The fight is no longer between fossil and nuclear; its nuclear versus renewables. And renewables are winning.

No one I know is opposed to renewable energy, but advocates really do everybody a disservice when they try to argue that an intermittent power source without storage is the reasonable replacement for base load power. As Bill Gates said in an interview "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

(Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.)

Natural gas will be cheaper than renewables + utility scale battery storage for only so long; as soon as natural gas spot market prices spike, renewables and storage are deployed, creating a downward price spiral, which natural gas generators can only defend against for so long.

Nuclear will never be commercially viable again.

Natural gas might be as bad in terms of climate change as burning coal due to losses of methane during production/transporting, so it would be great to eliminate its use. Unfortunately we are far, far away from having grid storage that could accommodate only having renewables. Grid storage has been worked on for generations and even so, right now, the U.S. has about 24.6GW of grid storage, 95% of which is pumped storage hydro. That is a very tiny fraction of what would be needed.

Strange, and here I thought that 93% of our energy output was generated by fossil fuels and nuclear.

Has there been consensus on whether renewables can power our society and industry on their own? Or for that matter generate more power than we currently need to drive further progress?

If you consider only electrical power generation, in some areas, yes renewable are competitive for some hours of the day.

As a fraction of our total energy consumption, they barely register.

It only takes a few hours of sunlight to power humanity for a year. The amount of energy is not the question, it's scaling up collection.

For a while the amount of energy is certainly a question. If it takes 100 gigawatts to produce a solar panel, but that panel only returns 75 gigawatts over its usable lifespan (including maintenance), then that's not a good look.

Even if solar generated 1.25 watts per watt to contruct/transport/install/maintain, it still isn't enough.

Now if solar is at the point where it was generate 5 watts per 1 watt, we're in business.

Google "solar pv eroei". We are past the point of positive energy return.

Wikipedia says: 80.0 for Coal

100.0 for Hydro

75 for Nuclear

18.0 for Wind

6.8 for PV Solar

I saw lower estimates for PV solar elsewhere hovering around 1.0 though, apparently the methods are controversial.

Either way, 6.8 is a still science experiment territory compared to other methods.

Come on, knock out being disingenuous. Science experiment territory? California and Germany have so much solar generation, they're having to take active measures to deal with the supply. And solar PV manufacturing capacity is only growing each year.

The U.K. Is closing the last of its coal plants in less than 5 years: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jul/19/how-coal-lo...

That article shows a graph indicating that Gas is taking over for the lack of coal plants, and wind/solar are plateaued.

People want a high return on their energy investment to power modern society.

I'm sure solar will get better, and I encourage the fledgling consumer market and small-scale deployments to improve the tech, but it's not ready today, and the longer idealists keep peddling the idea that it IS ready, the longer we accelerate global warming.