see the world is such a complicated mess where even stupid decisions could get a positive outcome due to unforeseeable events. (a new pandemic? a war breaks out? someone decided to retaliate? the suez canal gets occupied? a volcano erupts?)
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.
There is a third important reason--
For some reason, oil has masculine aesthetics but wind power doesn't. I don't think this is a calculated play
How many people actual think like this or are influenced by it? (I'm going to be disappointed aren't I)
Nobody at all, but isn't it scary to imagine? In fact we could imagine and invent all kinds of scary things if we think too much. Ahh!
I know plenty of people personally who can rant about energy prices being high while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy and even namedrop whichever foul devil bogeyman it is this week that is said to be the cause of this disjointed trauma that they find so overwhelming.
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.)
"while somehow finding room in the same breath to demonize wind and solar energy "
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.
I consider that I'm intertwined in the evolution of a very different friend's very local efforts, with their own hybrid battery-backed grid-tied offline-capable solar power system.
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?
"entirely capable of keeping them with power even if the grid goes down for an indefinite period."
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.
I didn't say that renewables have 1/3 of anything.
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.
Most grown men are influenced by this. The patriachy is strongggg.
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.
The Aplha Male Energy didnt do so well over the weekend. One got its jaw broken in two places... the other just got pounded into submission.
> oil is the main driver for dollar demand, as oil is paid in dollar
This stupid meme needs to die.
Maybe a third reason:
“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.”
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd74lyr094vo
Coincidentally, TAE Technologies had a product placement baked into the 2021 film named Finch with Tom Hanks, distributed by Apple Original Films.
The intention is to make specific individuals a lot of money. It has been since day 1.
Do you mean the first day 1 or the second day 1?
Yes.
>while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.
No, not for jobs. Profits, stock bumps, and bonuses for the execs at oil companies and friends of the admin.
china runs with everything. They are still expanding coal units for firming and they'll build a ton of new gas units too. But to ban deployment of wind turbines without any explanation is ... expected from current administration...
Being blind with bias is also expected. I don't like what is going on either, but please consider that if it was only about "damaging" as others have implied, it would not just be off shore wind turbines. I can assure you there are other reasons.
Okay, what are they?
We knew going into this administration that revenge would be part of every policy.
I hope you realize that China's coal and oil use for electricity is at an all-time high and increasing. They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total. US coal usage peaked circa 2000 and has decreased for the last 2 decades.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
> They have installed more coal capacity since 2020 than the US has total
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45108292
That article is about emissions, not admixture. If you look at the source of that article, which they link to: https://carbonmonitor.org/variation
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.
Their economy grew 3% this year and they cut emissions. https://rhg.com/research/chinas-economy-rightsizing-2025-loo...
"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration.
A 3% GDP growth this year is a slowdown from 2024. Did you read this paper? I encourage you to at least read the abstract. It discusses whether "China's 2025 economic growth story turns on whether investment merely declined in the second half of the year or collapsed."
You seem to be confusing first and second derivatives.
China had an emissions decline in 2025 that is substantially attributable to a decline in industry, per their first source. The decline in industry is plausible so long as GDP growth in 2025 is lower than GDP growth in 2024, and is additionally supported by the newly introduced source that the commentor did not read. Yes, it is possible to have an economic slowdown and a positive GDP print.
In general it's weird to say '"economic slowdown" is an exaggeration' and then link to something that talks about the economic slowdown.
I don't know what "decline in industry" means here tbh. Emissions from industry went down, but GDP still went up. Does that mean there's "less industry" or "more industry"? How do you measure "industry"? Maybe their industry just became more efficient.
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.
New coal data is out just a few days ago [1], it's plateaued globally and expected to start to decline.
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...
Article is about US blocking energy from wind. You are (correctly) saying that China is increasing energy from coal and oil.
What is your point? Can you elaborate how this is relevant?
> What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
That began almost the moment this administration came into power.
> we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage
That occurred a long time ago with the destruction of USAID and arbitrary firing of large numbers of federal workers.
But USAID needed to be destroyed. 'AID' never stood for aid, it was an organization for international development and spent vast amounts of money on cultural programs for countries that didn't want them.
There will be an estimated 14 million extra deaths directly attributed to this policy choice: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
91 million lives were saved over the last two decades. The vast majority of that wasn't "international development" fluff; it was basic survival. We’re talking about stopping tuberculosis, malaria, and starvation.
