We could power the whole grid with wood stoves and steam turbines with big enough subsidies. The fact that a heavily subsidized energy production method outperforms a heavily regulated and unsubsidized one shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
Subsidies are now mostly about solar vs wind. See for example the discussion in [2] about the tax credits and their effects on solar vs wind builds in the US (note that tariffs on solar panels from China offset some of these subsidies). Also note that they are tax credits, so somewhat different to a direct subsidy payment.
Most (non-coal) power generation has tax credits as a subsidy. [3] outlines the tax credit subsidies for the new nuclear plants in Georgia, as well as other subsidies including loan guarantees.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
[2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php
[3] https://www.georgiapower.com/company/plant-vogtle/vogtle-new...
It's about having energy available.
If weather reports show overcast and low winds, and your grid runs on wind/solar power only, who cares about their electricity bill? There won't be any kWh available to consume.
Of course it's about cost, the cost of achieving that availability.
Oh, I see. You are somehow imagining that storage cannot exist. Please stop.
The fact is that without inventing new storage tech, which might or might not be possible, the only options for powering the world are nuclear or burning more carbon.
Personally, I'd rather humans still have a viable habitat in a century.
All these storage technologies exist. The churn right now is to figure out what flavor of storage is going to win, and how much they will end up costing after they go down their experience curves. But if some aliens held a gun to our heads and insisted we build storage now, it could be done.
The weirdness from you guys, thinking that obviously existent things don't exist.
Hydro storage works, and along with hydro power, it is usually well exploited in countries that can benefit from it (e.g. alpine). Problem is you tend to run out of valleys and villages to flood after a certain point.
Why chase paper or limited impact solutions when massively available and clean ones already exist?
The estimates for the costs of storage needed to turn renewables into baseload aren't enormous. This is why Exelon abandoned the idea of building more nuclear power plants, and instead focused on storage.
BTW, the available locations for off-river pumped hydro are enormous. On a global scale it vastly exceeds what would be necessary for a 100% renewable world. There are areas without the vertical relief needed, but other storage technologies could work there.
The salient thing you see when looking at storage is that there are so many different ways to do it. Nuclear stans are loudly asserting that none of them can work. This is a very strong assertion and deserves much more detailed argument than the usual bare assertion.
Pumped hydro is severely capacity limited and is likewise limited by available water--even if you have a place to pump it you have to have spare water to pump there. Realistically, pumped hydro exists to allow powering up slower generators, not as a meaningful energy storage.
This isn't true.
If you accept 5% non-renewable power generation (which - lets face it - will be with us for a while!) you need storage at $150/kWh to use renewables for everything else[1].
This price is available now (and forecast to drop below $100/kWh next year)[2].
[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30300-9
[2] https://about.bnef.com/blog/battery-pack-prices-cited-below-...
Because anytime you work with something happening in the future you have to model it.