Hawai'i receives final coal shipment for its last coal-fired power plant

[superluser]

@ejeffrey

Not only is it cheaper, but it’s faster. If I buy 10 billion dollars worth of solar panels and wind turbines, I can have them installed and generating electricity next year. If I buy 10 billion dollars worth of nuclear I can hope to start getting bills for cost overruns in 6 years if I’m lucky. But that time the renewable power I installed will have already displaced millions of tons of CO2 and be close to paying back the capital costs.

Yeah, that’s why I say it’s pointless to discuss new nuclear at this point.

Larger renewable plants will take more time to get up & running due to things like availability of materials & environmental impact studies (will this 500-acre 100MW solar plant impact local wildlife or soil erosion?) than smaller renewables plants & that time isn’t trivial BUT

but that’s the beauty of renewables. There’s no real upside to having one 500-acre 100MW plant over 1000 .5 acre 100kW plants. So you can spin those smaller plants up well before you could get the approvals for new nuclear. Hell, you could probably get approval for the 100MW plant before new nuclear.