Uprooting a system in 7 years that's been in place for at least a 100 will have no downsides? Who actually believes this?
"Even some clean-power advocates acknowledge technology isn’t available yet to run power grids entirely on renewables without jeopardizing reliability"
This is exactly true. It's not really practical at this point to switch over to renewable energy because the technology just isn't there.
Not to mention the fact that the only way you are going to get China and India to switch away from fossil fuels completely is through a war. Together, they output the majority of the CO2 emissions and China for sure has been lying about the amount of coal plants they are building.
It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.
You’re right. There will be downsides, but your snide remark at “liberals” was uncalled for. Not every person has the same beliefs. Limping every left leaning person into a “liberals” category is demeaning.
I dunno the New Left's participation in anti-nuclear politics will hopefully be remembered as a horrible and irresponsible mistake. There are tons of other bad things born of politics of course, but most of those stem from the right :P.
You may wish to look into the economic case against nuclear since it's been dire for a few years now. It's good in comparison with coal (if you include externalities) but solar and wind have undercut it today and are forecast to keep getting cheaper.
It's getting to the point that just the steam turbine part of the nuclear plant is more expensive than solar/wind/battery.
The fact this is such a powerfully held opinion I'd put down to highly effective anti-renewable propaganda having a pernicious effect. Most people seem more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear, probably from absorbing fossil fuel funded propaganda.
In fact I spoke to a Green Party member the other day who thought Tesla batteries only lasted 5 years before needing replaced. It's amazing how well propaganda works if you just repeat stuff enough.
Speaking of propaganda, I’d love to see citations on solar and battery being cheaper than just the turbine of a nuclear plant. This seems so hyperbolic as to have gone well into the realm of silliness, but I’d love to learn I’m wrong.
You can see this fairly clearly in the Lazard LCOE report. It shows how much it costs to build each type of plant seperate from running and fuel costs. (Pages 11 and 12 specifically, note the low end coal has no carbon capture so that's more appropriate here for just steam cost, and why the cost of coal overlaps nuclear at the high end)
So low end, coal is about half the cost of nuclear to build, and gas turbines, which are simpler to build as they don't need the phase change (though some add secondary steam generation based on waste heat to enhance efficiency) are about a third of the cost.
Now obviously, to run those coal and gas systems you need to burn fossil fuels which you need to pay for and they generate CO2 (both things that nuclear will win on and regain lost ground, as seen by the high end coal costs with 90% carbon capture included) but we're excluding all of those things entirely from this comparison to try to get the cost of merely building and running a steam turbine.
You could say that not all the cost of the coal plant is the cost of the turbine, but it's unlikely to be much less than the cheaper end of gas plants, and we're not even counting maintenance and operation costs, which again are less for gas than for coal, so that gives us a lower bound.
So in this slightly rigged comparison, gas comes out well ahead of steam generation alternatives, they simply cost more to build and run, even just the coal one with no fancy nuclear stuff.
But renewables are matching that gas cost in many places today. Not only are they the same price to build, if you ignore the build cost of coal and gas entirely they're still cheaper than just the fuel and running costs in many cases. That's why many existing fossil fuel plants are being closed as uneconomic and replaced with newly built renewables even in places with flat energy demand.
I think everyone kind of knows this implicitly. Is there anyone, even their biggest fan, who has ever claimed current nuclear can compete with gas on price if you ignore carbon costs? I've never seen it.
Renewables plus batteries are wrecking the business case for building new gas plants and even rkeeping existing ones open. This will only become clearer as prices drop further.
The dramatic price decline of renewables is projected to continue. Solar plus battery storage is predicted to be cheaper than just gas running costs by 2045.
Which seems like a long way away in some senses, but if you build a gas plant today, you'll probably be relying on projections of still making money at that point, which makes gas less economic to build today.
And if you start planning a fission plant, then you'll be planning for it to come online around that timeframe and run for 40 years. So unless that fission plant will cost less in total than just the cost of running a gas plant, there's no point starting to build it just on economics alone.
This an interesting a well-written post and I am learning things from it, thank you. But when I cry foul on anti-nuclear, I'm not just talking about generating power today, but all the nuclear power plants we could have built over the last 50 years. We could be 0-carbon today except for ICEs, and this would have been so much better. And all that cheap energy would have spurred research into batteries sooner we I'd bet we'd probably already be ICE free by now.
