If you enjoy this read, you should also read the author’s earlier masterpiece of a post on the energy and materials transition (~1h40 read) : https://www.tsungxu.com/clean-energy-transition-guide/
the article does provide a nice survey of clean tech, but the conclusions should be disregarded.
I don't see a future where next-gen SMR nor fusion gets to cost parity with renewables quickly or easily. They will have to scale up via beachhead markets adjacent to existing electricity demand sources.
Long term, I do think economically viable fusion will supplant renewables, but that's decades away.
in the US, had we continued to build nuclear at the rate we were between the 70s and 90s, we'd be at over 50% nuclear for electricity generation, which would have knocked coal completely out of the equation, leaving only nuclear (baseload), gas (variable demand), and renewables (opportunistic generation). over 70 years, fission-based nuclear has caused 99+% fewer human deaths than fossil fuels have.
and yes, there's no need to pin any hopes on fusion right now, which is decades away at best.
Creators of a Texas plant thought it would never freeze (or that if it did it wouldn't matter with the government's gift of a an extremely small liability cap on nuclear), so they didn't put enough safety stuff for that scenario and had to shut down a reactor unplanned.
Only the relative dominance has changed, with 80% being commonly accepted for a few years and 100% now broadly accepted as reasonable.
Their consensus is that specifically batteries are completely nonviable for long-term balancing of intermittent energy sources. Physics simply do not add up.
So they'll still use mostly wind/solar/batteries. This is what grids are rolling out right now around the world.
By comparison, the world produces 300-400 GWh of batteries each year. Most of which is going to electronics and electric vehicles. Battery production has been increasing, but it's unclear if the supply of input materials can keep up. The price of lithium jumped 400% last year: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lithium
In short, the chart on the right is not something to be taken for granted: https://www.tsungxu.com/content/images/size/w1600/2022/01/so...
Moore's law is the exception, not the norm, because making chips faster works by making transistors smaller. This doesn't apply to most products, as even zero manufacturing costs cannot bring cost below input materials. Imagine the cost of a car went from $500,000 in 1910, $50,000 in 1920, and $5,000 in 1930. Is is safe to assume that a car would cost $5 in 1960 and $0.50 in 1970?
We are electrifying heating and transport. As a result about 80% of end-use energy will end up being electricity.
The motto "electrify everything" is used. It is not a big surprise that this, and developing nations growth, requires electricity.
That's why everyone is really pleased that renewables and batteries are the cheapest way to deploy electricity generation in history.
> the state's higher storage target and DPS and grid operator support will slash costs to $150-$200 kWh by the end of the decade, based on BloombergNEF estimates.
They have dropped an order of magnitude since 2008, so I'd maybe expect a few more years before it does it again but that does appear to be the current prediction.
If their predictions are that costs are going to decrease, but when push comes to shove costs increase above expectations then what does that say about the value of these predictions?
In Western Australia coal will be gone by the end of the decade. In South Australia it’s gone already and generation from gas is on a strong downward trend too.
Australia’s conservative electricity system planning is expecting the country to hit 80% renewables. That’s going to end up being the lower bound.
This is an extreme exception to the norm. Usually minimum demand is around 70-80% of the peak demand: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915