I still feel that these articles massively underestimate the amount of energy required in the future, when all fossils (eg. air travel, transportation, industry) will migrate to fully electric. Unless we want to pave every surface with solar, baseload will still be needed...
The point is that excess energy from solar especially is essentially free, while excess energy from nuclear or other traditional baseload generators is very far from free.
> I still feel that these articles massively underestimate the amount of energy required in the future
That's certainly an aspect. Here in Norway it increasingly looks like we'll end up with a lack of electricity by 2030 or so[1]. However production is just one aspect, another problem is distribution. Even if we tap into all that wind up north in Norway, for example, most of the consumption is in the south, and there's a huge lack of transmission capacity between the north and south today, with no current plans of building more.
[1]: A big factor here is if we want to use our precious "clean" hydro to electrify the oil platforms or not. They need a lot of energy to operate.
Perhaps a much less comfortable question for Norway is when to retire them entirely and leave the oil under the sea.
Maybe Norway need to build the Shetland interconnector as well as the 1400MW one that's just opened? Shetland is where all the never-built tidal schemes are always planned for.
Oh absolutely. About as easy as stopping a heroin addiction though, I expect. Not only the direct income from them, but about 10% of the non-govt workforce is directly tied to the oil extraction or in supporting roles.
Hydrogen generation does not have a flexible power demand, because as you the electrolysis ramps up and down efficiently goes to zero.