[HN Gopher] Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani unveils $10bn green...
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Asia's richest man Mukesh Ambani unveils $10bn green energy push
Author : baybal2
Score : 81 points
Date : 2021-06-27 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aljazeera.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aljazeera.com)
| piyushpr134 wrote:
| This man is a genius. He continuously disrupts his business
| empire every 10 years.
|
| From clothing & petrochemicals, which his father built,
|
| to refining in 90s (he built the world's largest refinery and
| made India net petroleum product exporter...a petroleum deficit
| nation), to phones in 2000s (ushered in phone era in India by
| bundling handset and plans), to data (jio) in 2010s (made India
| the largest Internet data user in matter of a few years).
|
| Now he is doing renewal energy.
| hourislate wrote:
| Maybe he's just a savvy business man but Genius? Money makes
| money, when you have billions you can make 10 of billions.
| Nothing he does is out of the kindness of his heart, it's to
| grow his empire.
| sremani wrote:
| You must then read about his brother Anil Ambani.
| hourislate wrote:
| Are they sending rockets to Mars? Did they invent some new
| Fusion reactor? No, they take existing technologies and
| leverage the billions they have to expand their Empire.
| Understandable that the Indian community wants to celebrate
| their own but lets put everything in perspective.
|
| No different than calling Warren Buffet a Genius.....
| unmole wrote:
| I don't think calling Warren Buffett a genius is
| controversial.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| I think it gets controversial when thinking about the
| investments and their effects, here's an example piece:
| https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/warren-buffett-
| americas-f...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Wait isn't Warren Buffet considered a Genius?!
| baybal2 wrote:
| He is a genius at dealing with Indian bureaucracy
| hourislate wrote:
| Hahaha, yes that I will agree with.
| hiyer wrote:
| Genius isn't limited to only science and technology. It
| would not be wrong to call Warren Buffett a financial or
| investing genius; and similarly Mukesh Ambani a genius
| industrialist.
| dartharva wrote:
| So only tech inventors qualify as geniuses to you?
| hourislate wrote:
| > So only tech inventors qualify as geniuses to you?
|
| I just gave two obvious examples that would change
| humanity for ever. Do I consider someone like Tesla a
| Genius? yes. Do I consider someone like Elon a Genius?
| No. But I definitely don't equate Genius with Business
| success based on well established Industry.
| contingencies wrote:
| s/green energy/PR/
| jgjot-singh wrote:
| This is embarrassing. This is one of the shadiest people in
| India, who is in part responsible for the currently ongoing
| largest protest in human history.
|
| He funded the current PM from being a no name local politician
| all the way to prime minister ( an ascent which included brutal
| racial killings of Muslims in Gujarat).
|
| And since his reaching PM status, Modi's government has allowed
| one shady businesses practice after another to be carried out by
| Ambani's many companies, ultimately culminating in the passing of
| the three farming ordinances which would give Ambani's companies
| significant freedom to fixing prices of crops. This model has
| already been tested by Modi and Ambani in Gujarat, where Ambani's
| companies now own the farmland while local farmers immigrate of
| out state to find labor jobs... So this is ultimately about land,
| and no one is India is more land hungry than Ambani.
|
| It is appaling that on one hand, this type of unethical behavior
| has resulted in the largest protest in history, with hundreds of
| thousands of Indians uniting together and traveling to Delhi
| through police barricades, to demand that the government take
| back the farming ordinances, which Ambani is directly behind.
|
| And on the other hand, here we are, calling this man a genius.
| amriksohata wrote:
| This sounds dubious, can you provide valid sources to back this
| up? He said he never wanted to get into agriculture
| dartharva wrote:
| Talking out of our ass, are we? The Ambanis had already
| established their supremacy and had flourished under Congress
| rule too, BJP's rise and the corresponding co-dependence was a
| relatively recent phenomenon.
|
| Regardless, it can't be denied that no one has brought such
| drastic changes in the country as M.Ambani. The entire
| country's mobile app and e-commerce market exists practically
| _because_ of Jio 's disruption in the telecom sector.
| ffggvv wrote:
| green energy is the biggest grift in the world right now. all the
| usual suspects cashing in.
| cute_boi wrote:
| I really don't understand why government aren't considering
| nuclear energy. The main problem of energy is batteries. Solar,
| Wind all have issues that they can't give constant energy.
