But how!? The answer is nuclear power plants.
Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go.
Legacy nuclear bridging the gap is an acceptable solution. As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, nuclear simply takes too long to build and is too costly (when compared to renewables as low as 2 cents/kwh and deployment times measured in months, not years or up to a decade). China is installing 40-50GW of solar per year; the world in aggregate installs about 100GW annually. The largest nuclear power plant in the US (Palo Verde in Arizona) has a nameplate capacity just shy of 4GW; assuming you need 16GW of solar to replace such a generator due to 25% capacity factor, that is an install time of just around a year).
> Don't forget also that electricity is roughly 40% of energy usage for most people, the rest being heating and transportation. Those are very fossil dominated so even though you see green here, there's a huge huge way to go.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory did a study about a decade ago [1] that ~73% of light vehicles could move over to the electrical grid with existing generation capacity. EVs are a perfect match for intermittent renewables generation, as they can charge when the sun is shining during the day, or charge at night when the wind is blowing. I concede heating has a long way to go with air source heat pumps, insulation, and other energy saving measures.
"This initial paper estimates the regional percentages of the energy requirements for the U.S. LDV stock that could be supported by the existing infrastructure, based on the 12 modified North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) regions, as of 2002, and taking into account congestion in regional transmission and distribution systems. For the United States as a whole, 84% of U.S. cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) could be supported by the existing infrastructure, although the local percentages vary by region. Using the light duty vehicle fleet (LDV) classification, that includes cars, pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans, the technical potential is 73%. This has a gasoline displacement potential of 6.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, or 52% of the nation’s oil imports.
Existing nuclear plants should be kept operational as long as feasible (from a safety perspective), but the writing is on the wall.
[1] https://www.ferc.gov/about/com-mem/5-24-07-technical-analy-w...
Duke Energy collected almost $368 million from ratepayers in South Carolina [1] to pay for a nuclear power plant, and then gave up on it, with no recourse for ratepayers. It spent another $1 billion on the failed construction of a nuclear plant in Florida (north of Tampa). If I'm a ratepayer, I'm going to burn you at the stake (metaphorically) if you try to force me to pay for another boondoggle.
If you want to save the planet, buy every solar panel you can get your hands on and install it as soon as you can, especially if you live near a coal plant; it'll drive the plant into insolvency, no nuclear power required.
[1] https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/energy/trigaux-abando...
But there is a solution: SMRs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor
Examples of renewable in Spain and Germany have shown that you still need an alternative source of energy - you just reduce its usage.
Nuclear, on the other hand, provide the opportunity to eliminate coal/gas.
Which prompts users to install battery storage (which, in the US, is eligible for a 30% federal tax credit, not to mention state and local incentives in some cases).
If the coal plant can bill you double, so can the nuclear power plant. You can't charge me for the sun on my roof, nor the energy I store in my Powerwall.
So nuclear has to face excess production from wind/solar exported by e.g. Germany at times, and can't make up for it when wind/sun is offline, because the germans then adapt with gas. That is kind of a bad situation if you optimize for co2.
Also power walls are not a scalable solution. The raw ressource just isn't there for it to happen.