You can't exit from the oil economy with renewable such as wind or solar due to their non-predictability.
If you want to stop importing Russian gaz, you need nuclear energy.
To not depend on russian gas by reducing gas usage, the gas heating systems need to be replaced with heat pumps or something else and industry needs to shift, presumably to electricity (since it's unlikely that we have enough green hydrogen that's not produced from fossil fuels without depending on russia). This isn't going to be easy and unlikely to happen at a large enough scale in the next 5 years.
And even if it was nuclear is not a viable response with new projects taking decades to develop. Todays nuclear industry is delivering warmed-up 1970s technology that is expensive, slow, and inflexible.
Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
You seem to be disagreeing with our greens. Gas is offered as the only backup source at that scale and timeframe.
>Solar/wind/batteries with a small amount of backup capacity from hydro, power-to-gas/fuel, biofuels, or new long-duration storage is cheaper and faster to deploy.
Wrong. [1]Nuclear wins out when kept open a bit longer and that is without accounting for storage methods. To say "a small amount of backup capacity" is absolutely ridiculous. The amounts we need compared to what is available right now would be massive. Most European countries aren't norway with loads of hydro capacity either. Also power to gas/fuel is a pipedream due to inherent costs and losses alone. You're better off making more pumped storage power stations like in Coo but those don't fit anywhere and aren't magical either.
[1]https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/image/png/2020-12/lco_b...
There is no such thing as storage systems at wide scale unfortunately
> well also run out of fuel within a few generations
Absolutely. But hopefully fusion will be around then.
I can’t find actual current annual production, only estimates for now and actual values for a few years ago, but we produced somewhere between 0.5 (what we did recently) and 1.3 TWh (what some people a few years ago thought we’d be at now) of batteries in the last year.
Given the likely usage patterns, this is already on a relevant scale to all 50 or so nuclear reactors currently under construction, and the expectation is that battery production will approximate rapid positive exponential growth at least to the end of the decade.
Also: currently, nuclear fuel cost is a small part of running a reactor. If nuclear fuel follows a similar cost/available quantity curve as other geologic resources, we should be able to find more once we start looking in earnest.
Don't forget they are easy targets when war get declared.