I love how these "failed" efforts did produce a quarter of germanys energy in 2018 [0] and heavily accelerated R&D of those technologies when they were far from profitable. The original article this discussion is about states pretty explicitly how this only changed due to such subsidies. Afaik, the german one was one of the first / biggest at the time. (edit and yes, solar is less optimal in germany and was subsequently scaled back)

Btw, storage tech will never be developed unless there is significant demand to shift load and thus a significant financial incentive. As such it naturally can only happen after a lot of "unreliable" solar/wind has been deployed.

More nuclear would not have made germanys grid that much cleaner. Laying off all those strip mine workers from otherwise underdeveloped areas is a political issue, according to our current news landscape. Doing it is kind of hard, thanks to the rise of populism, among others.

By the way, nuclear is a political issue as well. If the US doesn't allow e.g. Iran to meet their energy needs with nuclear, then this isn't a suitable solution to power the world. R&D subsidies should benefit the whole world, not just politically stable first world countries, if you care about CO2.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&perio...

California has gone from virtually non-existent solar to generating 14% of it's power in well under 10 years and the growth is accelerating. In the same time period, the amount of power generated by wind has more than doubled.

Given how much of California power generation is natural gas (nearly 50%), if we can move to a future where batteries aren't a solved economic problem but natural gas plants are used to provide supplemental power to "unreliable" renewables, that's still an absolute win.

You can also do carbon capture within natural gas plants.

Has anybody actually done this on any scale yet.

Here’s a Vox piece on a successful carbon-neutral natural gas plant: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/6/1/17416444...

That’s a small pilot plant, I did ask at any scale.

I know I’m being sceptical but CCS has been talked about in the UK for a long time and we haven’t been able to move forward on it for some reason. I now worry that it is mostly a distraction from other technologies and changes that we know will work.

Generating all of our baseload power with renewables isn’t exactly a more plausible short-term solution. The energy storage problem is outright enormous. We don’t know that any of it will work because we haven’t done any of it at scale, that’s why we still have the problem.

What has been proven to work at scale is nuclear.

Technology is also approaching from the opposite side, producing synthetic fuels from captured CO₂ or atmospheric CO₂.

Though you would want to use cheap, non-hydrocarbon-based electricity to do this in the first place. But this does provide a mechanism for safe, civilized countries to have nuclear power and essentially export their energy to less secure countries we may not trust with that technology.

Olkiluoto 3 started construction in 2005 and was supposed to be complete by early 2010. It is still incomplete as of this writing [1]. Its cost is also triple the original plan. The EPR under construction in France as Flamanville 3 is also grotesquely late and over-budget [2]. Meanwhile renewables started out very expensive per unit of electricity generated, but always had predictable costs and time lines from first concrete pouring to first commercial operation. And they continue to get cheaper to construct.

The AP1000 reactor projects in the US had the same late-and-over-budget problems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#United_States

Chinese budgeting is opaque, but note that AP1000s built in China were also years late [3]. This isn't just a matter of overly-strict regulations specific to rich countries.

If California and Germany had embraced new reactors like Georgia, South Carolina, Finland, and France did, it's far from assured that they would have cut fossil electricity faster and cheaper than they did by their actual renewables-heavy paths. Perhaps both locales would have multiple partially-built reactors still generating zero watts.

I write this as someone who was initially very bullish about Generation III reactors but became disillusioned as their cost/schedule realities proved so much worse than initial estimates.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station

This begs the question a bit, no?

There is definitely a discussion to be had about nuclear energy. However I'd like to point out that the way you phrased your comment makes it sound as if there's no discussion at all, that building more nuclear plants is obviously the right choice and that any sane, reasonable person would agree.

I personally am not completely anti-nuclear but am deeply skeptical of the human agencies which we would have to rely on to manage nuclear power plants safely over the lifetime of the plant and its residue.

I am a bit tired of advocates of nuclear power dismissing the concerns of others, so if I am over-reacting, I apologize.

I actually think if nuclear advocates faced head-on the terrible reputation of the industry, and acknowledged that while some fears may be irrational (and that other feares _are_ rational), they are certainly _understandable_, and worked to repair it, and show demonstrable change in transparency with the public at large, nuclear power could have a role to play.

Check your numbers with current prices and zero imports or exports.

Current nuclear prices for 100% nuclear power is insane. You need both massive storage and operating at low power for long periods which drive something that’s not competitive into unreasonable territory. France got close with huge subsidies and exporting and importing a lot of power, but that’s hardly 100% nuclear that’s just pushing Europe’s Nuclear percentage up a little.

That's not really the whole picture. Nuclear power doesn't produce CO2, but does produce radioactive waste which must be stored somewhere.

The volume of nuclear waste that must be stored is vastly smaller (by orders of magnitude) than the amount of emissions (and often ashes) from fossil fuels. About the same size as the radioactive tailings from mining rare earths for wind turbines (depending on the design).

And a big difference is that nuclear waste IS stored. In engineered containers. With the price paid by the nuclear power provider. Unlike CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants.

So I'd say, given the orders of magnitude difference, it is pretty much the full story. Except to note the waste issue for nuclear is vastly exaggerated.

Said waste does not contribute to global warming/climate change in bad ways.

I'll point out that the investment in renewables has brought down their price many orders of magnitude. Every other nation reaps that benefit, it's just a bummer that more who could have shouldered the burden didn't. Both onshore wind and solar are now cheaper alternatives than nuclear.