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I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Many environmentalists (those primarily concerned with global warming) are all for nuclear, but realistically nuclear

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Many environmentalists (those primarily concerned with global warming) are all for nuclear, but realistically nuclear does not play very well with renewables (nuclear wants 100% output all the time, renewables need a peaker complimentary service). Arguably, many nuclear proponents are , at least from my perspective, coming from right-wing groups and the like who previously didn't care about fossil fuels and didn't like renewables. Of course that's just a faction, but IMO it's a significant factor in the renewal of calls for nuclear - muddying the waters and delaying everything (as nuclear is so good at nowadays) At this point in time nuclear will take forever to come online, costs more than renewables, is harder to scale up than renewables, etc. Any company can toss together a factory that spits out turbines, solar panels and batteries without facing onerous regulations and massive liability risk. Renewables are just much more friendly to private sector actors - incremental capital investment, politically safe, etc.

LorenPechtel 4y ago
But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates. You can also make some uses of renewables demand-dependent. Consider desalinization--uses a lot of power. Let's redesign our desalinization plant a bit: Put in a big seawater holding pond, it must be several hundred feet above the actual plant. Now, make the pumps considerably bigger than you need. When the grid has extra energy you use that energy to run the pumps and fill up the pond. When the grid doesn't have extra energy the pumps turn off. The actual plant works on pressure, not power (it's a glorified version of the reverse osmosis system a lot of us have under our kitchen sink--and note that the kitchen sink systems don't even plug in at all.) So long as there's water in the pond it's happy, power use is low. Thus you can run your plant 24/7 off an intermittent supply of power. This isn't the only heavy use situation where intermittent supply isn't a big handicap. What you need is a power grid that broadcasts (probably down it's wires) realtime information as to what the electric rate is and the users set their machinery up to optimize for that.

LorenPechtel 4y ago

But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates. You can also make some uses of renewables demand-dependent. Consider desalinization--uses a lot of power. Let's redesign our desalinization plant a bit: Put in a big seawater holding pond, it must be several hundred feet above the actual plant. Now, make the pumps considerably bigger than you need. When the grid has extra energy you use that energy to run the pumps and fill up the pond. When the grid doesn't have extra energy the pumps turn off. The actual plant works on pressure, not power (it's a glorified version of the reverse osmosis system a lot of us have under our kitchen sink--and note that the kitchen sink systems don't even plug in at all.) So long as there's water in the pond it's happy, power use is low. Thus you can run your plant 24/7 off an intermittent supply of power. This isn't the only heavy use situation where intermittent supply isn't a big handicap. What you need is a power grid that broadcasts (probably down it's wires) realtime information as to what the electric rate is and the users set their machinery up to optimize for that.