> Developers have applied to build 139 GWac of large-scale solar projects in the territory of six grid operators – around five times what is currently online across the country – and that figure doesn’t even cover the entire United States. By any metric, we are looking at an unprecedented boom in solar development over the next five years.
> The six grid operator queues we investigated also showed more than 16 GW of battery projects which have filed for interconnection. And this number should not be too surprising to anyone who is watching the meteoric growth of energy storage.
> Per the US Energy Storage Monitor, from Wood Mackenzie Renewables & Power along with the Energy Storage Association (ESA), total energy storage deployed expanded by 60% in terms of energy and 300% on a power basis in the third quarter of 2018 versus the prior year. Going out mostly until 2023, the report noted that the front of the meter pipeline expanded to approximately 33 GW of power.
Natural gas picks up the slack until batteries (which everyone underestimates; we're going to have an enormous amount of energy storage cumulatively to go 100% low carbon) get a bit cheaper; wind, solar, hydro, and long distance transmission lines combined with utility scale storage is more than adequate to replace traditional base load (and all are possible today, not decades later if we started building fission/fusion commercial generators today).
FYI, it's "baseload power"
They go into much greater detail than the website.
Batteries + large grids averaging out weather and load fluctuations, plus smart grids, plus electric car batteries as buffers when the car isn't needed, plus efficiency gains lowering demand, plus some gravity storage, plus some natural gas.
Nuclear power is actually quite useless, because it's not baseload that's needed when you want to quickly react to changing weather conditions or load, it's peakers (i. e. gas)
There needs to be backup for the occasional times solar/wind/batteries are not enough, but hydrogen (made during the high solar/wind times) is likely cheaper for that than nuclear fission or fusion would be.
Are there really any occasions when there is no sun, no wind, no hydro over the whole of Europe? Better east-west interconnects and use of Norwegian hydro as pumped storage should help too.
Not perfect but very scalable and can be implemented a little at a time as the baseload fossil fuel stations slowly go out.
The construction industry employs millions directly and indirectly. Those poeple vote.
Politicians may be dumb about a lot of things, but few are dumb enough to intentionally threaten the livelihood of millions of voters.