Feels like you’re downplaying the tragedy of a whole village having to be abandoned with no warning. Yeah a few people live there now. That doesn’t make the tra

Feels like you’re downplaying the tragedy of a whole village having to be abandoned with no warning. Yeah a few people live there now. That doesn’t make the tragedy any better. We don’t need baseload. You can go 100% renewable just fine with existing technology, at a lower total energy cost than what we have today. You can check out Marc Z Jacobsens studies for some concrete details. Whatever technology we get before we reach 100% will just make it cheaper and easier. People who think we need baseload don’t take into account everything else we’d have to do to get to net zero carbon. It’s not just the grid. It’s everything. And a lot of that comes with an insane amount of flexible load and energy storage. Like, all of transportation being battery (or hydrogen for trucks/planes I suppose) electric… you buy a car and you instantly have the energy storage capacity to power your home for a couple of days or so. I’ve got my car set to charge whenever electricity is cheapest right now. It’s dead easy. I don’t care if I charge on Monday or Thursday. South Australia even have vehicle-to-grid up and running already. Steel and fertiliser production needs to switch to green hydrogen. All that hydrogen production will represent a huge amount of buffered energy. Just build some extra storage tanks and you can handle lower electricity inputs for a few days. Hell, you can even keep some gas power plants around and feed the hydrogen into those on very rare days with extremely low sun and wind. You can run gas turbines on 100% hydrogen. It’s already demonstrated. There’s increasingly serious plans about switching gas pipelines in the North Sea to transport hydrogen instead of natural gas. First by making hydrogen from natural gas and storing the resulting CO2 underground. Then later switching to green hydrogen from floating off-shore wind. Seasonal demand changes in the north will be handled with geothermal heat wells and thermal energy storage. There’s already large buildings that just dump their excess rooftop solar energy into geothermal wells in summer. You get a surprising amount of that back in winter. And of course the geothermal wells gives you “baseload” heat energy as well. I suspect advanced deep geothermal will become viable for electricity production in many regions within 10 years as well. All those oil and gas people will dump a lot of investments and engineering efforts in it to attempt to leverage their expertise in a new industry.