[opo]

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is the reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

(Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)

[toomuchtodo]

Natural gas will be cheaper than renewables + utility scale battery storage for only so long; as soon as natural gas spot market prices spike, renewables and storage are deployed, creating a downward price spiral, which natural gas generators can only defend against for so long.

Nuclear will never be commercially viable again.

[opo]

Natural gas might be as bad in terms of climate change as burning coal due to losses of methane during production/transporting, so it would be great to eliminate its use. Unfortunately we are far, far away from having grid storage that could accommodate only having renewables. Grid storage has been worked on for generations and even so, right now, the U.S. has about 24.6GW of grid storage, 95% of which is pumped storage hydro. That is a very tiny fraction of what would be needed.