[noad]

It's really not though, renewables have already surpassed coal in the USA for the first time while hyrdo is treading water. The change already happened and all the concerns about peak load capacity and storage were largely mythical. Coal plants are racing to shut themselves down, the miners are all filing for bankruptcy.

We didn't need to build dozens of new fission plants either. Another myth from the think tanks.

[eloff]

If by surpassed you mean cheaper than building new coal, or even operating smaller coal plants, then yes. Coal generation is still 2.5x wind+solar [1]. Claiming that the intermittent nature of wind and solar is a non issue is a joke. The system can absorb small amounts of intermittent power, but the problem gets progressively worse as the percentage share of the total goes up. We do need, modern, cost effective nuclear, and pumped hydro, and large improvements in grid scale battery storage as well as more long distance transmission to even out the supply.

[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3]

[noad]

I guess if you want to only look back at 2019 data you will miss the fact that renewables passed coal this year. The rate at which the coal industry is dying is remarkable and is well covered in the media.

[anewdirection]

Lots of things are celebrated in the media that are not quite true. While in some areas, on some days, renewables are outpacing polluters, their power peaks and wanes at different rates than demand. Coal is still the baseload energy generator, and will be required until massive energy storage is achieved, or we build more fusion/fission plants. With the exception of hydro, most 'renewable' generation stratigies come with temporal issues (wind, sun, tide, etc).

But nobody wants to think about the fact their teslas are runnig on coal, and we assume some random article we saw on renewables outpacing coal are the truth. It is not.

[acidburnNSA]

The reason we haven't seen the intermittency issue too much is almost entirely because we are building cheap but very high carbon (~400 gCO2-eq/kWh) fracked natural gas plants. This is not a good or scalable low-carbon pathway.

[erentz]

> The change already happened and all the concerns about peak load capacity and storage were largely mythical.

No they're not. At ~8% I don't see how you can conclude this yet. In the US coal plants were just replaced with natural gas plants. Still a carbon source of power. And these natural gas plants became such a rage in part because of a boom in cheap natural gas. That cheap natural gas boom was provided as a by product of the massive shale oil extraction boom. Which itself was a product of massive amounts of cheap credit that fueled what's probably the largest debt bubble in history, which is currently bursting and taking down a lot of those shale oil companies with it.

With a lot of wells being shut in due to lower oil prices making them uneconomical, we'll have to watch and see what happens to the gas prices. We have just spent half a generation switching from one CO2 polluting source to another, which when all inputs are properly considered is probably just about as polluting. And we did so by wasting a generation of capital. It's been a historical misallocation of capital and it's been entirely green washed.

[mehrdadn]

> The change already happened and all the concerns about peak load capacity and storage were largely mythical

Do you have a link to more on this? The story I recall was that we can't go fully renewable precisely because of storage issues.