Framing this as getting rid of unwanted "cultural programs" is a convenient way to ignore the fact that we pulled the plug on the life support system for 30 million children.
Why does medical aid require gay and lesbian cultural programming?
Yes I'm sure that the regime and its cronies who have spent the past 50+ years fabricating evidence for illegal wars to enrich themselves and their friends in the military and energy industries, trafficking arms and sponsoring regime change, destabilizing and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying Syria and Libya, droning Africa and Pakistan, arming and funding terrorist "JV teams" like ISIS, all uniquely care so deeply about the welfare of "the poor brown people" that they just desperately wanted to give the very shirts from their backs to this noble cause, if only the horrible government had not just forbidden it. Sure, that is the most likely explanation for all this.
Come on now. These programs are rife with corruption and ulterior motives. People have moved on from "think of the starving children" being able to shut down any questioning of it.
And really that's just silly when you think about it. If that's supposed to be an argument then we might ask why did previous governments practically murder 100 million people by not spending even more money on all these wonderful programs? Why are the European countries that have funded this paper you linked to murdering these orphans right now by not stepping in to replace the lost funding? It's just not really the way to have a reasoned discussion about it.
Interesting introduction to the paper too:
> Evidence before this study
> Despite the US Agency for International Development (USAID) being the world's leading donor for humanitarian and development aid, there is scarce evidence in the literature assessing its impact on global health. Few evaluations have attempted to estimate the effects of USAID funding on maternal and child mortality in selected low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), and some reports have offered only approximate estimates for specific diseases.
Strange that the American public was being made to fund these vast expenditures for so many decades, on apparently scarce scientific evidence for its effectiveness. You don't think anybody could possibly have any negative feelings about how the ruling class has been spending their money?
> vast amounts of money on cultural programs for countries that didn't want them.
I don't understand. How do you give someone money if they don't want it?
More like "if we can't be partners we'll find your enemies and fund them instead." or, "we'll partner with your next of kin who may be more sympathetic [or suggestive] to our concerns."
And it's a problem if your enemies' cultural programs get funded?
Because they have other things you do want. I’m sure you actually do understand that.
I don't. Walk me through it. Give me an example.
What other things should we destroy because you can vaguely describe something you consider wasteful?
"What is soft power?"
Reminiscent of how most water which used to melt into the Great Salt Lake is now being used to farm Alfalfa, which only makes up 1% of their GDP and far fewer jobs than other industries. Of course if this continues for another generation, toxic arsenic dust will pollute and force the failure of Salt Lake City and surrounding regions. Luckily this will cause the agricultural industry to fail (after killing many people) and nature will heal itself.
> What the... It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
He's been doing that since January.
>It seems we crossed into the realm of intentionally doing damage.
"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...]
What? They've been intentionally doing damage for a long time. Pardoning criminals is one that comes to mind.
Pardoning criminals is one that comes to mind.
Seriously, the pardons alone make this the most pro-crime administration in my lifetime. Probably ever.
At the same time as pardoning the Jan 6 insurrectionists, he's seeking multi-year felony convictions for... People standing in front of an ICE bus.[1]
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'.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
All the more reason for me to invest in a personal windmill.
Sadly wind turbines don’t really scale down like PV panels. The energy produced by PV panels is a linear function of their surface area. For wind turbines, it scales with the square of the blade length.
This is true, but if you already have a battery, getting an extra 200-400w when the sun isn't shining is really useful. (for a UK based house. Not so sure about the USA.)
The cost isn't as good as solar though. a 1kw turbine is expensive.
They also need regular servicing and proper locating away from turbulence. Micro scale wind makes absolutely no sense economically.
Economic sense depends on individual/local circumstances also.
Wow, that would take care of our usual home office base load (Germany, not using electricity for heating)
It's a siren call for us techies, but reality is less pretty than our fantasies of "cheap base load".
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.
Doesn't the area described by a turbine's motion scale with the square of the blade-length, so given a circular area covered by a turbine, the power will scale linearly with that area?
Yes but you’re not paying for the area the blade covers - you’re paying for the blade. Simplifying (to an extreme) for the sake of illustration - a 20m blade costs twice as much as a 10m one but produces 4 times the energy.
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.
YMMV depending on where you live but for MOST people you get more bang for your buck with solar+batteries
Unlike solar, wind at the utility scale virtually always improves load factors, lcoe, and a host of other economics vs a personal installation.
