> The overruns happen due to red tape and the overall loss of the heavy industry capability/capacity brought on - and these are the specific problems federal subsidies are supposed to tackle.
This might have mattered a decade or two ago, but that time has passed. Solar and wind have enormous momentum behind them, and they will only continue to scale up faster. [1] [2]
> Deaths per TWH for solar and wind have proven much higher than nuclear and that's before including their dependence on natural gas which is higher still.
Modern renewables are roughly as safe as nuclear [3].
> Utility scale batteries are so far still for peak shaving which is wonderful because the simple cycle plants they displace are super efficient, but won't be replacing combined cycle in our lifetimes.
Enormous amounts of battery manufacturing capacity is coming online for EV production [4]. Elon said on Tesla's last earnings call that demand for batteries for utility scale storage is tremendous and they can't keep up with demand [5]. I'll take the other side of that bet: overbuilt renewables, hydro, HVDC transmission across long distances, and battery storage will be enough to deprecate natural gas from the grid. South Australia's grid operator is already nervously preparing for distributed renewables generating so much power, there will be times where there is no net demand on the grid ("But it’s the latest “first” that is putting the wind up the state government and the market operator: Within one to three years, they say, South Australia could become the first gigawatt scale grid in the world where the growing amount of rooftop solar effectively eliminates grid demand."). [6]
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy
[2] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/18/1868159...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#modern-r...
[4] https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...
[5] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/tremendous-demand-for-stati...
[6] https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-the-first-big-gr...