solarpunk memes

The key is that, watt for watt, new solar right now costs about a quarter what new fission does. The cost difference has gotten that ridiculous. There are other options as well of course. We can use that superabundant power in the summer to split water and make lots of hydrogen, and use that for power in the winter. We can even use it to pull CO2 from the air, convert it to synthetic fuels like synthetic methane, and just run our old natural gas plants for power in the winter.

And we're easily headed to a world where watt for watt, solar is 1/10th the cost of new fission. At that point, even at high latitudes, it makes more sense to use solar power even in winter. I mean sure, if you're at such extreme latitudes that you have months of total darkness, then solar will have a problem there. Maybe small modular reactors make sense for those niche applications. But even then, those areas are probably better relying on synthetic fuels made from solar power plants at lower latitudes. Or even better, those higher latitudes also get very long days during the summer months, so they can make their own hydrogen during the summer and run their grids off tanks of that in the winter. Or, if nothing else, we can always just run some long power cables north-to-south.