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.
Control over oil and gas keeps monetary values high.
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).
TBH the fact renewables haven't or can't cut big cheques to change Trumps mind is a little baffling. Surely he can double dip from big oil and small renewable.
This is a road to serfdom (and/or a road to 1789 France) situation with what's happening to energy prices in the past couple years[1].
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.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
That graph is not inflation-adjusted and basically says to avoid using it like this in the description:
> 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...
The UK has tons of wind power but prices there are exceptionally high. Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy
> Offshore wind isn't as cost effective as solar, it's the poster boy for high-cost, low-value renewable energy
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.)
There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere. Once the infrastructure is adapted to that, costs should normalise again.
> There is also a significant cost to moving electricity production from a relatively small number of centralised plants to almost everywhere.
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.
UK energy prices are set by the most expensive energy source in the mix that contributes to the National Grid, which happens to be gas.
Which also sets broken incentives where nobody (not even renewables) are actually incentivized to dethrone gas/etc as it would reduce their own profit margin.
But everyone are incentivized to build another wind farm, solar plant, battery etc to make profit on the current fossil gas based margins. Pushing the price lower for more hours.
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.
Now imagine if you paid for a giant wind project that never produced a Joule. Great for energy prices.
Uk energy costs are high because the highest cost marginal producer sets the rate i.e. gas powered stations
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
energy development is complex, but it cannot be your idea, which boils down to, "whatever is cheapest," especially for government policy. it would be cheapest to not use energy at all, which is the exact opposite of the mercenary POV you are talking about, without having to use the word environment at all.
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.
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
> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants.
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.
In New England, where the offshore wind is being shut down, there is very little sun right now. How will solar + battery help in New England?
Germany is mostly north of the 49th parallel and has deployed over 100GW of capacity. New England would do just fine.
> It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.
“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.)
> nuclear is not 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.
> It can be effectively renewable for all practical purposes, but there's an aversion to breeder reactors.
Breeder reactors reduce long-term waste issues, but they don't make nuclear renewable.
They push the timeline out so far that it's effectively renewable. The sun will burn out at some point, too, but we don't say solar is non-renewable.
We don't say solar is non-renewable because using every single available bit of solar today has no impact on the solar energy available tomorrow. This is not true of nuclear, even if you increase the total quantity of available fission-derived energy by 50 or 100 or whatever the outer estimate is for breeder reactors compared to non-breeder fission.
Based on the math in this paper[1] there's enough uranium floating around to keep the planet running on the order of hundreds of millions of years at modern energy consumption levels. The price of the material would go up compared to what it costs currently, but the raw material costs are a small fraction of bottom line anyway.
[1] http://large.stanford.edu/publications/coal/references/docs/...
Why do you think your particular mercenary point of view does not prevail? Because people are stupid?
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.
The problem is you build all of these offshore wind turbines and none of them are lowering our bills. As a politician I would try and lower my constituents' bills
It's interesting that people are very incredulous of there being a legitimate defense reason for this when we have had unilateral unanswered drone incursions all over Europe and the US.
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.
This is part of the problem with having an administration that so obviously corrupt and so frequently tells the most obvious lies and consistently acts with such obvious, naked partisanship. You can't trust them about anything.
> unanswered drone incursions all over Europe
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.
It could in principle be legit. But there's a trail of previous bad faith behaviour around the same windfarms.
No, Sweden did not ban all offshore wind projects last year.
Is that the strawman framing of my argument that you want to stick with?
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...
You framed it that way. This is an article about how the US shut down every offshore wind farm project. People are here discussing the fact that the us shut down every offshore wind project. You came in and said Sweden did it too. Setting aside the fact that they did not do that, they blocked some projects, not all - you don’t even know what “it” is because the US did not give a rationale.
And, Sweden blocked those projects in early stage permitting, not well underway or even nearing completion.
It's not comparable at all. US defence agencies have had thorough involvement in the permitting process of these US developments.
They've been crying wolf for nearly a decade now, they aren't suddenly going to have a change of heart and be honest now.
There's obviously transparently political antipathy from the Trump administration towards offshore wind development in the US. It's far more likely this is gross political interference by an unserious and vendetta-driven administration.
Trump doesn't like windfarms since they built some off the coast of his Scottish golf club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_International_Golf_Club_...
