I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy requirements for full electrification

I've had an evolution in thinking over the last few years. I did a deep dive on both atmospheric CO2 reduction and energy requirements for full electrification of transportation, homes and industry. At the time (5 to 10 years ago) it seemed like a very large deployment of nuclear power generation had to be a significant part of the solution. That isn't at all what I think in today's context. At grid scale, today, I think wind plus storage seems to be the most logical answer at many levels: Energy production per installed GW: Solar: 1.33 TWh/GW (solar is reliably off half the time) Wind: 3.07 TWh/GW Land use per GW: Solar: 3,900 acres/GW Wind: 750 acres/GW Land use to provide all Tesla Master Plan solar + wind: Solar: 12 Hawaii's Wind: 1 Hawaii (area of all islands) or, Solar: 30% of California Wind: 2.5% of California Annual Operations and Maintenance costs : Solar: 1.33 times wind O&M Wind: 1.00 Initial investment in factories: Solar: $ 11 billion Wind: $212 billion Storage required for 95% reliability: Solar: >12 hours Wind: 3 hours Wind requires 4x less batteries, with all the cost, recycling and ecological advantages this delivers. Build supply chain origin: Solar: Heavy reliance on China Wind: Diverse Long term supply chain (maintenance, parts, etc.) origin: Solar: Heavy reliance on China (forever) Wind: Diverse The above numbers come from parsing through Tesla's Master Plan Part 3 (MPP3) and several of their references. Of course, this is US-centric, yet, I think it scales well to other parts of the globe. It isn't a case that combining solar and wind can't provide a good solution. It's that idea that wind has enough advantages that it can provide reliable clean power generation all by itself (with storage). In other words, grid-scale solar would not be necessary at the kind of scale proposed by MPP3. I need to emphasize the above because there's a tendency to point out that the combination of wind and solar works very well. And, yes, it does. However, that misses the point entirely. The point is that geographically distributed grid-scale wind with storage does not need any solar to reach 95% reliability (power availability) [0] Table 2. In short, it seems wind would have lower land utilization, operation and maintenance costs, startup investment, 1/4 the storage requirement, ecological impact (based on only needing 1/4 of the batteries) and, finally, the potential for a more favorable supply chain, both for construction and long-term maintenance. Home-scale solar and storage has nothing to do with my comment (after all, we are talking about nuclear power). I am only referring to grid scale. Home-scale solar makes sense on many fronts. NOTE: This is the only document outside of MPP3 I used to generate some of the above: [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z