Instead of worrying about the future of this civilization, we'd just be with wind and solar a) pandering to some NIMBYs in Las Vegas after a few decades of Yucca Mountain with b) pulling imperialist foreign policy gimmicks to stop the spread of centrifuges to nations other than cold war powers. Much lower stakes!
Back to your technical points and this shitty timeline, I have a few questions:
1) if we were to eliminate ICEs completely in the US, how much would more electricity would we need to produce?
2) Is there any declining returns of renewables as we aim for that much more? (I don't think but just checking.)
3) Assuming no problem generating the energy, how much more batteries would we need? How much more rare earths and other environmentally costly resources would we need to mind, or are you proposing e.g. fluid pumping?
1) because EVs are effectively a form of grid storage, the two transitions work hand in hand. Smart chargers will absorb excess solar and wind and get discounts as a result. The UK national Grid says no new capacity will be required as long as that flexibility is taken advantage of. The utilisation of the grid will be more consistent as a result.
2) the plan for the last 20% of renewables is a bit more murky than the first 80% which most seem to agree will be straightforward and inexpensive and using the obvious solar and wind tech. I'm fairly confident that a range of solutions will present themselves, I just wouldn't want to predict exactly what mix they'll be as it'll come down to a lot of small innovations and decisions. We have answers now but I believe we'll have more, better, cheaper answers by the time we need them.
3) Rare earths aren't rare, that's not what the name means. So they're not a fundamental blocker, though they are more expensive to extract so the market for electrical storage will naturally gravitate towards more cheap and abundant materials if they're out there.
Batteries for short day-to-day storage are already entering the market and making/saving money. As renewables expand and battery prices fall they'll expand massively (see my answer about EVs). I think we'll need something with a different model for long term seasonal storage though, but the main thing will just be building lots of cheap renewables. The "problem" will be as much about all the cheap abundant energy we have in spring/autumn as about the shortages caused by winter heating, summer cooling peaks. Storing that electrical energy as ammonia/hydrogen/whatever to shift energy is going to be a big thing I think, but only so far as it's cheaper than just adding yet another solar panel. (The current big innovation is just putting more solar panels on the back of your solar panels. It only add 1% but it's cheap, so why not?)
I think focusing on building costs is a red herring. Yes, solar today is relatively cheap to build. But are storage solutions really going to be that much better in 2045? How much of the build cost of nuclear is assuming the use of relatively outdated 1970’s designs plus the associated regulatory burden?
The economic case against nuclear is largely a byproduct of falling prices from fracking. That obviously can’t go on forever, and pulling back subsidies for fossil fuels would slowly help the economics align.
Meanwhile nuclear plants are being built at a good pace throughout the world.
A lot of the “anti renewable” people I know are some of the biggest proponents of nuclear. It’s strangely a popular position among America’s “right”.
> The economic case against nuclear is largely a byproduct of falling prices from fracking.
Fracking changed the economics of all energy production, not just nuclear. The economic case against nuclear is that it can potentially wipe out everyone in a 50 mile radius. The cost of a nuclear power plant is therefore proportional to the surrounding real estate value.
> The economic case against nuclear is that it can potentially wipe out everyone in a 50 mile radius.
Your magnitudes are way, way off. Even the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, only had a blast radius of 22 miles. And we’re talking about a nuclear power plant here, not a nuclear bomb. Do you understand the difference in how they operate?
Your comment is a perfect example of anti-nuclear hysteria based on embarrassing levels of ignorance.
See my other comment for some thoughts on how much gas generated electricity would cost even if you set the price of gas at zero and ignored carbon pollution
In the past fracked gas and unpriced carbon externalities have been the big factors for nuclear cost disadvantages, starting roughly about now (and already in some places) renewables will be doing to gas what gas has done to nuclear and take nuclear (and coal) out at the same time as a byproduct.
A carbon tax would give a short term boost to existing nuclear over gas, which is one of the many reasons it's a good idea, but it also accelerates renewable adoption and price declines which already render new build nuclear ridiculous in economic terms.
