Here's the issue: If solar is already on track to replace fossil fuels by 2030, everyone can stop working on energy. Bill Gates can apologize and shutdown his new fund. Sam Altman can stop meeting with energy companies.
But I'm skeptical. I expect there remain needed technologies. Storage? Transmission? Baseload? Such an analysis would tell us.
I'm asking, where can I find an analysis of this? All these articles are lite advocacy pieces that border on marketing.
Completely technologically sound, safer than any other power alternative, and impossible to fund, license, and deploy due to primarily emotional fear of the words 'nuclear reactor'.
[1] "Over 60 power reactors are currently being constructed in 13 countries plus Taiwan (see Table below), notably China, South Korea, UAE and Russia." -- http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/current-and-future-generat...
It seems China is at the very, very early stages of thinking about maybe investigating building one of these.
The "discussion inside the discussion" here is money. As inverter and management technology has gotten better, it becomes possible for a single family home, in the lower 48 states, to locally generate perhaps 95% of its annual power requirements, and to supplement that last 5% with onsite generated power using propane or methane.
In such a configuration, the consumer's on going payments are either lease payments or a maintenance contract on the gear to keep it running. Not some utility company. And that means that you cannot distribute the cost of "big" energy projects across a wide base of payers (as a utility, you can still do that with taxes). And that leads us too ... Commercial power.
While you and I might be able to live off grid, your typical multi-story office building or apartment can not. They don't have the square footage available for panels, and they generally don't have the space for back up power equipment. So they still need generators and transmission lines and a "grid." And because the cost of that grid is distributed across fewer people, their costs are significantly (I've seen estimates of 10x) higher. That raises rents, and the cost of goods, and generally puts a real crimp in any economy. Not to mention the power utility is now just another botique supplier to these guys and so loses a lot of scale it had before.
The shifting balance of power (pun intended) is going to cause a lot of disruptions and cost shifting. At the end of the day it could be the thing that puts a lot of brick and mortar stores out of business.