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Relying on Renewables Alone Significantly Inflates the Cost of Overhauling Energy (technologyreview.com)
A growing number of US cities and states have proposed or even passed legislation that would require producing all electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind within a few decades. That might sound like a great idea. But a growing body of evidence shows it's not. From a report: It increasingly appears that insisting on 100 percent renewable sources -- and disdaining others that don't produce greenhouse gases, such as nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture technology -- is wastefully expensive and needlessly difficult. In the latest piece of evidence, a study published in Energy & Environmental Science determined that solar and wind energy alone could reliably meet about 80 percent of recent US annual electricity demand, but massive investments in energy storage and transmission would be needed to avoid major blackouts. Pushing to meet 100 percent of demand with these resources would require building a huge number of additional wind and solar farms -- or expanding electricity storage to an extent that would be prohibitively expensive at current prices. Or some of both.
Gee, it's as if overhauling an infrastructure which was built predominantly on oil might cost a lot of money to retrofit to handle solar, wind, water, and nuclear!
No fucking duh. However, once you've got the renewable energy sources in place and harvested, the cost will die out, quickly. It's called ROI, and the smart people have obtained almost insane ROI (on the order of 3 months in some related techs like LEDs powered by renewable resources up to 5 years for full solar+wind-powered farms) so they really don't have to worry about this.
Which means Americans have this problem, and not many other people.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...adapt devices to power output. Use them only when electricity is available.
What are the odds that a whole town would decide to run their AC on the same day?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Do modern nuclear plants *really* melt down that often or at all? CA is ~20% nuke powered and it has, to my knowledge, never experienced a meltdown. The only meltdowns that have happened are due to negligence and a natural disaster happening all at once.
And really, if you're that NIMBY about it, just put the plant in the middle of nowhere and run a giant superconductor to the nearest power hub.
I think too many people played Sim City and thought it was a reality simulator.
The model does not include the cost of nuke plants that melt down, even though we know they do that periodically.
Come on, man, this is just blatant FUD. "Periodically" meaning 3 real incidents, EVER. Compare deaths from nuclear to constant deaths from solar (workers falling off roofs), wind (workers falling of turbines), hydroelectric (workers falling off dams, dams failing and wiping out entire towns), natural gas (workers dying in fires), coal (workers dying in fires AND dying in mines AND bystanders dying from lung disease), and you see that nuclear is far and away the safest energy source out there. Three completely separate references for you, all of which concur:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
https://ourworldindata.org/wha...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...
There are a few good reasons to be wary of nuclear - frequent schedule/budget overruns being chief among them. There's also a huge cost for facility decommissioning that hasn't really been handled adequately. But safety concerns are outright lies - nuclear energy is literally and provably the safest form of energy that exists. That argument is bad and you should feel bad for making it.