They are trying to switch the conversation from electricity where renewables are making unmistakably swift progress, to all energy (e.g. gas for heat in homes and factories and oil for cars and trucks).

They think the horrific inefficiency of fossil fuels in these uses makes progress look slow and futile as it massively inflates the total energy usage.

In reality, once we get the easy bits of renewable electricity done and are at 80% carbon free electricity, these other markets let us avoid the hard part of getting to 100% clean energy but still make rapid progress on decarbonisation.

An EV or heat pump running on mostly clean energy is a 5 or 6x improvement in carbon even before you account for the grid benefits of having such a large amount of battery and heat storage attached to the grid.

I think you're looking at electricity here, not energy. Energy is much more than electricity.

Not everybody live in house and have enough rooftop area. In Europe majority people live in apartments. If you want to have wind warm and solar farm there is also energy wasted with power lines transmission. Energy powerbanks also have energy waste.

I'm all in to have energy mix and more people to have solar panels if they can but it's not a holly grail

> Europe is in an inferior position in a renewable-powered world compared to many other locations.

Compared to who? In shared link you can see most countries are relying on non renewable energy. The better one is France (nuclear powered) and Norway (hydropowered).

Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.

I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

Have you done the math of how insufficient battery tech is, if we are to go 100% renewable? I'm so tired of renewable proponents just use the thought terminating cliche "BATTERIES!" when intermittency is brought up.

There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity.

All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages. (Let's just elide the disconnect between wages rising fully with productivity increases, but they do rise some!)

Despite being far more wealthy today than centuries ago, we don't build cathedrals with super intricate stonework, because labor is so much more expensive.

I fear that nuclear is like the gothic cathedral: something that was far easier to do when labor costs were low, but at wealth increases it becomes far more difficult to make economic sense.

Which again does not capture the cost of a nuclear plant being forced off the market because no one is buying its electricity during the day and they have to amortize the cost over a 40% capacity factor instead of 85% like they target.

And this can be a purely economical factor. Sure a plant may have a 90% capacity factor but if the market clears at $0 50% of the time they still need to recoup all the costs on the remaining 50%, pushing up the costs to what would be a the equivalent to a 42.5% capacity factor when running steady state.

Take Vogtle running at a 40% capacity factor, the electricty now costs 40 cents/kwh or $400 MWh. That is pure insanity. Get Vogtle down to 20%, which is very likely as we already have renewable grids at 75% renewables and it is 80 cents/kWh.

Take a look at Australia for the future of old inflexible "baseload" (which always was an economic construct coming from marginal cost) plants.

Coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

You can say that "no one would do that" but it is the end state of the market.

Electricity is fundamentally priced on the margin and if you start forcing nuclear costs on the ratepayers they will build rooftop solar and storage like crazy, leaving you without any takers for the nuclear based electricity.