The government--actually governments, since there are autonomous local, state, and federal layers in the U.S.--do play an important role in regulating and coordinating the system. But most power generation is not owned or funded by the government, and fundamentally it is not the government's responsibility to fund new generation.
If there is a forecasted shortfall in energy, that will be expressed in prices going up, which will attract investment in new generating capacity.
So, we don't need every bit of existing generation to stay online. Power plants are idled and decommissioned every year, as more efficient (and therefore less expensive) new power plants come online and soak up the demand. Hydro power plants are not immune from this.
Each decision to build new generating capacity, or take old generating capacity offline, is made on its own merits, in the context of what people know at that moment. It might seem frighteningly disorganized at first, but in the long run it is the best way to do things because of the flexibility built into the system.
"Replace the lost power" is something the market will do without legislation.
Diablo Canyon has a power output of 2,256MW vs 18MW for this tiny dam. This dam is many magnitudes smaller.
The benefit of keeping the minuscule power output vs ecosystem damage and maintenance leans heavily towards removal.
> We’re closing coal plants and building wind farms and it all just has to add up in the end. It’s not a one-to-one
And of course this won't cover the loss of energy, so let's pretend we can do that through "energy efficiency"
>You can make up that power by the way you operate the rest of your facilities or having energy efficiency savings so your customers are using less
Tl;Dr for the energy side: Smoke and mirrors.
I don't understand the anti-wind sentiment in this thread. Yeah it's not ideal, but neither is hydro or nuclear. But all of them combined and mixed, they can make up for each other's shortfalls.
1. A wind farm is built by a private company in order to make a profit selling cheap electricity. A nuclear plant is built with vast amounts of taxpayers money to sell expensive electricity.
2. Nuclear is not dispatchable. That means you need natural gas turbines, hydro or batteries on your grid to provide it. Something that's glossed over by the nuclear fans.
This is not an intrinsic limitation. Naval nuclear reactors can power up to meet demand very rapidly. Civilian nuclear reactors aren't built like this for various reasons, including gas turbines just being cheaper for this purpose.
Additionally when your capital and fixed O&M costs are higher than renewables with the same net power + batteries, then the costs of your peaking energy skyrocket even further.
Far better to build less nuclear + storage. And then realise that the generation doesn't need to be nuclear in most places.