> Nobody generates more than 20% of their electricity from solar. Denmark is the only country that generates over 30% of its power from wind, and Germany is the 3rd highest at 24.7% [2]. By comparison plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear power

This is an extremely odd comparison. No one is proposing a completely solar generation strategy - it's renewables vs whatever.

Plenty of countries generate more than 30% of their electricity from renewables.

Nuclears not some secret unexplored concept at this point. If it were competitive it would be competing. Its costs are too high, not due to regulations due to the sheer amount of resources involved in mining, refining, and operating. Not to mention initial construction.

It's doing much better in terms of actually being used as a large portion of countries electricity generation, as I demonstrated above. But more importantly, the reality is that nuclear isn't competing against renewables it's competing against a fossil fuel grid that's supplemented by renewables. Germany, the poster child for renewables, still emits 10x the carbon dioxide per watt of electricity as France.

Let me put it more bluntly. Renewables are indeed cheaper on a per-watt hour basis. But that's more than offset by the need to deal with intermittency. Batteries are great for cars, but they exist at nowhere near the scale required to decarbonize with a wind and solar generation base. More exotic proposals like thermal storage, hydrogen, or the Sabatier process remain in prototyping and academic stage. The cost of storage is a non-answer, because there's no real plan to build this storage.

Renewables make in a stopgap mitigation plan but we have no feasible way of building a grid that's powered completely or even mostly by renewables. If our plan is to decarbonize the energy sector, renewables do not offer a solution. Hydroelectricity, and geothermal power do, but those are geographically limited. Nuclear energy is the only source that can feasibly replace fossil fuels as a consistent, geographically independence, and carbon-free energy source.

TL;DR:

* Industrialization happened because we figured out we could heat water and push a piston (and later, spin a turbine). Modern society is built off the ability to produce mechanical and electrical energy from thermal energy.

* It's a lot easier to heat water and spin a turbine with a carbon-free source of heat, than to try and capture energy from sun and wind and store massive amounts of energy to overcome intermittency.

Battery was and is never supposed to take up the entire storage load of a network - nobody is designing or forecasting future networks in that way.

Batteries provide fast response

Pumped hydro is what is being used on a lot of networks and in future network planning. Ironically old open cut mines are often perfect locations for them.

This paper discusses an algorithm used to find pumped hydro sites - there is _a lot_ of capacity out there waiting to be tapped

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

There are already numerous draft or under constructions plants that are "triple" projects with a combination of solar/wind + battery + pumped hydro

To add to this, there are numerous very large scale project already underway to use existing hydro capacity as pumped hydro storage.

Eg, Bath County Pump Storage is a 3GW plant[1] although ironically it is often filled using nuclear power because the hydro station can adapt better to rapid changes in demand.

In the US there is 22GW total pump hydro storage already (compared to say 98GW total nuclear power capacity).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_Sta...

add Snowy 2.0 in Australia - 2GW:

https://www.snowyhydro.com.au/snowy-20/about/

Pumped hydroelectricity is geographically dependent - you need a valley or mountain that you can dam up to build pumped hydro. While it may be great for South Australia, the region examined in your linked paper, it's wrong to assume that this availability is uniform.

The available isn't uniform, but it sure is widespread!

"The perception has been there are limited sites for pumped hydro around the world, but we have found hundreds of thousands."

https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/anu-finds-530000-potent...

This paper just ran an algorithm over a heightmap, and pinpointed potential reservoirs. This is a far cry from actually identifying feasible sites. The massive density of hydroelectric storage in the Himalayas, for instance, is far too remote to be developed at anything approaching reasonable cost. Not to mention, it still leaves swathes of places like Central north America, and much of Northern Europe without access to hydroelectric storage.

The European electricity market is already very interconnected, so I doubt that would be a problem there at least.

Batteries are only the most expensive of a wide array of storage choices that today vie for which will end up cheapest, overall. Pumped hydro is mature, but underground and underwater compressed air are being proven; mine-shaft gravitic similarly; low-pressure LH2 is newly practical with aerogel insulation; carbon-captured LCH4, likewise; catalytic ammonia; and even powdered iron. None of these require any theoretical breakthroughs, just workaday engineering. In some cases combining them makes sense, such as mineshaft gravitics and compressed air in the same mineshaft. In other cases the storage medium is itself directly useful, as for example LH2 as aircraft fuel, and ammonia as both fertilizer and fuel.

Some depend on geography, particularly pumped hydro and mineshaft gravitic, and to a lesser degree compressed air. Catalytic improvements will bring rapid cost decline in LH2 and ammonia production. And, finally, battery technology, still the most immediately practical for home systems, is still improving fast. Any breakthroughs not anticipated only improve the picture.

The cost for utility-scale solar is many times less than roof-mounted, battery-backed home systems, but in places where distribution is expensive (rural) or unreliable (3rd world and California) it has strong appeal.

Its a nice appeal to simplicity to say nuclear is just 'heating water and spinning a turbine', I could also say the sun is a very large carbon-free maintenance-free opex-free reactor in the sky and we just need to design a secondary stage of the power plant to transform the energy to electricity. And instead of pistons OR turbines, we can use a new type of machine specifically built for this purpose aka renewable energy technologies.

The reality is it doesn't matter how you word it or what you think should be simpler. Its what the economy can actually build, and including risk, buying solar panels which have no moving parts and last for decades are currently the more efficient way to add a watt to the grid.

Your "blunt" assertion where you predict the capacity of the grid to accomodate renewables and the quantity of battery storage and the feasibility of every potential upcoming storage technology probably requires a few sources to be taken seriously as well.

Correct, the sun is a great source of energy. But we use most of our energy when the sun is blocked by the earth. The sun is opex and capex free, but the storage necessary to make it feasible requires massive capital expenditure and massive operational expenditure.

The point is, just adding watts to the grid is not a solution. You needed watt when they're needed and where they're needed. And doing that with renewables is a lot harder, hence why we're really just supplementing fossil fuels with wind and solar not really working towards full decarbonization.

My assertions about the capacity of battery production were indeed backed by sources of predicted growth of battery production. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25283498

> It's sad to see people downvote correct information.

I'm confused, there's no downvote button in HN.

There is you need a certain amount (200?) of karma to use it. Posts with negative votes have more lightly colored text. The above post no longer has negative votes so it's normal colored now.

For completion, am not sure if it was 200 before but it's 1000 now.