Arab states are embracing solar power

Waste from a coal plant is (somewhat) radioactive, it's full of metals and generally very toxic. If you're lucky you can find some actual use for it, e.g. as a constituent for some construction materials that will fix it in place, but you aren't going to get "a hill in the end" in a human lifetime by insisting it doesn't need to go anywhere, you just get a toxic heap of unstable black dust. If you try to grow plants on it, plants that do grow will be extremely toxic, because the heavy metals and other pollutants are drawn up into the plant.

The US already has a disposal site constructed in the desert, but we're not using it yet. Europe also has a dig in Finland. Most of it stays on site because there's so little of it to store.

Luckily, they'll finally be decommissioned now as France turns towards renewables: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...

But that's the price we pay for rapidly switching off all our nuclear plants and heavily subsidizing low efficiency inland wind farms.

That's the result of too much ideology in energy politics.

I think it's less about being scared and more about the eye-watering cost of storing waste responsibly.

So basically by building renewable we are reducing nuclear power's viability on the grid. Since there does not seem to be viable storage option (if there was we'd be building that instead of gas power plants everywhere), running only on renewable is not possible. So I really don't see the point in using renewables as we do when electricity is already low-carbon.

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I didn't make an underlying assumption about having just one source of energy to cover all needs. I made an extensively-sourced, well-substantiated calculation that, out of all the sources of energy available in the Netherlands, two of them represent a large enough resource to support an order-of-magnitude increase in energy usage — enhanced geothermal and solar — and neither of these will be economically competitive with importing solar energy from elsewhere.

The absurd misinterpretation that underlies your comment is that I'm talking about what will happen in, say, 2021, 2022, 2024, or 2028. But it should be obvious that the Netherlands is not on a path to use an order of magnitude more energy in 2028, nor will solar power in Morocco and the like usher in "new kinds of energy-intensive industry" that quickly. So, as should have been obvious from my initial comment, I'm talking about a longer timescale than that; I think 2040 to 2060. You chose to ignore this and instead interpret my comment as patent absurdity.

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Let's talk a little bit about this "lots of untapped potential" and "a lot of investment" and "a lot of homeowners" who "put panels on their roofs" you tout in your comment.

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First, what about the homeowners? Well, putting panels on your roof doesn't improve your capacity factor relative to the utility-scale plants surveyed in the reports I cited; in most cases it worsens it, because it's too expensive to reorient the roof to the optimal angle, and most people just use whatever the roof's existing angle is instead of building an extra truss to support the panel. So a square-meter 200-watt (peak) solar panel on a Dutch roof is still going to generate only about 20 watts on average, maybe 15 watts if your roof is at an unfortunate angle.

Moreover, there isn't nearly enough roof for rooftop solar to meet a significant fraction of demand. Current marketed energy consumption in the Netherlands is about 60 gigawatts electric, 100 gigawatts total, about 5.6 kilowatts per capita — about 280 square meters of panels per person.

Nevertheless, the total solar resource in the country is, as I said, 4.2 terawatts, of which 900 gigawatts would be available with current mainstream solar panels. It should be apparent that Dutch residential rooftop solar can only ever be an insignificantly tiny fraction of even the total current demand. It is an irrelevant distraction.

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Of the other sources you mention, three — wind, tidal, and hydroelectric energy imported from Norway — are also insignificantly small compared to the country's solar resource. The fourth, geothermal, represents a larger energy resource than the solar resource, but because it is more expensive to access, it will remain untapped until after the Netherlands starts to experience a scarcity of places to erect solar panels.

David MacKay's Europe-wide estimate of the wind power resource per person is 0.4 W/m² http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_232.shtml, which works out to 17 GW in the Netherlands' 42865 km². This is enough to supply about a quarter of current marketed energy consumption. You will note that this 0.017 TW is insignificant compared to the 4.2 TW of solar resource. This is true almost everywhere, not just in the Netherlands; MacKay cites a worldwide estimate http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_235.shtml of some 53000 TWh/year (6 TW) of wind resource, which you will note is comparable to the solar resource of just the Netherlands.

Current Dutch wind farms total some 6 TW of nameplate capacity and are growing about 10% per year. These produce about 2 TW of power on average, giving about a 30%–40% capacity factor, a bit low for wind but not unreasonable. This represents 2% of the Netherlands' current energy demand, potentially growing to 4% within a decade.

https://globalwindatlas.info/area/Netherlands gives much higher numbers: 500 W/m² at a height of 100 m. This is lower than the solar resource only by a factor of 2, rather than the factor of 400 from MacKay. To resolve the discrepancy, let's look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder, in an area the Global Wind Atlas rates as having 600 W/m² resource. It has a nameplate capacity of 429 MW and generates 1.4 TWh/year, which is 160 MW, a 37% capacity factor. It occupies 8 km², thus giving 20 W/m² on average, halfway between the two numbers. This is a bit better than what you would get with current mainstream solar panels (200 W/m² with a 10% capacity factor gives you 20 W/m² of panel, but angled at 53° you get 12 W per m² of land).

But presumably if you blanket a large percentage of the country with windmills, the wind speed will go down.

Tidal power is about two orders of magnitude smaller than wind power; MacKay http://withouthotair.com/c30/page_237.shtml cites "Kowalik (2004)" as estimating a worldwide practically-extractable resource of 40–80 GW. The Netherlands, with its mere 1900 km of coastline, can't have more than 1% of that total, since it has about 0.1% of the world's total coastline of 1.6 million km.

Norwegian hydroelectric energy is almost tapped out, and certainly cannot provide an order of magnitude more energy than at present; there just isn't enough rainfall at high elevations. Moreover, it is a particularly expensive form of energy, not just in flooded upstream lands and the risk of dam breaches but also in construction. Historically it has been competitive with, even a bit cheaper than, fossil-fuel power plants; but it has not experienced the dramatic collapse in pricing that photovoltaic has over the last decade.

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Historically, geothermal power has been limited to areas with subterranean water in near contact with magma near the surface. But modern hydrofracking approaches ("enhanced geothermal systems", also more straightforwardly called "hot dry rock") have demonstrated the ability to extract thermal energy from much deeper rock without the necessity for it to already be wet; almost anywhere in the world can do this, using drilling equipment similar to an oil well. An enormous amount of fossil energy is locked in the crust from the last several billion years of radioactive decay. For uses like electricity and transport, though, the trouble is that turning the heat into a useful form requires running that heat through the same kind of steam turbines that are failing to compete with PV in existing coal and oil plants. The resource is enormous, orders of magnitude larger than solar, but even if drilling were free, solar will be cheaper until we start running out of land. Unless heat engines suddenly get a lot cheaper.

The geothermal gradient is typically about 30°/km, so typically you need to drill 3 km to even reach boiling, and almost 12 km to reach water's critical point. Most of the heat is "fossil heat"; heat flow out of the earth is currently about 44 TW, but this has been going on for 4 billion years, and most of that heat is still there, several million yottajoules.

Yes, it is. To use one of your examples, it's as wrong as saying you travelled a distance of 120 mph.