I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.
There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few commercial reactors had just been finished on a reasonable schedule and budget. Government cost projections showed that just-completed reactors were competitive with coal and that by the mid 1980s, with rising coal production costs, nuclear would have a clear edge.
Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island, so that explains part of why this projection didn't pan out.
The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising. Increased surface mining of coal reversed the upward price trend for coal as a fuel. At the same time, the thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants kept improving beyond what was considered practical circa 1968. So new coal fired power plants were spending less per gigajoule of fuel and turning more of the fuel into electricity. New coal plants in America became so cost-effective in the 1980s that nuclear would have been hard pressed to compete even without the actual delays and cost overruns that nuclear foundered on. France dodged this environmentally dreadful rise of coal because they didn't have abundant domestic coal like the US, so they were committed to developing non-fossil electricity regardless of improvements in coal technology.
I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975 also assumed ever-rising fuel costs. If solar companies expected coal power to keep getting more expensive, that would indirectly accelerate the adoption of solar power (lowering its costs) as well as directly easing the cost benchmark that solar power needed to meet.
Or maybe, like in many other cases, the people working on solar back then were just over-optimistic about improvements and had blind spots about the obstacles ahead.
> Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island
Costs were ballooning even before TMI.
> The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising.
More importantly, 1979 saw the passage of PURPA, which began to open the power market to non-utility providers. There was enormous untapped potential for cogeneration (and, as it turned out, cogeneration-in-name-only) that produced a slug of new output, mostly gas fired, into the grids just after what had been inexorable 7%/year increase in electricity demand in the US suddenly moderated.
In this environment, it was very difficult to make the case for new nuclear power plants.
> I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975
In what sense were they over-optimistic? PV has experienced a remarkably relentless cost decline along an experience curve of about 20% decline in cost with each doubling of cumulative production.
The OP said "I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas."
That would mean PV cost parity with coal-generated electricity in the early 1980s. Actual PV cost declines have been remarkable but they didn't go that quickly.
Their memory may well have been perfect, as public speakers and newspapers do get things wrong every so often.
One show I watched as a kid, Blue Peter, introduced Thrust SSC as a car that would go faster than the speed of light. (Or perhaps my memory of that is wrong, too…)
There was a brief period in the US from the late 1960s through the early 1970s where it looked like new nuclear power plants were going to supply electricity cheaper than coal. A few commercial reactors had just been finished on a reasonable schedule and budget. Government cost projections showed that just-completed reactors were competitive with coal and that by the mid 1980s, with rising coal production costs, nuclear would have a clear edge.
Most people who care about the history of nuclear power know about the ballooning costs and schedule overruns for nuclear reactors after Three Mile Island, so that explains part of why this projection didn't pan out.
The other part is that real coal prices fell in the 1980s instead of rising. Increased surface mining of coal reversed the upward price trend for coal as a fuel. At the same time, the thermal efficiency of coal fired power plants kept improving beyond what was considered practical circa 1968. So new coal fired power plants were spending less per gigajoule of fuel and turning more of the fuel into electricity. New coal plants in America became so cost-effective in the 1980s that nuclear would have been hard pressed to compete even without the actual delays and cost overruns that nuclear foundered on. France dodged this environmentally dreadful rise of coal because they didn't have abundant domestic coal like the US, so they were committed to developing non-fossil electricity regardless of improvements in coal technology.
I wonder if those over-optimistic solar cost predictions you saw in 1975 also assumed ever-rising fuel costs. If solar companies expected coal power to keep getting more expensive, that would indirectly accelerate the adoption of solar power (lowering its costs) as well as directly easing the cost benchmark that solar power needed to meet.
Or maybe, like in many other cases, the people working on solar back then were just over-optimistic about improvements and had blind spots about the obstacles ahead.