If we're going to have any chance of hitting the 2C climate targets, electricity production must be more or less completely emissions-free by mid-century (prefe

If we're going to have any chance of hitting the 2C climate targets, electricity production must be more or less completely emissions-free by mid-century (preferably ASAP). So, any non-trivial amount of natural gas usage is out. Also, there's the rough rule of thumb saying that when variable sources (like wind or solar) approach a fraction of total generation in the grid equal to the capacity factor of said source, system integration costs start to rise rapidly (because that's, at the latest, the point where you'll start needing large amounts of storage, curtailment, or long-range transmission). Thus, in most grids wind+solar will unlikely see much larger than 50% of total generation without massive extra investment and/or breakthroughs in storage costs. If we're going for lowest-cost deep decarbonization, it looks like the share of nuclear will start to rise when we go deep enough, see e.g. slide 41 in https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Getting_to_Zero.pdf https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/Getting...