> I wish I didn't live in coal and NIMBY land

Money will eventually win the war. Depressing way to get there but this crisis will accelerate the change.

Modern grids favour flexibility over fixed baseload generation (like nuclear) though. When you turn off a nuclear power plant its operating costs basically stay the same, which is horrible when you could cover your whole consumption with basically free solar/wind.

>> France had to nationalize EDF due to the exorbitant cost of their nuclear fleet >That's just wrong.

No, it's correct, the total costs of the 2022 bailout was almost 10bn, and that was to get control over a company that had over 50bn in debt.

Furthermore it was discovered that the plants had neglected maintenance that had to be undertaken rightaway, that had nothing to do with the TRV.

Of course, the TRV didn't help, it caused a loss of 18bn in 2022 on top of everything else, but things were bad already.

So even if the mentioned 5 bn export now was pure profit - which is isn't - it would take 15-20 years to cover the bailout that has already taken place. The 100 billion of investments until 2035 is in addition to that.

And they will have to sell their power on markets that will increasingly often have free electricity from solar and wind. How do you pay 1000 educated plant operators when electricity prices are negative?

Unfortunately nuclear power isn't the kind of thing you can try and then walk away from when it turns out to be a bad idea. Which is likely the main reason it's still around.

Australia is currently giving away free power for the peak three hours of sunlight a day, due to solar overcapacity until battery uptake increases. They are also working on a market scheme to transition primary grid services from thermal generators to battery storage.

They only have 22GW of coal generation remaining to replace, which should take no longer than 5-10 years. These generators are already at the end of their life, so they have no other choice but to go forward with renewables and storage.

A glimpse into the future, as is Spain, as is California. Some are further on their journey than others. Those at the frontier will teach the rest of us how to solve for the hardest parts.

https://www.pv-tech.org/australia-mandates-three-hour-free-s...

https://openelectricity.org.au/analysis/40-renewable-and-ris...

https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-energy/global-energy-s...

https://www.iea.org/commentaries/global-battery-markets-are-...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think you misunderstand. We are cheering trajectories, not the point in time. Renewables and storage will continue to be deployed, fossil fuels will remain expensive, and build outs will continue over the next decade or two. If these trajectories hold, and growth rates continue to grow for clean energy deployments, what happens? The outcome is obvious, is it not?

The thesis is simply this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

Of course, there is nuance, but the facts are that in the next 10-20 years, renewables and storage will have destroyed demand for fossil fuels for electrical generation. That's progress. We might go faster or slower, depending on policy and other factors, but this is the trajectory we are currently on, based on the data presented in this piece.

The Economist wrote a piece explaining this, if that is helpful:

The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential... | https://archive.today/lp9pZ - June 20th, 2024

> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

> To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

So! The transition is going fast (~1TW/year), and it is likely to continue to increase in speed (more solar manufacturing and battery storage will continue to be be built year over year, increasing annual production and deployment rates from today's rate(s)), based on all available data and observations. This is the good news to cheer. Nameplate and capacity factor arguments are meaningless in this context. We are at the hockey stick inflection point: look up.