| The "strong developments" in the grid and storage you speak of is peanuts compared to trying to make nuclear cheap. Big, powerful companies with brilliant physicists and engineers have worked on it for decades. Lots of prototypes, lots of designs that didn't work out in practice. Today, we don't actually need new tech for distribution and storage, although new tech is being developed and helps. Chemical batteries for small-scale time-shifting and hydro plus gas plus biomass for larger scale. In 20 years, the youth of today will have to decide if they want to get rid of the last fossil gas - long term storage is on the order of 10% of total energy needed in the studies I've seen. It can be substituted with gas made from biomass. In fact, it's already happening in the country I'm in. Distribution is just building more connections. I think working on improving the cost of underground connections would help, but it's doable with today's tech, and it is happening. If anyone's interested, there are plenty of academic papers discussing this, and also a bunch of more accessible articles by this dude: https://cleantechnica.com/author/mikebarnard/ For instance, here's a recent one https://cleantechnica.com/2024/04/11/the-short-list-of-clima... And yes, it's a complex topic. And yes, there will be some pain points along the way - energy is important to modern society, and it is a large transition that will years to unfold. |