|
| For me I still think Nuclear and Hydro are the best green energy.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| My understanding is that governments consider nuclear disasters
| as eventualities - reducible but not truly preventable, and in
| the event of a disaster you have to create a _functionally
| permanent_ exclusion zone.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Not unlike a hydroelectric dam and reservoir.
| akamaka wrote:
| Cost. Have a look at the numbers and then it should make sense.
| Don't get caught up in silly internet debates about safety and
| politics. It might soon be cheaper to install new wind and
| solar than to operate some existing nuclear plants.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
| saddlerustle wrote:
| Cost is a non-answer. The cost of nuclear plants has gone up
| about 5x since the 70's due to regulation, which is entirely
| in the hands of the government.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| If your generator technology isn't cost effective because
| of safety regulation, the problem is not regulation, it's
| your generator technology.
|
| China recently had a reactor that nearly had a radiological
| release from damaged fuel rods. Even recently built
| reactors from newer designs have significant challenges.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/business/china-nuclear-
| re...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Regulation isn't the only problem. The steam turbine of a
| nuclear plant by itself is more expensive than solar today.
| This is a similar turbine to that in a coal plant. So if
| coal plants are more expensive than solar, so is nuclear,
| even if there are no regulations.
|
| The problem isn't regulation, it's that any large
| infrastructure project in America is crazy expensive.
| Nuclear power plants are expensive because of regulation,
| but ev even more so for the same reason that bridges and
| subways are crazy expensive to build.
|
| Solar & wind are built in factories and so don't have this
| problem. People are trying to build nuclear plants in
| factories, which might be the solution.
| vimy wrote:
| Cost is high because there is no mass production. Every new
| nuclear plant starts from scratch. France built almost all
| their nuclear power plants in one decade with tech from the
| seventies. They have 56 reactors. There's no reason we
| couldn't do it again.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| EPR was supposed to be the way forward for the EU and
| instead has been a costly disaster. There's no way dozens
| of those are getting built.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Cost is high because there is no mass production.
|
| Aside from reactor, everything else is shared with all
| other thermal powerplants. And think, "other thermal
| powerplants" also cost a ton to build, run, maintain, and
| decomission.
|
| Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part in
| the nuclear powerplant, but they are far from being the
| deciding factor.
|
| You cannot do much about the cost of reactors, with mass
| production, or without:
|
| - Without mass production, you have to _forge_ one giant
| pressure vessel to extremely high standard
|
| - With mass production, you have to _forge_ few dozen giant
| pressure vessels to extremely high standard
|
| The capital cost of the reactor is considerable, but take
| just any reactor technology, it will not make much
| difference to the fact of reactors being giant, expensive
| pressure vessels.
|
| Union's RBMK reactor design (one which blew up in
| Czernobil) tried to work around that by turning the
| pressure vessel into a huge pipe network, without much
| success:
|
| - Such piping network still needed to be fabricated to an
| extremely high standard
|
| - Such piping network still was gigantic
|
| - Such piping network still had to use super expensive
| superalloys
|
| - This giant pipe network was requiring even more
| inspection, and maintenance than one big boiler
|
| - This giant pipe network obviously leaked way more than
| one big boiler
|
| - Fixing the above leaks was taking enormous amounts of
| time, money, and manpower, and opportunity cost in lost
| generation hours
| Tarrosion wrote:
| > Reactors themselves are the most expensive single part
| in the nuclear powerplant
|
| Do you have a recommended source for this? My impression
| was the vast majority of cost was _outside_ the "nuclear
| island" of the plant.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Yes, you are right, most of the cost is still outside of
| nuclear island.
|
| But the single costliest part would still be a reactor,
| despite it itself being a small part of the plant cost.
|
| Turbines may've been more expensive than reactors for
| gigawatt scale plants decades ago, but large steam
| turbines went down in price considerably exactly because
| of mass manufacturing.
| kragen wrote:
| Have you been able to find reliable pricing information
| for large steam turbines? I've been looking for quite a
| while and haven't managed to find a good source,
| especially for historical data.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Unfortunately not except of "tens of megabucks" range
| kragen wrote:
| Have you been able to find reliable pricing information
| about the turbines in the tens of megabucks range? Those
| are the ones that matter for the cost of grid power, I
| think.
| vimy wrote:
| Mass production means experienced teams so no costly
| delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws
| in the design have been corrected after a couple
| iterations. An EU wide team working to build 100 nuclear
| plants in Europe in 10 years will be a lot faster and
| cost a lot less than each country going at it alone with
| different designs.