> I dunno the New Left's participation in anti-nuclear politics will hopefully be remembered as a horrible and irresponsible mistake.
I suspect that the minority of leftists that criticize nuclear energy will be remembered far less than those on the right that say global warming is a hoax.
The only people supporting nuclear are also on the left.
Nuclear's demise has nothing to do with the liberals blocking it (if they were so powerful their efforts against coal and fracking and oil pipelines may have been marginally effective) but rather the terrible economics of it vs solar/wind as well as natural gas.
Solar and wind beat out nuclear for generation without regard to intermittent production. If you counting the cost of actually replacing fossil fuels, that has to take into storage and retrieval costs which drastically increase cost well beyond nuclear. Well, to be more pedantic nobody really knows the cost because the technology to store energy effectively and at the required scale in a manner that is not geographically dependent does not yet exist.
And now you’ve learned that labels are more often used to denigrate than inform. Just talk about the issues, you don’t need to stick people in a box first.
I’d answer your honest question, I really would, but there’s not a “hardness scale” type measurement for liberality or conservatism. $DEITY, that would have to make things a little easier, wouldn’t it? “Don’t project on me like I’m an L7. Firmly a 5, thank you very much. Here’s the certificate.”
Even more confusing for non US people is the fact that the word stem of liberal, libre, literally means free. Freedom loving right wingers harking on liberals does not make any sense seen this way.
It's just labels. In my opinion "the left" is a collective term for a large spectrum of different political views, sometimes overlapping, often not. As a non-american "liberal" to me indicates a US centric type of neo centre-left political view.
That's a fair question but is the western world commiting energetic suicide first the solution? The biggest problem for the green revolution type of people to understand is that electricity just doesn't come from the wall, just like the rest of they energy needs. People can't imagine to live in a world where it's not reliable.
You can have natural gas backup generating capacity equal to most demand--but which is used only a few days a year. This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution.
There is no good reason to expect the ¨last 5%¨ of demand will be more economically met by the next generation of nuclear plants - than by the generation of renewable tech which will be developed by the time it is already supplying the other 95% ;)
> This 95% Green solution is going to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than a 100% Green solution.
Right now our energy is roughly 5-10% green. Arguing whether green energy should eventually be 95% or 100% is purely pedantic at this point. There is approximately 95% of common ground between green energy purists and pragmatists. Lets get in line.
Sure, but the problem is most demand occurs when intermittent sources do not produce energy. This plan really aims for about 40% green energy not 95% green energy. Hence why Germany's emissions have remained flat despite large increases in solar and wind generation.
Like being without power for a week and half, like my elderly mother was, because pg&e can't upkeep their transmission lines? Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. And shield against a state-level attack on our very fragile national grid.
> It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.
And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
> Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse.
They can't make it better, since they have to have same transmission capacity and be more complex than existing grids. And who's going to maintain it? When there are problems maintaining simpler existing grids already.
> And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
What the problem with that? Nuclear is pretty well spread over the world already, and it's not like there are any problems with habitability.
If anything, it's coal that makes places barely habitable.
I propose we start by taking the author's money (all of it, +debt), and converting his lifestyle to be 100% "green", as a proof of concept. No car, no Hawaii vacations, no meat, no fruit in the dead of winter, no computers or cell phones either, of course. Let's see how quickly this will "pay for itself".
That's exactly what it means, if you consider it rigorously and you want to be "100% green". You can't get fruit or electronics from the other side of the world without burning kerosene. You can't get meat without methane. Even public transportation is far from "green" unless it's electric and powered entirely from renewable sources. If the author is talking "100% green" that's what it's gonna be.
That's the trouble with woke activism: it's always someone else's lifestyle that needs to change. It's always someone else's money that needs to be spent. I can't take such people seriously unless they practice what they preach. And none of them do.
Except for the hundreds of thousands of europeans who travel exclusively by bike and train (100% renewables here), are vegan, eat local all year round, own a fairphone, and invest their money into renewables.
But sure project your unwillingness for mild inconvenience in return for a sustainable lifestyle onto others.
Going 100% green doesn't mean 0% fossil fuel btw, it can also mean that said fossil fuel is offset with CO2 capturing projects like reforestation or rewetting bogs.
