[barney54]

Renewables industrialize much more land than nuclear and nuclear solve the challenge of renewables being dependent on the weather. Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

[invalidname]

Not accurate. Renewables can be multi-used. You can put them on agriculture lands, on buildings, on parking lots. You can put a wind turbines in the deep sea (where you have constant wind). Geothermal works all the time and you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything.

When you have a large enough territory then you always have power from one or the other. Storage is enough to cover the rest and still keep the costs down.

[ttfkam]

Look at this map.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325

Now tell me where you think the entire southeastern quarter of the US should deploy its wind farms, bearing in mind its periodic susceptibility to hurricanes along the coasts and offshore.

Geothermal? The largest geothermal plant in the world is the Geysers Geothermal Complex with a capacity of 900 megawatts. It is made up of 22 power plants and spread over several kilometers, located north of San Francisco. This is hardly something where "you can put it in the middle of a city without disturbing anything." Additionally, it sits on top of a deep magma chamber that spans over 30 square miles. If you don't have a thermal source quite as abundant and close to the surface, costs and losses rise dramatically. (For reference, Diablo Canyon in California has two 1,100MW reactors on a single plant that has already been producing CO2-free power for decades, and folks are still trying to take it down.)

Don't believe the hype. I'm firmly in the camp that global climate change is an existential crisis that we may already be too late to properly mitigate. This also means we're far too late to be discussing hypothetical solutions to the problem like geothermal and wind options that simply don't exist in large swaths of the US let alone the world.

[tcfhgj]

> Renewables are far more expensive than nuclear when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

Which fortunately doesn't happen too often in Europe.

[KptMarchewa]

It happens _all the damn time_ in winter and late fall. Anyone who doubts that is conjuring their own reality. Poland had 2x larger share of renewables in July than in November.

There's barely any sun, wind increase isn't that significant to cover lack of it, and energy demand is very very high.

[hathchip]

A reduction of only 2x between July and November is actually super positive for renewables. Wind and solar energy is almost free on an ongoing basis and installation of new capacity isn't expensive. Your number suggests that simply installing 2x the capacity needed in favorable weather would be sufficient for unfavorable weather. Actually it's more like 3x but that's still often very doable.

[tcfhgj]

No, statistics say otherwise [0]

Poland is still part of the European electricity grid. It is not the European electricity grid

[0]: https://www.tga-fachplaner.de/meldungen/energiewende-kalte-d...

[RetroTechie]

Link covers a hypothetical 2045 scenario. Researchers have shown that... in future... could..

Parent refers to current situation I think?

[tcfhgj]

No, the link shows data related to weather without sun and wind for significant time periods ranging from 1995 to 2015.

[RetroTechie]

The researchers used past weather data (as you wrote), and looked at how that would work in a future (as I said) energy-mix scenario: a climate-neutral energy mix as projected for 2045.

So it definitely does not refer to the energy mix as currently installed.