Absurd that discussion of nuclear power brings out people who think it’s too pricy. 30 trillion in US debt. Ten percent of that could have nuclearized this country
And say 3% makes the entire country renewable? What is the better use of money then? Energy is energy, and even better if it is vastly simpler to generate with less headaches to take care of afterwards.
South Australia is getting close. [1] Give it a year or two.
> Sometimes the sun does shine and the wind does blow. That’s most of the time in South Australia, apparently. The average share of wind and solar during October was 72%. For 29 out of 31 days, 100% of the power used in South Australia (SA) was renewable. The sky didn’t fall, the grid didn’t collapse, and the apocalypse is not nigh.
It's the "Electric cars will never work until I can drive across the country on one charge" argument all over that line of reasoning.
Different areas will require different trade-offs. Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter.
Currently storage does not make sense because the cheapest store of energy is a smart consumer. It will be very interesting to see if actual storage outside of governmental emergency backups will ever be needed in wind heavy deployments.
>> Higher latitudes, excluding inside the polar vortex, tends to have larger amount of wind in the winter.
"Larger amount of wind" still means at most 3-4 days of decent wind per month, that has been my experience living in Poland. There are some windy regions like the Baltic Sea coast, or Tatra mountains in the south, but that's still not enough.
Poland is one of the worst places in the world for renewables.
Which is sad if you want Poland to have an industrial future. Having Poland's industry be powered by expensive nuclear energy when solar is $0.013/kWh in sunny parts of the world will not bring happy experiences.
If renewables provide 100% of power on good-weather days, doesn't this mean they've picked the low-hanging fruit, and additional renewables no longer have a stable source of income?
What incentive exists to decarbonize the remaining 26%, and provide clean power on bad-weather days?
The incentive is ever-increasing CO2 charges, and also high prices per kWh on those off days. The CO2 price is already up to 100 euros/tonne of CO2 on the European CO2 market.
Renewables will go further with some combination of short and long term storage, dispatchable demand of other kinds, and outright curtailment.
With enough uninhabited desert to fit France in it, Australia is ideally suited for solar. It's great that they're pioneering solar, but I guess the numbers may look different for France.
