France at least has a huge amount of nuclear power. I wish we saw more reactors built in the U.S., it would certainly kill a lot of birds with a single stone.

Killing birds! Wind turbines?

I agree with your point about geography. I was very surprised to learn that Austria has a huge amount of hydropower. Sure, I knew Austria has a lot of mountains, but combined with rivers and relatively low population density, it allows them to get more than 50% of their power from hydro!

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Austria

About your last point: <<Solar and Wind cannot power a modern economy without fossil fuel back-up.>>

I respectfully disagree. I think solar+wind+batteries+nuclear can do the trick. Not everywhere, but many places.

I'm surprised no one talks more about how countries near the equator (DRCongo, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.) will transition to renewables. Wind is much weaker near the equator, and building huge solar farms will mean cutting down precious rainforest. It's a real conundrum!

I'm ignorant - why can't solar and wind provide enough power? What about somewhere like Arizona/Nevada/Utah?

Because those are intermittent power sources. That is, there are times when the wind isn't blowing, and sun isn't shining, and there is no battery technology (now or coming) that is capable of storing enough energy to bridge this intermittency gap. This is why solar and wind need fossil fuel back-up. Natural gas companies are some of the biggest proponents of solar and wind projects.

Can you elaborate on the "or coming" part of your post? What makes you think batteries won't be substantially better 20 years from now?

Because we've been working pretty hard on batteries pretty hard for over 200 years, it will take a 10-20X improvement over current technology and we're not really seeing anything that is exponential like that anytime soon. I mean obviously it could happen, it's just unlikely given the past 200 years of steady improvement and not step function improvements.

My heuristic for pessimism:

We use enourmous amounts of energy and we invest enourmous amounts of money in energy production. At the same time we have neglible storage and and neglible investment in storage.

some numbers:

194MWh - capacity of Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia

161 million A$ - it's cost (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve)

4 700 000 MWh - Australia's daily total consumption of energy of all fuel types (https://www.energy.gov.au/data/energy-consumption)

4700000 / 194 = 24226 - number of same power reserves to store australias power for one day.

24226 * 161 millions = 3.9 trillions of A$ - money needed to build a days capacity in Australia at current price.

(for comparison, Australia GDP is near 2 trillion A$, US GDP is 27 trilion A$)

Short answer: solar produces ~10 watts per square meter, all factors considered. Wind, even less. USA consumes 3.8T kWh/yr electricity, needing 44,000 square kilometers (20% of Utah) of solar panels & buffer batteries to supply.

Conceivable, but a massive undertaking at a scale having inevitable significant problems ($66T price tag for starters).

($66T = 1m^2 panel + 1kWh battery from https://www.goalzero.com/shop/kits/goal-zero-yeti-1000x-powe... times 44,000km^2. That’s 3 years of the USA‘s entire GDP.)