|
| The problem isn't technological or cost, it's political.
| There is no political willingness to even try.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Mass production means experienced teams so no costly
| delays because of inexperience.
|
| How can experience change anything about the costs of
| forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?
| jsnell wrote:
| Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a
| lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this
| be different?
| baybal2 wrote:
| 1. It will not do anything about material costs --
| reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by
| superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry,
| and marine
|
| 2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive
| tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x
| production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging
| plants.
|
| 3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of
| this scale is never done for cash.
|
| 4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be
| worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10
| meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is
| unavoidable as the underlying physics.
|
| 5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower
| needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it
| wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of
| cost.
|
| 6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery
| can't go down by much either. Road closures are
| expensive.
|
| 7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go
| down, but it also is not much.
| tdeck wrote:
| Isn't there a new generation of reactor designs that
| operate under low pressure?
| baybal2 wrote:
| Lower pressure == bigger turbines
| akamaka wrote:
| If you believe economies of scale are truly the key to
| success, then certainly wind, solar and battery power will
| be the long term winners. We can scale up to put solar
| panels on every roof in the world, and batteries in every
| car. Do you envisage a realistic scenario of having
| billions of tiny nuclear reactors in every home and car, to
| achieve similar economies of scale?
| [deleted]
| poutine wrote:
| "Sorry kids. We had the solution to limitless clean energy
| but it was just a bit more expensive than others, so we
| passed. Too bad about the devastation. Lol."
| imtringued wrote:
| You can say the same thing about renewables. Gas and coal
| are just a tiny bit cheaper than renewables because of
| subsidies.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Renewables backed by storage are cheaper than fossil fuels
| and nuclear in most of the world. Even with a lower cost
| it's taking too long to roll out, but some of that is
| incumbent inertia. The change will come.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-
| cost-o...
|
| http://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Power-
| Sector-...
| poutine wrote:
| The above was meant to be pro nuclear. Though I see how
| someone could take it either way.
|
| Point being, saying one energy source is too expensive Vs
| another is an idiotic argument should one lead to
| decarbonization.
|
| But sure guys, go ahead and throw trillions on economic
| bailouts every several years but wring your hands at
| moderately more expensive energy.
| kongolongo wrote:
| Costs aren't static though, have we reached the limits of how
| much we can improve on nuclear tech? If we were having this
| discussion a couple of decades ago, this reasoning would lead
| you to believe solar and wind have insurmountable costs
| compared to nuclear.
| [deleted]
| qart wrote:
| In general, I would agree with you. However, I would prefer the
| developed countries to put this into action first. That's
| because I don't trust the Indian government. The government
| here has an odd combination of instilling too many regulatory
| hurdles, and very lax enforcement of safety policies. By that,
| I mean, the company pays a little bribe, and the government
| looks the other way.
|
| We have plenty of arid, otherwise unusable land within easy
| reach, and solar farms don't interfere with the environment in
| such places.
| sremani wrote:
| But you trust Indian government with 100+ nuclear weapons.
|
| If I am not wrong, India has about 6 new nuclear reactors in
| works using a mix of Russian and American firms.
| qart wrote:
| Merely having nuclear weapons does not produce daily
| barrels of nuclear waste. The comparison is ridiculously
| silly.
|
| And I would like India to get its regulatory framework
| fixed before it allows more nuclear plants.
| dotancohen wrote:
| How long do you think is the shelf life of a uranium core
| weapon? Of a plutonium core weapon?
| qart wrote:
| Feel free to look it up. You're in for a surprise.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I know what it is. That was my point: old weapons need to
| be retired and replaced, thus generating waste.
| webmobdev wrote:
| In India, nuclear power is part of the country's energy policy.
| A decade or two after independence, India was one of the few
| countries that focused on nuclear energy with the support of
| the US, and went on to build nuclear power plants. In fact,
| after the _US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement_ in 2005, and the
| subsequent NSG waiver to India in 2008, India also signed deals
| with many countries to build new, safeguarded nuclear power
| plants. Currently India has 22 nuclear reactors in 7 nuclear
| power plants -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_India
|
| I guess the reason it is not popular is because once you master
| the technology to build a nuclear reactor, you are one more
| step closer to build a nuclear bomb. And the powers be do not
| want any more country to have nuclear bombs.
|
| And you are absolutely right - the weak point in home solar
| power generation is the battery. They are a huge recurring
| expense.
