The green energy transition may be a more recent consumer.
It's still shit, but implying this wouldn't happen if we stuck with coal and nuclear is silly.
That said, in some small assuage to your worry there are large sectors that are transitioning to replacement of fossil fuels.
Global scale mining operations, such as Australia's ~ one billion tonne per annum iron ore industry consume large quantities of fuel for trucks, trains, and electricity generation for shovels, loaders, crushers, conveyots, screens, etc.
https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
https://fortescue.com/news-and-media/news/2024/03/15/world-s...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/fortescue-starts-work-on-world-f...
Infinity Train: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuLrc1u43gU
CO2 reductions aren’t necessarily 1:1, but are usually very close.
So, adding renewable energy is replacing fossil fuels, even if the fossil plants don’t immediately shut down.
It’s a lot like replacing car trips with walking/biking/transit and then complaining that you still have a car.
What we see now is that the data center industry lays claim to a lot of power generated in many regions, increasing the demand for electricity at an alarming pace. The same seems to be happening other places in Europe. We keep needing and using more electricity, without really moving away from fossil sources. And the renewable energy sources are far from clean to produce, wind and batteries require a lot of minerals and extractive processes that is highly polluting and Co2 expensive in other parts of the world.
I do not know enough (yet) to be categorical in my claims, but I have started looking into the numbers, and from what I have seen so far, I'm only getting more worried about the path we are heading down.
But a few things to note:
- embedded CO2 in renewable gen is very low compared to fossil fuels
- lithium is abundant and cobalt/nickel are not needed in most battery applications (and lithium may be replaced in the future, too)
- waste from solar is trivial compared to things like municipal waste, coal ash. I think wind is similar, but I’m less sure - either way, recycling is improving
- (in the US, at least) we have plenty of land for renewables, especially compared to things like corn crops used for transportation ethanol (a silly thing in my opinion) and pasture used for beef cattle (something there will likely be a lot less of in the future)
Anything you find while looking into the numbers that disagrees with the above points is possibly outdated or just wrong.
https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18....
While the International Energy Agency fully champion the use of renewables, they also take a vey pragmatic data based approach to global energy consumption and production and believe that nuclear power must compliment future energy creation more or less as it does today; providing some 20% of total electricity in advanced economies.
Saying nuclear is "effectively irrelevant" is numerically equivilant to saying the third child in a two parent family is "effectively irrelevant".
They acknowledge that AGW is real and they push for an optimal path forward through energy transition .. and they don't see a downside to maintaining existing reactors and maintaining current share.
Thank you for your opinion none the less.
The argument, as it has been for about 40 years now, is that the people saying it is not cost competitive tend to have high overlap with people who are changing regulations to ... make it very expensive. If the regulatory framework was sane, it'd be quite cost competitive.
The problem nuclear has is the economic learning curve has been inverted. That can only be caused by overregulation.
That reads like a creedal statement. We see the same effect in all regulatory jurisdictions, indicating the effect is instead intrinsic. A more fundamental observation is that the more we learn about building nukes, the more expensive they get.
Getting rid of coal (and natural gas, to lesser extent) should happen ASAP, and nuclear can be a part of the solution for the transition period.
The IEA WEO is infamous for its inaccurate solar capacity forecasts over the last 10-15 years. They repeatedly assumed annual solar additions would flatten out (i.e., future years will not see more additions than recent years), despite the roughly exponential growth that was obviously happening. After doing it 5 years in a row, you have to wonder what was going wrong…