3 ms·

> Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of needs have been proven to not be very useful for scoping the problem. And his proposed solution of nuc

• seoaeu 4y ago
  Not the one you’re responding to, but I can take a stab: The article on battery capacity assumes a country would need to store an entire week of energy to have a dependable grid based on renewables. But it isn’t like the sun just might not rise a few days in a row (and solar panels produce a non-trivial amount even on cloudy days), and it is basically guaranteed to always be windy somewhere. Overbuilding generation capacity is also missing despite being a far more economical approach to dealing with long stretches of reduced wind/solar output. The net result is he overestimates the needed capacity by probably 1-2 orders of magnitude. As a smaller point, his math works out to $74/kWh (in 2012 dollars) which probably seemed outrageously low at the time, but thanks to Li-Ion tech and lots of investment might actually be reached in not too long