"Batteries" was a shortcut for whatever storage mechanism we may come up with. Some of them are promising, and hopefully cheap enough to reduce the cost of "on

"Batteries" was a shortcut for whatever storage mechanism we may come up with. Some of them are promising, and hopefully cheap enough to reduce the cost of "on demand" renewable energy. Right now, though, proper storage makes renewable much costlier than they otherwise look. Without enough storage, you get energy when you have sun or wind, not when the train must depart the station. So what happens in practice? We use other energies to compensate. Now if renewable end up partially replacing fossil fuels like coal or oil, that's good: every joule we get from the wind, we don't have to get it from coal. If however you compensate with nuclear plants, that's almost a one sided loss for the environment: you still need to maintain the nuke plants to guarantee minimum available power, but you use them less because renewables offload some energy from them. Carbon wise, this is a pure loss: you end up using more concrete & more steel to get energy from the wind (or the sun), and you don't even shut down nuke plants in return (or if you do, you end up trading nuclear for fossil, which is beyond ridiculous). Moreover, those nuke plants are now less profitable, since we need less total energy from them. If you want to reduce risks, that's not a good idea: less profit means less budget, and maintenance may suffer. The only advantage is a slight reduction in nuclear waste, and those are mostly not a problem (just bury them). Don't get me wrong, renewable energy is the future, one way or another. Nuclear power is only a stop-gap measure, it won't last forever — just like fossil fuel. Right now though, that's a stop-gap measure I welcome with open arms.