There has been plenty of noteworthy pushback against renewable energy has been significant, even for offshore wind farms that would have minimal view impact.
Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy.
We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or combined cycle natural gas can.
If you wanna put the tinfoil hat on, having a political flamewar between renewables and nuclear is so ideal for fossil fuel companies that it almost looks deliberately architected.
Nuclear proponents are rarely if ever against renewables on principle, but rather claim they aren’t delivering on their promises. The environmentalists OTOH have been radicalized to be opposed to nuclear in a dogmatic way, are entirely against improving it by lifting research bans etc. The “nuclear is not economically viable” argument seen in recent years is dishonest from the majority of critics; they were against nuclear before and will be in the future, independent of economics and regional viability of wind & solar.
Meanwhile, coal, gas and oil are doing absolutely splendid – even countries with a strong environmentalist ethos can easily be convinced to expand their fossil fuel dependencies during a crisis, when their citizens can’t afford to heat their homes in the winter.
That's a great point. Those that generally fall on the "just trust the science, bro" side are also the ones saying "nuclear isn't as effective right now, so let's avoid it like the plague" and "think of the long term!"
It has always baffled me. This flamewar being pushed by fossil fuel companies makes perfect sense.
The problem with this analysis is not that it’s wrong: the existence of a zero-sum nuclear/renewables “argument” is absolutely a huge benefit to the legacy fossil fuels industry. The problem is that right now it’s renewables and not nuclear that pose the most direct threat to fossil industry profits. Given current prices and dropping costs/watt of solar and wind, those sources are going to extinguish a lot of fossil competition in a relatively short period through exponential increase in deployment - and delaying an exponential “knee” can mean years of additional profit. Whereas right now there’s really no path to a massive nuclear rollout, and the costs don’t compete with fossil sources even if we decided to push harder.
Coal loves nukes. They know coal is doomed, but each nuke plant start is a guaranteed 10-20 year continuance of the coal contract.
The cost of that amount of coal would build enough solar to cover for the prospective nuke. Not then building the nuke frees up enough money to construct that much solar several times over.
An important reason for the gangbusting success of solar and wind is that they build incrementally. Build some, and it starts producing immediately. Build more, get more, in a virtuous cycle. There is precious little room for graft, because anybody can cost it on a napkin: N turbines x $per, M square meters of panel x $per. Nukes, meanwhile, leave unlimited room for graft: nobody knows how much anything ought to cost, and actually finishing the job means cutting off everybody's gravy train. There is really no fixing this: nukes are well established as an unlimited graft pipeline.
I think this is an objective overstatement, just 10% of 2021 global electricity production came from wind and solar combined, and these are supposedly “easy to scale incrementally”, “simple technology that can be manufactured quickly anywhere” and have had major subsidies in relation to their market cap.
Then you have the intermittence issue, which is worse than dispatchable like hydro & nat gas, but isn’t factored in.
Lastly you have the regional variations in wind and sunshine which makes it impossible to say how it performs unless you know the regional conditions. Often you hear success stories from places like South Australia or the Danish coast or something, which is similarly honest to car commercials driving on empty mountain roads.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for developing and expanding renewables, especially in areas where the sun or wind is strong, but if I put myself in the shoes of fossil fuel lobbyists, current wind & solar is kind of a perfect nerfed pretend-enemy in regions of influence, such as say Germany.
These arguments, where you only look at current deployment and not growth and projected trends, aren’t worth very much. It’s like asking whether you should invest in smartphones or dumb-phones back in 2008: looking at that year’s ownership data might have convinced you that smartphones didn’t have much of a future, and then you would have made a very stupid bet.
The question is whether going forward there will be a huge increase in deployment of solar and wind, and answer is that every expert projection says that due to surprisingly reduced and reducing costs there absolutely will be. There are questions about whether this new generation will eat all of fossil’s market share (due to storage improvements and coordinated grid improvements) or just an enormous fraction of it. But both are devastating to the industry.
Similarly, worrying about edge cases and specific geographies doesn’t matter when you’re looking at aggregates. The claim here is not that renewables are perfect or will even be able to supply 100% of our needs. It’s simply that even at 75% of all power generation that’s a terrifying kick in the teeth for fossil corporate interests. The nuclear industry has nothing plausible on the table that can do this: outside of a few countries that invested heavily while building a nuclear weapons program, nobody has the political will to launch the sort of “Interstate-Highway System” government projects that would be needed to subsidize nuclear into that level of deployment. And even if we did, building the plants would take decades.