| vsskanth wrote:
| I believe India recieved a lot of technology from Russia for
| it's nuclear plants. Agreements with US were mostly about
| "allowing" them to import nuclear fuel and not be subjected
| to sanctions, which India was subjected to after they tested
| nuclear bombs (in a race with Pakistan).
|
| Of late there has been a lot of local resistance to build
| nuclear plants and there's been accusations of protest
| organizers being US funded to prevent more contracts going
| out to Russia.
|
| Also heard similar accusations for why thorium reactors
| aren't being developed properly even through India has
| massive reserves - foreign interference.
|
| So yeah, the main reason nuclear isn't all that attractive is
| that it invites a lot of interference from powerful countries
| with interests in controlling the technology and fuel -
| military dominance is threatened.
|
| Solar, wind power and battery technology do not face these
| issues.
|
| You can see similar dynamics play out in aviation, especially
| jet engine tech.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > The main problem of energy is batteries.
|
| The main problem of energy is cost, NREs, capex, and long term
| support.
|
| The Big Energy (gigawatt scale powerplants,) works well on big
| scales. But 9 out of 10 countries don't have that.
|
| Big economy, big population, big industry, big infrastructure
| -- you need all 4, or it doesn't work.
|
| Solar is extremely efficient at small scales if you think of
| capital costs. A single panel atop of a tent in the desert is
| just few percents behind a gigawatt scale solar powerplant in
| efficiency.
|
| Now think of any 2 stroke generator you see in a 3rd world
| country. Costs many times more for the power if you look at
| ones capable of 24/7 operation. Heavy duty diesel ones are even
| more so.
| fy20 wrote:
| In the UK there is a nuclear power plant under construction
| [1], and two more plants with the same reactor type are planned
| to be built in France and Finland. The plant will cost around
| PS23 billion to build, mostly financed by the owners, EDF
| (state owned by France) and CGN (state owned by China), with a
| little funding from the taxpayer.
|
| However they have negotiated a "strike price" of PS92.50/MWh -
| how much they can sell the electricity for. In 2019, auctions
| for offshore wind were sold at a strike price of PS39.65/MWh
| [2], so that's nearly 3x the price. Somebody is getting a good
| deal out of it, but definately not UK electricity consumers :D
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
|
| [2] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/prices-
| tumble-a...
| sesuximo wrote:
| Is it bad to pay more for more consistent energy?
|
| When you factor in cost of storage, I doubt the multiple is
| still 3.
| manmal wrote:
| It's a bit weird to have fixed prices for some players
| while other players in the same market need to compete. If
| a new tech comes along in 10 years which offers basal power
| like nuclear plants do, then there won't be any incentive
| to invest there because they are stuck with the much higher
| price.
| jsnell wrote:
| Just to be clear, the plant in Finland isn't just "planned".
| They started construction in 2005, and it was supposed to be
| operational in 2009. They've just loaded the fuel for final
| verification tests, so it should finally go online next year.
|
| The delays and budget overruns for that project have been
| quite something.
| euroderf wrote:
| The overruns bankrupted the French prime contractor, so
| there's that. I suspected they underbid the job, never
| suspecting the Finnish regulatory authorities would as
| strict as they are.
| jorvi wrote:
| We as humanity need base load capacity, and getting enough
| battery capacity for even just the West is a pie in the sky.
| Hydro is very localized. So then the choice falls to coal or
| nuclear. Coal is more polluting, and it even has more
| (indirect) radioactive spillout than nuclear.
|
| I'd happily pay a few cents/watt more if that means turning
| most energy production green. It also has the knock-on effect
| of making driving electric more green.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| Perhaps because of "been there, done that", a couple of
| catastrophes and the afaik still unsolved issue of storing the
| waste for a couple of thousand years.
| 5etho wrote:
| perhaps both of these are pretty non-issues
|
| I'm from Poland - Chernobyl was not as bad as it looked I
| dont know about Fukushima much
|
| storing the waste? lol it's so small amount and the planet is
| gigantic. Meanwhile coal, smog cancer, oil and wars behind
| it, saudi arabia killing people; yemeni genocide happening
| now - '2021 holocaust' as I could even call it
|
| all above is much better than small amount of radioactive
| trash
| Etheryte wrote:
| For all practical intents and purposes, nuclear waste is a
| solved problem. About 96% of spent nuclear fuel is recycled
| [0] and of the remainder, there's so little high level waste
| that so far most countries haven't found it cost effective to
| even build long-term storage facilities yet [1]: there's only
| one worldwide. There are ongoing projects to build more
| though, and the general approach is deep geological burial.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste#High-
| level_w...
