Furthermore, with wind and solar, we don't factor in things like decommission like you would on nuclear.
Factoring in the "backup" generators makes no sense in a free market electricity economy. That's like saying you need to factor in the cost of a taxi to train tickets, in case the train is broken down.
And of course, it makes sense to factor in backup energy as you can't actually deliver consistent energy with wind and solar alone.
So the true cost of wind and solar should obviously include the cost of running these backups AND it would then of course also mean some of those externalities.
Anything else is dishonest comparison IMO which the above article is guilty of.
Wind can't deliver enough energy it's relying on other types. So any discussion that includes wind or solar as a solution needs to include what backup are needed and what that cost.
The reverse mind you is not true.
I heard about it on the radio, so I may be remembering it wrong, but it was something to the effect of the new nuclear plants using 'nuclear waste' from old plants currently sitting in caskets since we don't know what to do with them and gleaning more energy out of them for XYZ thousand years in ideal conditions.
Nuclear is not like that. Learning-by-meltdown would be completely unacceptable. It's not even acceptable in non-democracies. And even aside from that, proliferation concerns would guarantee a controlling bureaucracy exists.
They advance because of the political tailwind they have not because they are actual solutions.
Again you can't have energy based on solar and wind alone. You need backup energy. That means oil, gas, coal and nuclear.
Nuclear powerplants don't meltdown today and fewer people died from nuclear in all its time than from what nature alone kills in a year by a factor.
Sigh. I thought I already beat you about the head over this nonsense. Look at the percentage improvement per time. It's massively better than anything nuclear has ever been able to achieve.
> They advance because of the political tailwind they have not because they are actual solutions.
Yeah, the factor of 200-300x improvement in the cost of solar since its invention is just "politics". The many billions of dollars being invested around the world is just "politics". The failure of nuclear to get the same result, even with 100% loan guarantees, must be because of a nefarious conspiracy.
Or maybe solar and wind are just winner technologies and nuclear is a loser technology. Have you considered not backing the loser?
I am not backing anything. I am simply stating the facts which are that wind and solar will never be able to be winner technologies since their density is extremely low, they aren't scalable, their capacity factor is low, they are intermittent, requires extreme amounts of space and arent very flexible.
Thinking you can build a future society on them is as backwards as can be.
That's the reality we are dealing with.
And yes it is just politics. The Windmill "revolution" was started by Denmark the solar panel "revolution" was started by Germany. Who are their customers? Other countries.
Yet none of those countries are even close to supplying their own countries with enough energy through those means.
So sigh away that doesn't make your claims truer today than they were when you last made them.
That's simply ridiculous. Any rapidly improving technology will go through a period when it's at 1% market penetration. This cannot be used as an argument that it won't go further. It's as if you cannot wrap your head around exponential growth.