I do think nuclear has a clear role as baseload to help with the intermittence issues, and that renewables and nuclear deployment are natural allies. But that happens in a world where renewables have been massively built out and nuclear happens at the margins. The advantage of this plan is that it involves building a lot less expensive nuclear (maybe even less than we think now, if there are new storage tech improvements) and it’s not such a disaster if nuclear takes another 15-20 years to build. However: this pathology where nuclear advocates preen about an all-nuclear world is harmful and dangerous. It’s bad that so many advocates have mistakenly identified renewables as their competition and are spreading bad arguments trying to politically dissuade/delay people from adopting them. While it may not be intended that way, this line of argument reads like pure fossil-industry FUD.
Renewables don't need baseload help, they need dispatchability. So nukes would not help at all. Nukes will be mothballed in a few years as they become unable to attract bids sufficient to continue operation. (In some places they will continue getting their massive tax- or rate-payer subsidy.) As operation time falls, cost of every kWh they ever produced grows as the massive construction cost is amortized over fewer lifetime kWh.
Fortunately, most storage technologies are nimbly dispatchable. They are not being built out much, yet, except for extra-short-term load shifting, and hydro cheaply retrofitted with a pump, because there is not enough renewable capacity to charge from. Until there is, combined-cycle NG turbines fill shortfalls. Build-out gradually reduces that expense, but not to zero.
Instead, solar farms in the tropics fixing ammonia for export mean nobody needs more than a week of storage. The NG furnaces will be converted to burn ammonia, or maybe hydrogen extracted from ammonia. Catalytic fuel cells might enable retiring the gas turbines when they get cheap enough.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Many environmentalists (those primarily concerned with global warming) are all for nuclear, but realistically nuclear does not play very well with renewables (nuclear wants 100% output all the time, renewables need a peaker complimentary service). Arguably, many nuclear proponents are , at least from my perspective, coming from right-wing groups and the like who previously didn't care about fossil fuels and didn't like renewables. Of course that's just a faction, but IMO it's a significant factor in the renewal of calls for nuclear - muddying the waters and delaying everything (as nuclear is so good at nowadays)
At this point in time nuclear will take forever to come online, costs more than renewables, is harder to scale up than renewables, etc. Any company can toss together a factory that spits out turbines, solar panels and batteries without facing onerous regulations and massive liability risk.
Renewables are just much more friendly to private sector actors - incremental capital investment, politically safe, etc.
But if you accept a bit of carbon emission from the peaker plants it can play reasonably well with solar in warm climates.
You can also make some uses of renewables demand-dependent. Consider desalinization--uses a lot of power. Let's redesign our desalinization plant a bit: Put in a big seawater holding pond, it must be several hundred feet above the actual plant. Now, make the pumps considerably bigger than you need. When the grid has extra energy you use that energy to run the pumps and fill up the pond. When the grid doesn't have extra energy the pumps turn off.
The actual plant works on pressure, not power (it's a glorified version of the reverse osmosis system a lot of us have under our kitchen sink--and note that the kitchen sink systems don't even plug in at all.) So long as there's water in the pond it's happy, power use is low. Thus you can run your plant 24/7 off an intermittent supply of power.
This isn't the only heavy use situation where intermittent supply isn't a big handicap. What you need is a power grid that broadcasts (probably down it's wires) realtime information as to what the electric rate is and the users set their machinery up to optimize for that.
The political flame war doesn’t matter. I have a lot of capital allocated towards natural gas, but none to nuclear because the math doesn’t work (see the duck curve). Nuclear is dead on arrival because there is no industry demand for additional base load, regardless of whether it comes from uranium or coal.
> Nuclear is dead on arrival because there is no industry demand for additional base load, regardless of whether it comes from uranium or coal.
What if there is a political demand for phasing out existing coal / gas plants, thereby necessitating new plants to provide base load from some other source?
> Intermittent renewables displace the need for any base load.
When you talk about wind and solar you have to specify the region, because it differs wildly. As someone who has watched exactly those ideas fail to the point of crisis in north-central Europe, I truly hope you’re talking about some other unrelated place.
Note that there is not only the daily cycle, but the seasonal one, in particular in cold regions. Baseload usually refers to the lowest demand during the day, so in those terms the baseload changes dramatically over the year. This is something that nuclear can adjust to perfectly fine.
Pushback against new infrastructure is high in general, causing society to lean on inefficient and dirty sources of energy.
We need more modern nuclear reactors, renewables and storage since neither can load follow like hydroelectric dams or combined cycle natural gas can.