Besides, the whole point of the article is that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources.
The whole point of government is to pool resources and coordinate policy so that the collective can achieve goals that would not be achievable by individuals.
One can could easily invert you argument to expose its fallacies:
"These conservatives are only good at spending other peoples money on the military budget and sending other peoples children to die. We should all give them a gun paid for by their personal funds and send THEM to fight overseas."
>> Except for the hundreds of thousands of europeans
There are dozens of them! Dozens!
>> CO2 capturing projects like reforestation
Reforestation does diddly squat for CO2 capture. It's beneficial in other aspects, though. Prevents soil erosion. Creates habitat. Just doesn't capture much CO2.
>> doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources
Seems like that's exactly the point. You can't be 100% "green" without going back to what is essentially pre-industrial living. You can certainly pretend being "green" though, and virtue signal about it. I hate to break it to you, but your e.g. Germans (or Europeans of any other locale which has an actual winter) aren't "eating local all year round" _especially_ if they're "vegan", unless they somehow subsist on a ration of storable root vegetables and grain like people did 150-200 years ago.
Paywall, can't even see what they're saying because a subscription offer masks most of text.
But I did see some claims about a lower cost. If the cost is lower, why do we need the government to "do something"?
I haven't seen it in the article but the usual statist routine is to claim that if the government first "invests" in something (we are somehow too stupid to recognize these opportunities and avoid the overhead of government), it will somehow pay back for itself in only X years.
First, it usually doesn't. We just end up with more debt (and more expensive energy too.)
Second, it certainly won't pay back for the people who got taxed to pay for it. Has the government ever taxed less anyone who paid for some spending with an above-zero ROI? So it simply is a call for more violence (increased taxation or forcing taxpayers to take on ever more debt) and statism/socialism (ever-increasing role of the state).
Does anyone here not wonder why Tesla investors prefer to invest in Tesla rather in those green schemas that are guaranteed to provide a 100% ROI in just 5 years? Or why is Musk running a struggling, loss-making Tesla when he could easily save the world and make a profit by simply "going 100% green"? Or why despite being (supposedly) smarter about long-term investing, no government employee ever got rich investing unless it happened thanks to corruption, insider trading or regulatory influence?
If you read the article it makes exactly the point that you can go to 100% renewables with keeping our current industrial level, but since you apparently don't even want to read it...
Your argument with storability of perishable goods is just laughably absurd. News flash, we now have fridges and cans and pickles.
Whenever I read headlines close to this or a study that find such insane conclusions I automatically dismiss it out of hand. You can only get to numbers this extreme with lots, and lots of hidden assumptions that you need to totally spin your way to get there.
In a world with limited time you need to think about what to study and after many studies that I find totally unrealistic, diving into another one is just not what I'm gone be doing.
I don't know if it would break-even that fast, but I would say much of why people are not doing it yet is that the technology is so new people don't know about it, and also there are some very powerful entrenched interests fighting it. Like the present US administration.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] thread"Even some clean-power advocates acknowledge technology isn’t available yet to run power grids entirely on renewables without jeopardizing reliability"
This is exactly true. It's not really practical at this point to switch over to renewable energy because the technology just isn't there.
Not to mention the fact that the only way you are going to get China and India to switch away from fossil fuels completely is through a war. Together, they output the majority of the CO2 emissions and China for sure has been lying about the amount of coal plants they are building.
It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.
It's getting to the point that just the steam turbine part of the nuclear plant is more expensive than solar/wind/battery.
The fact this is such a powerfully held opinion I'd put down to highly effective anti-renewable propaganda having a pernicious effect. Most people seem more anti-renewable than pro-nuclear, probably from absorbing fossil fuel funded propaganda.
In fact I spoke to a Green Party member the other day who thought Tesla batteries only lasted 5 years before needing replaced. It's amazing how well propaganda works if you just repeat stuff enough.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019
So low end, coal is about half the cost of nuclear to build, and gas turbines, which are simpler to build as they don't need the phase change (though some add secondary steam generation based on waste heat to enhance efficiency) are about a third of the cost.
