For the first time, renewable energy generation beat out coal in the US

It doesn't really matter if renewable generated more energy than coal for 1 day. What matters is annual generation.

Renewables generates 5 times less than coal annually and still peak for a short period of time, so this is not a big progress. Wind turbines can have big energy peaks when it's very windy, but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time, WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.

And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.

> combined wind and solar generation increased from 12 percent of national power production in 2021 to 14 percent in 2022. Hydropower, biomass, and geothermal added another 7 percent — for a total share of 21 percent renewables last year. The figure narrowly exceeded coal’s 20 percent share of electricity generation, which fell from 23 percent in 2021.

the article is speaking about average power, not peak power. how do you and the article present such different figures?

> but there is no cheap way to store that energy for a long period of time

It's getting close to the point that wind+storage can compete with nuclear, and even gas, on price. With the way cost has been developing on renewables and energy storage sulitons it's more or less inevitable. You're also starting to see off-shore wind, even floating off-shore, come rapidly down in cost, and those have more stable generation and require less energy storage.

The problem of storage is also exaggerated by people who haven't looked at the big picture. We need to replace oil/gas in lots of areas where you need to store and transform energy anyway. Like cars. Think about it.. if you buy an EV you'll generally have enough storage there to power your house for 1-3 days. In a world where all cars are BEVs we'll be well within an order of magnititude of having the manufacturing capacity to have energy storage for all homes. You can even feed electricity from BEVs back into the grid, and I already have my BEV set to only charge in the hours where electricity is cheapest right now. We're also starting to see people use smart controllers to exploit the storage capacity in hot water tanks.

Green metal production will also be a huge source of flexible load. Somewhat related to that, there's even molten metal batteries that can provide extremely cheap grid storage.

> WHICH IS WHY NUCLEAR IS THE GREENEST BASELOAD ELECTRICITY.

If you need to shout I'm just led to expect you don't have much meat behind your opinion. Anyway, the problem is just this: what we really need isn't baseload.

You can't solve the worlds energy crisis without lots and lots of renewables. Going all nuclear would be too expensive, too slow, and would probably generate enough heat to slow recovery after climate change. Thermal power plants in general have a whole range of issue that makes it a bad idea to go all-in on it.

Nuclear can certainly supplement with a bit of baseload capacity. But what we need is load following and peaker plants. We need a replacement to gas power plants. Because those are what works well when combining with renewables. And without lots of renewables we have zero hope of combatting climate change.

> And solar also requires a lot of copper and steel, which makes it carbon cycle much worse than nuclear.

At least copper and steel is easily recycled, with low carbon impact. Nuclear power plants use a lot of concrete and the sustainability of that is far more uncertain.

Too bad the capital requirements upfront are so expensive for nuclear and literally no one wants to fund a project that will cost at least $8 billion, won't be online for a decade, and the power it be will produce is already more expensive than that of smaller renewable projects.

Who knows maybe once renewable market penetration is nearly maxed out and if storage tech somehow hasn't caught up enough despite the great strides being made, the economics won't be so terrible for the GREENEST BASELOAD.

Who

Really?

Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.

Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.

Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.

And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.

I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.

PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.