[jacquesm]

You are a couple of years behind the times when it comes to your knowledge of the cost effectiveness of solar and wind. They are $ for $ competitive with nuclear, and are being rolled out at scale. 8 MW onshore turbines are now pretty normal, larger ones are on the drawing board, and in the offshore wind market there are now 15 MW turbines.

Base load can be provided through carbon neutral sources, such as the burning of rest-mass left over from crop production. Smart control of appliances is another way in which the need for baseload power could be reduced, allowing for increased consumption to co-incide with periods of higher (or even excess) power generation, and high voltage DC has made it cost competitive to route electricity across larger distances than before allowing an excess in windpower from one location to be moved with relatively little loss to places where there is a shortage.

Storage is entirely optional in this scheme, but we already have more and more battery storage coming on-line in the form of the expanding fleet of electric vehicles which can provide a large sink.

Energy consumption correlates to qualify of life because that's the society that we've built. But it need not be so, not every source of pleasure or quality of life needs a combustion engine or a plug.

[felgueres]

'Base load can be provided through carbon neutral sources, such as the burning of rest-mass left over from crop production.'

This statement is very uncalibrated. Biomass is possible just as much as tidal power but that doesn't make it viable for scale. It's not even part of the conversation.

'Smart control of appliances is another way in which the need for baseload power could be reduced'

Wrong. Smart control of appliances is used to shift demand from peak load not base.

Storage is not optional to make renewables base load.

'But it need not be so, not every source of pleasure or quality of life needs a combustion engine or a plug.'

You are obviously trivializing quality of life. High energy consumption means access to quality products and services in food, transport, education, entertainment and healthcare at minimum.

Unfortunately your arguments are uncalibrated so I will stop. Please take a look at the cost-effectiveness of nuclear on this source for future discussion: https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...

[jacquesm]

Nonproliferation agreements alone mean your scheme will never work. I prefer to solve problems with the available means rather than to fantasize about a world that could be, it tends to get more and faster results.

FWIW baseload is provided today by biomass augmented plants all over Europe (except for France, which does rely predominantly on nuclear. It's not yet the largest fraction but it is definitely moving the needle.

Smart control of appliances can be used to shift demand from peak, but it can also be used to shift demand away at times that baseload would have to be increased for baseload generators that are slow to ramp up (such as: nuclear).

As for storage not being optional, we are very far away from having excess power with such regularity that storing it is cheaper than reducing generating capacity. In other words we can safely ignore this problem until orders of magnitude more renewable energy generation capacity has been installed.

It looks to me like you are heavily personally invested in seeing nuclear (fission, presumably) based energy no matter the disadvantages, which are numerous and which leave us with a serious problem in terms of waste removal.

But you're the (anonymous) expert ;)