I think this matter boils down to the following: Nuclear is better than fossil fuels (by a significant margin) but the spin up time and investment is significant, too significant for many. Such little investment has been made in the last 10 or so years that investing now when the world is on the precipice of being able (though clearly, not very willing) to use wholly renewable sources seems like a better investment, even with the various pitfalls of each respective source. Energy storage has come a long way and with significant leaps every few years, it seems that energy storage + renewables is the way forward but it’s sad to see the missed nuclear opportunity. Like so many other promising and environmentally friendly(er) ideas, it has unfortunately been passed over when the time was right and will not be utilised sufficiently.

Nuclear probably isn’t. It could be, but it doesn’t look like its going to be.

The author is vastly underestimating the problem caused by intermittency. He just slap $600 of batteries and consider it not intermittent anymore.

It’s way more complicated than that.

First is the batteries, how much batteries? Enough to cover the night, one cloudy day, two ?

Then what do you do about winter ? Solar is producing 2-3 times more in summer than in winter, however we use generally not electricity in winter. So do we oversized the solar installation so it still producing enough for winter or do we plan backups ? What kind of backups? We have hydroelectricity and wood, but again if we need to build more wood burning power station it has a cost. Same thing with oversizing the solar installation.

I’m not saying that against renewables energy, I definitely the way to go.

However saying that a kWh of solar/wind is xxx cheaper is misleading.

Yes it’s true that producing a kWh of renewable energy is cheap, however producing a kWh of renewable energy when we need it is way more expensive and it needs to be taken into consideration!