[JohnHaugeland]

Renewables are only cheaper if you count nuclear as a renewable.

When people say solar is cheaper, they neglect to consider the supporting subsidies, or the fact that 76% on global average of solar power is actually natural gas in-fill.

At that rate, the whole grid could go solar and climate change would only be set back three years. It's a farce.

[toomuchtodo]

High level, fossil gas filling in when there are renewable shortfalls is acceptable in the short term due to the rapid energy transition occurring.

Australia is on track to hit 100% renewables with solar, wind, batteries, hydro, and transmission in the next decade for example.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

Europe has equivalent wind potential to being able to power the world. As more renewables are deployed, this continues to push fossil gas to the margins.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/wind-power-in-europe-...

NextEra’s latest investor deck forecasts battery backed solar and wind cheaper than existing natural gas, coal, and nuclear in the US before the end of the decade.

https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-small.jpg?mrf-s...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[JohnHaugeland]

76%. More than three quarters.

For wind, the number is 72%.

No, that isn't acceptable. If you take information from climate experts instead of vendors, they say the acceptable line is 5%.

Solar is not clean. Wind is not clean.

Three quarters means we're not actually solving the problem.

[credit_guy]

> is acceptable in the short term

It's actually acceptable in the long term as well.

To take the US. The forests absorb 13% of all the emissions. That's a whopping amount. We could retain all the current natural gas plants (and build some more) and if that were the only source of greenhouse emissions, we'd be below net zero.

This would be more than enough to smooth out any intermittency from solar and wind. You'd need zero batteries and zero hydrogen storage. Just the combination of the current nuclear and hydro, the solar and wind that we'd build at the rate of the last decade for 3 decades in the future, and the current natural gas, and we'd be well below net zero. No need for new nuclear, or hydro, we could shut down all coal power plants, we could transition to electric transportation, zero emissions steel, concrete and fertilizers, all with just keeping the current trajectory of building solar and wind.

And I'm as pro-nuke as they come. I'd like to see a nuclear renaissance, I really hope we'll do that, but we don't really need it to get to net zero by 2050.

[ElevenLathe]

Regardless of what is "really" cheaper in the market, we absolutely need renewables to be cheaper if we are to survive. We can do this by making them cheaper or by making fossil fuels more expensive. This is totally within the rules and is not "cheating." The market is "real" in some abstract sense but not in the same sense that emissions are. Nature and physics don't care about Exxon's profits, and they don't care whether we have food to eat or air to breathe.