Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary.
In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc.
Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan.
You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
Quebec produces far more electricity via hydro than any single US state, some of which gets exported to the northeastern US.
Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing?
Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.
That's a funny statistic to focus on when the actual use of coal for electricity has increased by 50% over the same period.
It's almost like they are using it to cover baseload or something.
It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.
If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.