Fission plants have a finite lifespan anyway so if fusion or space laser or whatever appear, openings will be appearing constantly.
If those wealthy people are happy to pay a 5x or 10x rate, you can use it to install tons of renewables (with batteries). That's not something to complain about.
> Meanwhile, a middle/low-class family would be paying 1.5x the rate to keep the lights on home.
If it's not low, middle, or upper class, who do you imagine is paying the 1x rate?
But independent of this, I'm pro wealth-redistribution at any rate so really I see the solution to the paycheck to paycheck problem in terms of that. Massive investment in switching to green energy should also help by creating good jobs, as well.
The largest bulk of excess emissions doesn't appear to come from individual habits so much as structural industrial practices - things like producing things far overseas and shipping them by oil tanker, electricity production still being heavily reliant on coal, commutes being effectively mandated for many workers as their work doesn't pay them enough to live close to their job - or their job being doable remotely but corporate policy preventing workers from taking advantage of that (to both the benefit of their free time and health as well as the environment). So it seems unfair that working people should be punished for something they have limited power over.
Laying out a ton of solar panels everywhere is great but if we have rolling blackouts when it’s too cloudy for a while people will be very upset.
One of the worlds biggest batteries (currently under construction nearby LA) stores the huge-sounding amount of 400MWh of energy. What isn't clear to folks who don't do the math is that battery is really only big enough to help out with peak load periods. The peak consumption of LA has reached as high as 6,393 MW (about double their average peak). At that rate, that battery -- literally one of the biggest ones in the whole world -- will last just 3.8 minutes.
Only small pilots have been deployed because batteries are just getting cost competitive now for the first time, and utilities are super slow to pick up new technology. They're not used to living in a world where there is new technology, but they are slowly waking up.
It's going to be like digital versus film cameras. Once the critical cost threshold is crosses, they will scale like crazy. And batteries are trivial to scale to huge or small sizes. We could start putting them in all substations and massively increase reliability of the grid in addition to switching to 100% renewables. It's just a matter of cost, we know how to engineer and build them. With nuclear, it's a matter of cost, and we know how to engineer, but we don't know how to build or scale.
You may be mistaking energy production with energy consumption. However, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as "energy" in the list that I found. If we mean only electricity, then I believe some of these countries are still less than 100% run on renewables.
There are plenty of sources illustrating that things have changed in that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay#Green_energy_supply
Know what would work today? Reducing our energy consumption.
It also doesn't make a damn bit of difference of base load power comes from coal.
nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.
the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.
renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.
Cost-wise renewables are already winning in many parts of Earth and viable efficient storage has become the main problem.
Batteries are great for quick on-demand grid balancing, but are environmentally damaging and lose large amounts of capacity within half a decade.
Supercapacitors hold great promise, but like fusion always seem 20 years away. On a $/Ah scale they are useless today, but don't suffer from any of the flaws of batteries apart from weight/volume issues.
Gravity storage [1] seems the most promising, pumped hydro isn't that efficient and very site-dependant, rail or crane weight systems seem to outperform and hopefully they gain some traction
[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview
[1] https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/grid-scale-energy-storage
Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea
Any advice on that level of generality is useless and better trashed.
The only thing we don't know well is how much improvement current technology brings. We have an idea, but there are probably flaws on our estimative.
I don't think nuclear will help, mostly because it's too late. But basing decisions on ignorance is crazy.
Basing decisions on limited understandings is also not crazy. I've heard the rough US Army guideline is to act when you have 70% of the information. If you wait too long, there's often no right answer.
Anyway, my whole point is probably one level meta from what you're talking about. I find many disagreements turn out to be simply two different simultaneous discussions.
Thanks for making my point.