<i>Rooftop solar is still losing, but yes renewables in general are still competitive</i> They aren't though, how many people do you know with an electric car,

<i>Rooftop solar is still losing, but yes renewables in general are still competitive</i> They aren't though, how many people do you know with an electric car, solar panels, a battery, without a grit tie? AKA they get all their power from renewables? I personally don't know anyone like that, although I know plenty of people with solar, an electric car, or even a small solar+battery setup. Why is that, because its super expensive, the tesla will be the cheapest part of the equation when your done. And that applies to PV and wind at grid scale too, because for every MW of PV+Wind being installed there is a MW of natural gas plants being installed. So the actual cost of a wind turbine isn't just the turbine/panel, its the gas plant and its fuel. Which means that until we get magic pixie dust batteries that are less expensive than a gas plant, the price of wind or PV will never really go lower than whatever the cheapest backup source is. And that is the fundamental issue with the economics of solar/wind. Worse, battery costs can't just be added in because one has to take the duty cycle of the renewable source and multiply it enough (maybe 5x-10x) to get a 100% average duty cycle sufficient to charge those batteries. So, at this point to get a rough approximation of the price of wind + PV needed to compare it fairly against the legacy power generation one needs to multiply by maybe 10x. And that is why every random person with a farm isn't covering turning their land into power generation. So, maybe solar thermal solves the battery problem, but AFAIK its crazy expensive at this point too. So, we keep pumping carbon out our tailpipes because we can't even get renewables to grow significantly, nevermind actually dealing with the impact of doubling or tripling the electric production needed to heat peoples houses and charge their cars. The only question is how many more decades we will pump C02 into the atmosphere before we say enough, and either dump massive amounts of money into renewables, deal with grid instability, and try to "conserve" out way out of a crisis, or just get out of the way and start reprocessing the "waste" we have sitting around into new plants that can for a small fraction of the construction costs actually solve the problem.