[macspoofing]

>But we're in 2022 now, and we can easily and cheaply ramp up renewables greatly before we have a storage issue.

Really? 'Easily' and 'cheaply'? So even with massive cultural pressure to move to renewables, somehow we don't want to move to a cheaper energy source? You sure about that?

What if ... we can't actually replace fossil fuels with wind/solar.

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

You write about "massive cultural pressure to move to renewables" but what about all the money to be lost by the fossil fuel industry? Billions of € coming every year in deep pockets weight definitely more than the "pressure" of a Greta, a few Extinction Rebellion members and some ecologists/socialists.

Let's look at the UK, between 2000 to 2021 Source: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-nuclear-output-falls... (3rd chart):

- renewables went from 3 to 40%

- imports: 3.6 to 7.6%

- nuclear: 22 to 14%

- oil & gaz: 40.1 to 39.7%

- coal: 31.7 to 1.9%

Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

UK electricity component of the consumer prices index (in real terms 2010=100): 68.1 to 128.2 (source https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...)

Can't find the exact same series for France but you can compare the two between 2010 and 2020 here and see a comparable trend: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/d40f8154-...

We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...: "As of May 2022, the project is two years late and the expected cost is £25–26 billion,[2] 50% more than the original budget from 2016" Oops!

[macspoofing]

>Looks like we managed to replace 40% of fossil fuels in two decades, without much inflation (almost in line with countries who did not deploy renewables):

Just to get our terms in-line, renewables typically include hydro-electric. Hydro-electric is a great power-source if you have the geography for it. My province of Ontario, between Nuclear and Hydro, pretty much only derives 5% of power from fossil fuels. The problem is, there aren't any more places to dam to generate hydro. So that's done.

And yeah, there is a ceiling on how much wind/solar you can handle as a percentage of your power-mix because you need to rely on base-load to bridge the intermittency of wind and solar. I don't know what that percentage is ... maybe it's 40%, maybe it's 60% - but it's going to be somewhere in that range.

>We'll see how UK continues its transition, but I see renewables becoming cheaper while nuclear keeps rising.

It doesn't matter if they are free! You're not replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar because you still need to run your economy when the sun isn't shinning or the wind isn't blowing. You'll need base-load from somewhere else. Nuclear is actually terrible for that because it can't spin up and spin-down on-demand. Hydro and Natural gas are perfect for that, but like I said, if you don't have the geography for hydro, you're stuck with natural gas.