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by phicoh 1595 days ago
Ignoring storage, wind and solar are now very cheap. For example, companies now pay to rent pieces of North Sea to place wind parks there.
3 comments

Pumped water storage also isnt that expensive.
Pumped water storage is unsurprisingly limited by the same factors as hydro - there aren't that many steep mountains suitable to put lakes on top in most places.
Storage and transmission.
Wind and solar need a lot of resources from mining, which itself uses fossil fuel (for extraction, treatment and transport) and creates a lot of local pollution.

Wind and solar take a lot of space that could be used for agriculture, so they compete with important uses of the soil. (I don't know if it's clear how much offshore is a thing, but I suppose this increases also energy expenditure)

If we look at CO2, which is far from the only metric, but the easiest to compare, then solar panels make up for their production in a period on months and for wind it is a period of years.

Both solar and wind provide a significant net reduction of CO2 when you take into account their production. Long term, materials in solar and wind can be re-used. So you would need to mine them only once. Currently, mining is just too cheap to effectively recycle all metals.

Wind doesn't takes hardly any space. Wind is not compatible with airfields and residential areas, but that's about it. Wind mixes perfectly fine with argiculture.

Due to you people complaining about wind in their neighborhood, there is now a lot of wind at sea. The good thing about offshore wind is that typically there is more wind at sea. So the construction cost is higher, but the production is higher as well.

For solar it is more an issue of price. Putting solar on a field is cheap. To some extent putting solar on a field is good for nature. An undisturbed area with shadow is quite nice for small plants, insects, etc.

The potential for solar in urban areas is enormous, but often not cheap. For example, existing roofs of large building are not strong enough for lots of solar.

Solar can also be mixed with smaller scale argiculture.

In the UK at least, and in general I think, this is not really true. There is plenty of land that is marginal for arable farming purposes and this is what is targeted for wind farming.
You can put solar on the roof and you can farm between the wind turbines, so that's not correct.
Solar on the roof only matters for single family homes, of which you won't find too many in European cities. Solar on the roof of a 12 story apartment building is not going to do much to help the residents.
My comment is missing a "for the same energy output as nuclear" prefix.