| Krasnol wrote:
| First thing: it's not being recycled. It's being
| reprocessed. A very expensive process which not everybody
| does. The US doesn't even have a plant for it and there
| isn't even a plan to do it because it makes no sense at all
| since you still need fresh fuel (which is cheaper) and can
| mix MOX to it and you end up with even more less
| radioactive waste you still have to store on site.
|
| So no not 96% of spend fuel is recycled. It's 96% of the
| reprocessed fuel is being reprocessed.
|
| And no, the main amount of the waste is still radioactive
| for generations and needs to be kept safe and watched over
| for a very long time. The reason almost all countries
| haven't been able to find a hole deep enough is nothing to
| be proud of. This stuff is and remains to be dangerous. It
| will fall to generations to keep it safe. No matter what
| and just think about it. Just a decade ago nobody would
| have taken you seriously if you'd say that Donald Trump
| would become the president of the USA. We don't know what
| will happen in the next decade or century. Meanwhile this
| dangerous dirt is out there. Most of the times on site.
|
| Those "ongoing projects" are a wide understatement. Germany
| has been looking for decades and the one they've found
| turned out to be not so good after all because water
| started leaking into it only a few decades later:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
|
| And that's just nature issues. Human issues didn't come
| into play....yet.
|
| Waste is far from being a "solved problem" and it will
| remain so as long as this lie is being kept alive by the
| radioactive Astro-Turf.
| superkuh wrote:
| I guess this new title holder is because Jack Ma got disappeared
| and took a big hit after he called Chinese dictator Xi Jinping a
| "clown" for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
| eunos wrote:
| The one that called Xi a clown was not Jack Ma, that was
| somebody else. Besides, China's richest today sells bottled
| water.
| shadilay wrote:
| I don't see how any amount of money will fix climate change. The
| planets stable equilibrium carrying capacity has been surpassed.
| jletroui wrote:
| It seems if we would only put brains on the matter, there is no
| physical laws to be broken to fix this issue.
|
| A great example is the Shift Project think tank in France
| putting together a systemic plan [1] that:
|
| 1) brings an entire country to actually respect its carbon
| budget (relative to its population) necessary to stay within 2C
| of global warning 2) do this while keeping a job for everybody,
| in a systemic way (consistent across all industries) 3) does
| not assume any new miracle technology 4) does not assume to go
| the autocratic way 5) and more importantly, assumes all of this
| must be possible under economic contraction, because
| energy/economy decoupling is for the foreseeable future, a
| chimera [2]
|
| [1] https://theshiftproject.org/article/fiches-plan-
| transformati... (in french) [2]
| https://mk0eeborgicuypctuf7e.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
| dinkleberg wrote:
| What should we do then, just accept fate and give up?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Climate change is not binary. The question at this point is
| "how much climate change", not if we can or cannot prevent it.
|
| Equilibrium is also not a single point. Various ecosystems have
| different equilibriums. Some have been surpassed, but most can
| still adapt if we hold change to a low level.
| shadilay wrote:
| Equilibrium is not a continuum if there are any positive
| feedback loops. It's just as likely if not more that there
| are islands of stability passing out of which triggers the
| feedback loop. For the moment I'm enjoying unprecedented high
| temperatures reminiscent of the carboniferous.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Amen, it'll be fun to watch this thing burn.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Similarly, in Feb. 2020 one of America's richest men, Jeff Bezos,
| started a $10bn 'Earth Fund':
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/17/amazons-jeff-bezos-pledges-1...
|
| To give some context back then, Andrew Revkin gave a chart of
| what this is in actual relative to government-scale funding of
| projects: https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1229595028072300544
|
| The other concern is that this seems only energy focused. What
| about environmental issues like land-use change, geochemical
| flows, biodiversity loss, etc. as mentioned as existential risks
| in the planetary boundaries framework
| (https://stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundarie...)
| ?
| grouphugs wrote:
| y'all got juuped into respecting oligarchs that don't deserve
| your respect
| beebeepka wrote:
| I mean , even Black water is going "green". They made bank
| poisoning the world and are just as eager to make even more money
| cleaning that mess. Hardly surprising
| briefcomment wrote:
| Having people pay you for solutions to problems you create
| seems like a pretty successful business model.
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(page generated 2021-06-27 23:03 UTC)