this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Their cost goes up over time while the cost of both renewables and energy storage is plummeting.
Can anyone explain to me why cost matters in these conversations? Do shrinking populations need more energy for any sane reason? If so, do we need it scaled that rapidly?
Do we need electricity to be dirt cheap for any reason other than we want to consume it? Is it just capitalism-brain insisting that tricking the market with profit incentives will save our planet?
Feel free to re-imagine the energy system as a socialist one where you merely replace the concept of a monetary cost with a resource cost. You still want things to use less resources, because then you can have more of it, which ultimately benefits the public that aims to use the energy.
Why do we need more of it? Since 1950 the USA has increased electricity usage 14x with slightly over 2x the population. With full electrification, our electricity demands are expected to increase by 90% in 2050 with only a ~10% population bump.
Surely we've gone beyond necessary consumption and hit diminishing quality-of-life returns. And all of this is considering just production, excluding the complications of replacing infrastructure, transportation fleets and upgrading the grid.
Those projections also don't include gen-AI datacenters, which will consume ~12% of total usage by 2028. Electric trains are between 2-10x more efficient per passenger/kWh than BEVs. With a focus on more efficient transportation you could turn off those datacenters, skip the complex and expensive BEV infrastructure and come out with a much lower 2050 consumption.
That's of course a different way we could go, yeah. Renewables are still more fit for purpose in a paradigm where we try to reduce energy consumption levels down to what they've been in the past.
You can only optimize usage for so long though, until you start having to downgrade your lifestyle to a significant degree. You're likely going to find this to be a very hard sell, somewhat reducing the feasibility of the strategy.
The cost goes up entirely due to red tape and lobbying from fossil fuel organizations. Remove the boot that is nuclear fear induced largely by oil companies and actually commit to nuclear R&D and the cost will drop. And even the recent breakthroughs China made with Thorium made are genuine, even more so. And unlike every other power generation industry, nuclear operators are mandated by law to put aside funding to handle waste. Tell me which solar industry members are doing anything about PFAS generated in their production or wind turbine operators who give a damn about how many landfills they are flooding with expired turbine blades.