[toomuchtodo]

Countries are meeting their renewables targets years ahead of schedule, and the cost of wind, solar, and batteries will continue to decline. I don’t see any way we’re still using fossil fuels for electricity by 2030. It’s not optimism, just curve fitting.

[hueving]

Except batteries aren't even close to where they need to be in costs to cover windless nights.

[toomuchtodo]

They will be in the next 5 years.

[DennisP]

Maybe. And maybe Terrestrial Energy really will deliver a molten salt reactor delivering nuclear at 3 cents/kWh in 2025.

Renewables advocates have a bad habit of comparing the renewables of the future to the nuclear of the past.

[toomuchtodo]

Nuclear advocates have a bad habit of never delivering on time and/or without massive cost overruns. Renewables (solar and wind) are already below 2 cents/kwh at utility scale. They, theoretically, should be considerably cheaper in 5 years (and so, nuclear must target 1 cent/kwh to be profitable).

[DennisP]

Solar/wind with enough storage to be reliable without fossil backup is nowhere near that cheap.

[toomuchtodo]

It doesn’t have to be storage backed at every hour if the day. ComEd in Northern Illinois provides me nuclear at 1 cent per kWh from midnight to 5am because demand is so low in the middle of the night. You can overbuild renewables, and ramp battery production to arrive at a cost below nuclear, coal, and natural gas (and even used load shedding and coordinated storage orchestration using electric vehicles).

Maybe I’m just optimistic based on historical cost decline curves, but I’d bet $1000 on my thread thesis (renewables replace all fossil generation by 2030). It’s the economics.