[rosser]

All that's holding us back is politicians and their bribes..

No, unfortunately, that's not all that's holding us back. There are still some pretty substantial, e.g., storage and transmission problems with the renewables.

Unless you want us to keep burning coal or some other nonsense like that...

[kuschku]

There are no storage or transmission problems. Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.

Build power lines from everywhere to everywhere, and refit transformer stations to be up to the load of users producing more than using, and you fix that, too. (Incidentally, in Germany we’re having a huge debate about a huge powerline currently, NIMBY is one of the worst things that happened)

[mpweiher]

> Build hydro-pump-storage plants, and you fixed the storage issues.

You do realize that the largest ever energy-generation accident was a dam failure? 171000 people killed in 1975 when a dam in China failed. And overall, hydroelectric facilities claim 94% of the fatalities of energy-production accidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents#Fatalities

[kuschku]

What you are talking about is hydro-generation.

What I am talking about is hydro-pump-storage.

That type of storage has no dam that could fail – you take two lakes, one higher than the other, connect them with a tunnel, and place a turbine in the tunnel. Now you can push the water up (store energy) or let it flow down (produce energy).

[mpweiher]

Yes, that was a hydro-generation dam.

However, it is simply not true that hydro-pump storage never has a dam.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ffestiniog_Power_Station

In fact, when you look at the list of pumped storage stations, the vast majority of them have dams:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...