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I am rather skeptical of a source that puts Nuclear at half the cost of gas given it would seem to require that everyone who does the math on private investments decides to half their return for no apparent reason, and it seems odd to claim that spending going up when replacing currently functioning and fossil plants with new solar plants must mean that solar is more expensive long term. The whole point of solar is that it costs a lot up front but very little to maintain, so obviously until all new solar and wind plants are replacing end of life solar and wind plants your going to see an increase in short term cost while building such plants.
It’s also worth noting that solar, battery storage, and wind are new technologies in terms of their current form and are seeing consistent drops in real price as they develop and grow in scale over the last few decades, as compared to far more developed technologies where there is little room for innovation or scale to bring down costs.
Worthwhile to point out what the author thinks about nuclear https://www.artberman.com/blog/can-we-just-get-over-nuclear/
The argument is that renewable pricing does not include nesessary storage for buffering intermittent production, offloading the task to the grid.
The improvents ongoing are asymptotic. I.e. we are running into diminishing returns. Arguably we will see price reversals due to increased material and energy prices as fossils and mineral extraction declines. Right now renewables are almost completely fossil energy extenders or multipliers, which is fine initially but won’t do in the long run.
Notice that we need renewable production to cover the primary energy demand, not just current electricity production.
That doesn’t really address why he uses a source that says that nuclear is absurdly cheap compared to anything else if he also believes that their isn’t any demand to scale up production.
And yes, renewable priceing often does include the cost of the batteries needed for buffering in the commonly cited category of generation+storage. It is worth noting however that this price is much higher than it would be worth a fully renewable grid. This is because not only does it take time to actually build the renewables, which means given their consistently dropping price that by the end the batteries and panels will be cheaper than current prices, but because long range distribution is far cheaper than the direct storage that figure counts.
While renewables are intermittent at a local level, at the continental scale between solar and wind the output is actually very consistent. It costs money to build more HVDC transmission lines of course, but currently thouse are cheaper than batteries or pumped hydro, although that may change if battery prices drop as low as their manufacturers are boasting they will.
Primary energy demand will decrease as more users more to electricity given that most of that energy demand that is currently done with fossil fuels can only being turned into useful work at 40 to 60 percent efficiency, as compared to the 90 percent efficiency typically found with electrical motors. Not that it matters at all, as the only impact primary demand has at all on the cost of sources of electricity generation(the thing we are debating) is that we are going to need to see a large scale up in net electricity generation.
The idea that we can reverse climate change and planetary overshoot without some trauma for society is just magical thinking.
Every optimistic climate change scenario involves hand-waving “technology improvements”. Because without them, you get exactly the scenario described in the article. Hell, most timelines for 2.5 C I’ve seen (which is still bad) involve carbon recapture, which doesn’t even exist yet. And it will have to compete with agricultural land. And nobody is going to stop eating meat, it just isn’t realistic politically.
