1. Build solar and wind, anywhere across the globe to 4x overcapacity, and then use power-to-gas technology to store the energy into synthetic hydrocarbons, which can be plugged directly into our current infrastructure.
2. Reinvent the whole of society to run on lithium batteries.
Lithium batteries are used mainly in transportation. And we're already shifting towards them, because they're just plain better.
If we were to start over from scratch, the whole notion of covering the landscape with chemical dispensers would be considered absurd: smelly, toxic, and inconvenient. Why wouldn't you just go home and plug your car into your house? Why have a car with thousands of precision moving parts when you can just have a battery on an oversized skateboard?
We already have electric distribution infrastructure. It needs to be upgraded, but not created from scratch. The only thing that needs large lithium batteries is vehicles. You can use different chemistries for stable objects like the grid itself, or your house -- which is a nice bonus, in that you can run your house even when the infrastructure is down.
And then you can let a whole separate parallel energy infrastructure degrade and vanish. No more gas pipelines or gasoline tankers as we gradually get rid of the dependencies on them. It's not "current infrastructure" forever: it has to be maintained. If we're going to do maintenance anyway, why not put it into the existing electric grid rather than both that and the fossil fuel system?
This is completely wrong. Nuclear is more expensive. The optimal strategy going forward likely involves no new nuclear construction.
Solar/wind and nuclear do not play well together. The former will push the latter completely out of the market unless nuclear becomes considerably cheaper (and that is a forlorn hope, given the history of the technology.)
You assumed wrong. I was talking about history of nuclear's economics. It has failed to show good learning effects (that is, getting cheaper as more units are built.) If anything, it has shown negative learning effects -- getting more expensive as more units are built.
Contrast this to photovoltaics, which have declined in cost by something like a factor of 300 since they came on the market. PV has shown a robust learning rate of 20% cost reduction per doubling of cumulative production.
It should be no surprise that nuclear is sputtering to extinction with such poor cost trends. In contrast, all the competing technologies -- solar, wind, storage -- are showing excellent learning. So, it's only a matter of time until nuclear dies.
So it cheaper and faster to build, however I still see no solution for base loads and land usage, which as far as i can tell nuclear is a minute fraction of land usage as opposed to solar and specially wind. Some estimates put this at 1/400 for nuclear vs solar and 1/2000.vs wind where nuclear produces constant power supply as opposed to “renewables”.
So there seems to be natural bounds as to how much these can grow and how much land surface they take and thus damage.
Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
So even if you are right about the current prices I don’t see that as a nuclear problem but populist problem, since people are scared of nuclear waste but seem to be ok with destroying the marine and land habitats.
Hey, let’s wait for another decade and see where it takes us.
Land usage is not a problem at all, if you do the arithmetic. That you bring this up tells me you're parroting anti-renewable talking points in bad faith rather than presenting reasoned objections.
As for base load, we can estimate the cost of covering for intermittency of renewables to produce synthetic baseload. It ends up cheaper than nuclear. A key part of this in some locations (such as Europe) is to use hydrogen in addition to batteries for storage.
> Plus, we haven’t put as nearly as much time last 30 years coming up with better nuclear devices as we did in renewables.
We've spent much longer than 30 years trying with nuclear. The first nuclear power plant on the grid was in the 1950s. Huge investment was made in civilian nuclear back in the day. If less is being invested now it's because nuclear has demonstrated it's unattractive, not because we didn't give it more than enough chances.
The "oh poor nuclear is just misunderstood" argument is common nuke bro defensive thinking. No, nuclear's problem is $$$. The people with money are negative on nuclear because they see scammers trying to sell them crap all the time (in nuclear's case, via grossly lowballed cost projections), and they've learned to say no.
1. Build solar and wind, anywhere across the globe to 4x overcapacity, and then use power-to-gas technology to store the energy into synthetic hydrocarbons, which can be plugged directly into our current infrastructure.
2. Reinvent the whole of society to run on lithium batteries.