Massachusetts, in the Northeast, is showing a real-world strategy for solar.
Massachusetts incentivizes homeowners to have their own solar installs. My house, for example, has solar, as do many houses in my town. Yesterday it produced about 50 kWh, meaning I was sending energy into the grid.
You might ask, what's the point of solar if there's no storage? Going 100% renewable would be amazing, but reducing CO2 is a win. If electric load declines because more and more homes can produce their own electric, that's a huge reduction in total CO2 that needs to be produced at the power plants. It doesn't mean we can throw away the gas plants, but they can be run at lower capacity. Storage isn't really discussed yet, but maybe one day we'll get there.
We're also investing in a huge offshore wind farm.
> Solar and wind power alone can’t scale up fast enough to generate the vast amounts of electricity that will be needed by midcentury, especially as we convert car engines and the like from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy sources. Even Germany’s concerted recent effort to add renewables—the most ambitious national effort so far—was nowhere near fast enough. A global increase in renewables at a rate matching Germany’s peak success would add about 0.7 trillion kilowatt-hours of clean electricity every year. That’s just over a fifth of the necessary 3.3 trillion annual target.
> To put it another way, even if the world were as enthusiastic and technically capable as Germany at the height of its renewables buildup—and neither of these is even close to true in the great majority of countries—decarbonizing the world at that rate would take nearly 150 years.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/only-nuclear-energy-can-save-th...
The UK has not brought a new (commercial/public power) nuclear reactor online since the nineties, or finished building a completely new site since the eighties.
It has started building one, which is over budget and delayed and has been described as “the most expensive power station in the world”.
It has had three recent plans cancelled, four more go nowhere in years, had two developers (EON and nPower) pull out of UK nuclear, and the Scottish parliament had backed no new nuclear plants in Scotland.
If nuclear is our saviour, it’s not looking very likely that we’ll be saved.