I suspect this is the true reason. He is not known for being a strategic thinker.
This is dumb. We are in the midst of an energy shortage that will only get worse.
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.
> energy shortage that will only get worse
Worse? An energy shortage is an opportunity to increase prices and make more money! Think about the hyuge profits!
Putin's orders?
drones are invisible to radar.......or clearly russia(or ukrain) would not be dealing with strikes far from the front lines also, hypersonic missles are now a thing, and the hit faster than any radar or interceptor can register but yes if you were worried about Portugal trying a sneak attack, then clearly they would use the wind turbine shielding attack vector from weaponised shipping cans placed on container ships
They are not (necessarily) invisible, that depends on size & many other variables.
Also, hypersonic missiles are perfectly vusible on radar.
Drones are regularly intercepted in the Ukraine war. Patriot batteries have intercepted kinzhals.
Kinzhal is ballistic missile flying on high altitude trajectory, so it is easily visible and somehow interceptable.
Drones and cruise missiles often fly very low, which makes them much harder to detect and intercept.
The Water Folk put the kibosh on that shit.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355227
can we setup a polymarket for the number of days until trump blames offshore windmills for hurricanes
Oh no! look Trump is doing exactly what he promised and everyone is shocked, again
https://www.project2025.observer/en?agencies=Dept.+of+Energy
I don't think anyone here is shocked.
He said he'd never heard of project 2025.
Can we summon the Trumphole licking HN users that spent their reputation insisting that us "libtards" were freaking out, and get them in here to explain how this fits in the MAGA 4D Chess?
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?
Global human populations are in decline; fossil fuel use will decline along with us.
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?
> Global human populations are in decline; fossil fuel use will decline along with us.
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.
Prefer solar over wind
To be fair, there could absolutely be national security issues. One example might be undersea (or even surface) navigation. If the coastline is littered with windmills off shore, this might create a negative of submarine navigation routes. That's clearly information we don't want shared with adversaries. There might be undersea classified cables. There might be classified sonar stations. It might be hard to detect adversary subs within a windmill field due to extra noise, etc.
Sure. We can always imagine an excuse to avoid dealing with the obvious reality. I don't think it's productive though.
Yet Sweden did it too (https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/11/11/why-swe...) and they quote these defense-related reasons. Are they lying, do you believe that Sweden of all countries is under Trump's direct influence re: wind aversion?
Sweden is worried about a hostile neighbor. They're freaked out enough that they joined NATO after generations of non-alignment.
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.
> If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending.
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.
Nuclear war isn't winnable. It's stupid and dangerous to pretend otherwise.
humans already gave nuclear buttons to politicians and dictators with questionable intelligence, so it doesn't matter what you are pretending to be exactly.
Sweden did not ban all offshore wind projects.
Defense related reasons canceled projects early in the planning phase.
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.
> do you believe that Sweden of all countries is under Trump's direct influence re: wind aversion?
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.
A conspiracy is not the obvious reality.
Unless the conspiracy is being done by malicious idiots with too much power.
Project 2025 is a conspiracy that is obvious, is reality, and includes blocking windmills
They were approved by a prior administration that prioritized green energy over national security.
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.
Great, then they can explain the reasons. Most transparent administration in history, remember?
The reasons are clearly stated and widely reported by multiple news sources: The Trump administration ordered an immediate pause on five major offshore wind projects, citing national security risks due to radar interference.
Not much on details besides a “classified study“ but sounds pretty transparent to me?
> They were approved by a prior administration that prioritized green energy over national security.
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.
If that were the case, why would they have been granted the leases in the first place?
If the US had a normal, rational Administration, then yeah, I'd probably accept the "national security" explanation. But when the Administration claims completing the White House ballroom is a matter of "national security", and Antifa is the current largest threat to "national security", then credibility for these claims is completely lost.
> But when the Administration claims completing the White House ballroom is a matter of "national security"
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.
I'm thinking maybe they shouldn't have done that. Unfortunately they are all incompetent.
>To be fair, there could absolutely be national security issues.
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.
Yeah, especially enemy submarines. A windmill farm presents opportunities for defense: as a platform to mount and power sonar, radar arrays or other early warning systems, the power cables are actual decoys for comms infra, the farm itsrlf is an obstacle for drones and enemy subs.
