[JumpCrisscross]

> * Nuclear plant construction times are on the order of a decade or (realistically) two decades in the West, if you include planning*

Sure. Forecasting twenty years out is tough. But our forecasts out 10 years show the power crunch easing to almost no degree--we'll still likely be making the same tradeoff then as now. (And, I suspect, still filling the gap with gas in teh west.)

You're broadly correct: we need to build faster. There is no reason we can't build a large plant in under a decade and an SMR in a few years. The latter is what Google is experimenting with here. It's a long shot. But so is hoping battery production scales the orders of magnitude necessary for it to become a utlity backbone over the next decades.

> first goal is to get renewables to 90-95% or more of power generation, massively overbuilt with short-term battery storage

We don't have the battery pipeline. What we're repeatedly getting is renewables plus gas generators. There is no world in which you put down trillions of dollars of gas infrastructure and then poof it in a few years because it's no longer needed.

[ViewTrick1002]

California would like a word with you. Gas generators are increasingly being forced off the grid with storage.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

Storage costs are today lower than the most aggressive projection for 2050 according to one widely cited US DoE study from 2023.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-149971818