Solar, even concentrated desert solar, is no good at all. Wind is a distant derivative and much, much worse.
Hydrocarbons and nuclear are the fuels of today and tomorrow because they are orders of magnitude more energy dense. These energy sources are so dense they double as energy storage.
We need to get on nuclear. Then we can help poorer nations with nuclear power so they can undergo their own Clean Industrial Revolutions. In 80 years we all want the world’s ~11 billion plus people to live far better than we live in the West today.
> Each siting location by definition is worse than the one before.
How is that not true for nuclear power plants? If we have better tech, we can remove old panels and wind turbines. With nuclear plants the place is lost forever. Let alone that there cannot be a safe place to store the waste.
I'm in favor of nuclear power too, but it takes too long to build.
That's far from solved, countries close to each other have very similar weather pattern and wind electricity is especially unreliable. We're also very unlikely to have a massive breakthrough in turbines since we're close to the theoretical maximum already.
Wind turbines obey Betz's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law and are already close to maximum efficiency, the only thing you can do is drop the production cost.
Experts wrote thick reports on how to transition to renewables. You shouldn't dismiss their work with half a dozen graphics on Twitter.
Depending on the region, seasonal differences caused by low wind are canceled out by higher solar production and low solar production is canceled out by higher wind production. That chart completely fails at showing that.
I'm a LFTR fan. Solar wind has won and civilization should concentrate on enabling it to eliminate gas/coal from our energy production.
Nuclear has a higher energy density than hydrocarbons or batteries but we still don't see nuclear powered cars and aircraft everywhere.
To me, solar is first-order. Solar leads to wind, so it's second-order. (Though really, solar heats water and air, producing wind, so it's kinda third-order.) Oil is... uh... the sun grows the plants which die and get compacted, then we pump up the remnants. I'm not sure what you'd call that.
Uranium is, like, zeroth order then. Fusion in the Sun produces solar.
And yet, none of this really means much. Unless you're constructing Dyson spheres, it really doesn't matter how efficiently you're capturing the max theoretical energies. If you don't believe me, stop eating. Try replacing food with sucking on a power cord.