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aperson_hello | 2 years ago

Accelerating and who knows - everyone is extraordinarily terrible at making predictions about power generation. New solar/wind capacity is already significantly cheaper than new nuclear (and new plants of any sort other than natural gas), but more expensive than running existing nuclear plants. Nuclear is a great way to get stable base load capacity - while wind and solar require significant storage to be used as base load (because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine). We'll ultimately probably land on a mix of power sources.

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epistasis|2 years ago

The best predictions have come from people that know the "least" that make the simplest predictions just extrapolating current trends.

To get bad predictions, you need to be "deeply knowledgeable" about energy and come up with all sort of ways to bias the predictions against renewable energy.

Greenpeace (not known for being very numerate in the first place) and Ramez Naam did much better:

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...