Are the areas that we are placing windmills regularly navigated by submarines? And wouldn't windmills cause as much, or more, issues for an adversary submarines?
I smell BS.
This happens all the time in my country. The navy has all kinds of gear deployed in the sea that could be interfered with.
Edit: Looks like they were a bit late to veto it here though.
This is obviously because Donald Trump notoriously hates offshore wind turbines.
Perhaps worth recapping that he hates them due to a specific personal event (the same is true for everything he does, if you dig deep enough to find the reason). In this case he developed a golf resort on the East Coast of Scotland. Meanwhile wind generators were also being deployed immediately offshore. He became enraged that the view from his new development was blighted by the turbines. So it isn't even due to oil industry bribery. It's personal.
I don't know why people think wind turbines are ugly... Someone who admires gold toilets, no less. I think the opposite.
I think you just found the compromise:
Gold painted wind turbines. Art of the Deal!
In that case he would just approve wind farms that fuck with people he dislikes.
It seems to me this is very much intentional to keep oil demand up and prices high.
The problem there is that other people don't hate wind farms the way he does.
I’m pretty sure the list of people Trump outright likes is approximately one.
Much like a certain White House Correspondents' Dinner incident.
Occam's Razor: offshore wind requires a lot of rare earths for their magnets and whatnot. US military-industrial complex needs the little remaining global supply not under China's export controls.
> offshore wind requires a lot of rare earths for their magnets
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.
Any electricity produced by turning generators will require rare earths. This includes, every current non-trivial electricity source with the exception of solar. Gas, oil, coal and nuclear all work by heating steam and running it through a turbine that turns a generator that makes electricity. For hydro, the falling water turns the turbine/generator.
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.
> Any electricity produced by turning generators will require rare earths.
AFAIK, not all kinds of rotating generators require rare earths; IIRC, induction motors don't need any permanent magnets.
AFAIK, modern wind turbines use types of induction motors because it allows them to adjust the rotation speed by applying a counter-rotating stator field (which is a very neat trick) - older turbines had to rotate at a fixed divisor of 3600 rpm (grid frequency).
This could very well be the excuse they're using. The reality is almost certainly more petty than that given the great one's irrational hate of wind power.
So, let's halt projects for which most fabrication of components is already completed?
Occams Razor: Trump openly hates windmills and green energy
This feels extremely plausible. I don't see anyone else saying this yet, well done.
I actually believe the radar surveillance excuse (on a technicalities only), if that's what this is going to come down to. The ocean is a big empty place and prime for picking up radar reflections as the background is pretty quiet.
However... how on earth was this not identified like 10 years ago way before these projects were even started? Seems pretty obvious in hindsight.
Youre taking the bait.
Sounds plausible but it would have been identified 10 years ago which is why everyone in the thread thinks it's a dubious claim.
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.
It's almost certainly the best excuse they could think up to placate the masses.
There is a Belgian company that can use temperarure & other fluctuations in underseas power & cimmunication cables to detect nearby objects etc. I'm sure they are willing to help the US navy if they can convince them the US is a solid NATO partner… ( oh, wait, that might have become difficult…)
We don’t need offshore wind or onshore. Wish the US focused more on Solar. Seems to be the smartest path forward.
China understands and is gunning for Nuclear and Solar. Geothermal and wind are nice but too location dependent.
Wind and solar are highly complementary. Wind tends to be peak during evening and morning, and is often stronger at night than during the day. Wind is cheaper than overbuilding solar and adding batteries.
Everyone hates living near the turbines. They are loud, an eyesore, kill birds in droves, and cause annoying flickering.
People don’t mind solar as much.
Wind cannot compete on solar for price especially with China reducing solars base cost each year.
China is building out immense offshore wind capacity - more than 41GW operational currently, about half of global capacity.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2025/02/07/half-of-global-opera...
The big solar plant they made in between Cali and Las Vegas one, it wasn't online more than a few years? It shut down...
It shut down because it can't compete cost wise with ... solar. Specifically solar photovoltaic.
You're thinking of an actually quite small solar-thermal plant, which is bankrupt because solar-thermal is a dumb idea.
If its a dumb idea, why waste billions of dollars on it? Do you know how much pollution that shutted down plant is? It was HugE I've gone past it. So much waste for a "dumb idea"
This is what's wrong with Americans in one succinct example. "Look at all the pollution from this field of mirrors" he thinks while driving on the freeway to Las Vegas.