https://blowhardwindbag.blogspot.com/2011/04/forbes-article-...
> but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidies to exist
Citation needed here, too! The unsubsidized costs of solar and wind are still the cheapest sources, so they don't "need" subsidies to be deployed. The existence of tax breaks subsidies for wind/solar doesn't mean that the subsidies are needed, any more than the special tax break subsidies for oil/gas/coal are needed for those sources to keep on going.
> Batteries? Won't scale
This is a very strange claim! Not only do batteries scale beautifully in theory, we already have scaled them for deployment, with GWh grid batteries that can be scaled at the same site to 5-6GWh (Moss Landing, CA). Batteries can be deployed in homes, at distribution substations, underneath utility scale solar or wind farms, at old decommissioned fossil fuel sites so that the transmission capacity can be reused, on one side of a congested transmission line to avoid massive upgrade costs... Batteries are practically defined by their beautiful scalability, a real Swiss Army knife for any grid application
Current global production capacity for the lithium ion types of batteries is 285GWh, which on a GW completely dwarfs global nuclear deployment. Projections from the battery industry are for this amount to increase 10x every five years. And though lithium ion tech is by far in the lead, there are many other chemistries perfectly suited to grid use (but perhaps not cars), if lithium ion's improvement pace ever slows to let them catch up.
We are in a new era for energy, an era that is far more like tech, and less like the staid commodity industry that energy has been for the past century. Depreciation of grid assets is very slow, far slower than the tech change of energy tech, so we need to start paying very close attention to tech change curves if we don't want to waste massive amounts of money and screw up our fight against climate change.
Hydrogen would still be hard to beat for seasonal storage, though.
I would say "citation needed". France typically had a documented public investment plan for nuclear energy, and is enjoying one of the cheapest and low-carbon emission electricity in Europe.
> And now we have just experienced a decade where intermittent renewables have plummeted in cost to below that of fuel-base energy
I still read this here and there, but strangely, solar/wind still need large subsidiaries to exist. How so ?
Other renewable such as hydro are fine, though, but they tend to be already at their max everywhere.
> And storage is on that trend too, with storage being added to most solar and wind projects these days
We don't have real storage solutions for now. Batteries ? Won't scale. Reversible dams ? Doable if you have the chance to have a lot of hydro.