Now obviously, to run those coal and gas systems you need to burn fossil fuels which you need to pay for and they generate CO2 (both things that nuclear will win on and regain lost ground, as seen by the high end coal costs with 90% carbon capture included) but we're excluding all of those things entirely from this comparison to try to get the cost of merely building and running a steam turbine.
You could say that not all the cost of the coal plant is the cost of the turbine, but it's unlikely to be much less than the cheaper end of gas plants, and we're not even counting maintenance and operation costs, which again are less for gas than for coal, so that gives us a lower bound.
So in this slightly rigged comparison, gas comes out well ahead of steam generation alternatives, they simply cost more to build and run, even just the coal one with no fancy nuclear stuff.
But renewables are matching that gas cost in many places today. Not only are they the same price to build, if you ignore the build cost of coal and gas entirely they're still cheaper than just the fuel and running costs in many cases. That's why many existing fossil fuel plants are being closed as uneconomic and replaced with newly built renewables even in places with flat energy demand.
I think everyone kind of knows this implicitly. Is there anyone, even their biggest fan, who has ever claimed current nuclear can compete with gas on price if you ignore carbon costs? I've never seen it.
Renewables plus batteries are wrecking the business case for building new gas plants and even rkeeping existing ones open. This will only become clearer as prices drop further.
The dramatic price decline of renewables is projected to continue. Solar plus battery storage is predicted to be cheaper than just gas running costs by 2045.
Which seems like a long way away in some senses, but if you build a gas plant today, you'll probably be relying on projections of still making money at that point, which makes gas less economic to build today.
And if you start planning a fission plant, then you'll be planning for it to come online around that timeframe and run for 40 years. So unless that fission plant will cost less in total than just the cost of running a gas plant, there's no point starting to build it just on economics alone.
Instead of worrying about the future of this civilization, we'd just be with wind and solar a) pandering to some NIMBYs in Las Vegas after a few decades of Yucca Mountain with b) pulling imperialist foreign policy gimmicks to stop the spread of centrifuges to nations other than cold war powers. Much lower stakes!
1) if we were to eliminate ICEs completely in the US, how much would more electricity would we need to produce?
2) Is there any declining returns of renewables as we aim for that much more? (I don't think but just checking.)
3) Assuming no problem generating the energy, how much more batteries would we need? How much more rare earths and other environmentally costly resources would we need to mind, or are you proposing e.g. fluid pumping?
2) the plan for the last 20% of renewables is a bit more murky than the first 80% which most seem to agree will be straightforward and inexpensive and using the obvious solar and wind tech. I'm fairly confident that a range of solutions will present themselves, I just wouldn't want to predict exactly what mix they'll be as it'll come down to a lot of small innovations and decisions. We have answers now but I believe we'll have more, better, cheaper answers by the time we need them.
3) Rare earths aren't rare, that's not what the name means. So they're not a fundamental blocker, though they are more expensive to extract so the market for electrical storage will naturally gravitate towards more cheap and abundant materials if they're out there.
Batteries for short day-to-day storage are already entering the market and making/saving money. As renewables expand and battery prices fall they'll expand massively (see my answer about EVs). I think we'll need something with a different model for long term seasonal storage though, but the main thing will just be building lots of cheap renewables. The "problem" will be as much about all the cheap abundant energy we have in spring/autumn as about the shortages caused by winter heating, summer cooling peaks. Storing that electrical energy as ammonia/hydrogen/whatever to shift energy is going to be a big thing I think, but only so far as it's cheaper than just adding yet another solar panel. (The current big innovation is just putting more solar panels on the back of your solar panels. It only add 1% but it's cheap, so why not?)
Meanwhile nuclear plants are being built at a good pace throughout the world.
A lot of the “anti renewable” people I know are some of the biggest proponents of nuclear. It’s strangely a popular position among America’s “right”.
Fracking changed the economics of all energy production, not just nuclear. The economic case against nuclear is that it can potentially wipe out everyone in a 50 mile radius. The cost of a nuclear power plant is therefore proportional to the surrounding real estate value.
Your magnitudes are way, way off. Even the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever detonated, only had a blast radius of 22 miles. And we’re talking about a nuclear power plant here, not a nuclear bomb. Do you understand the difference in how they operate?
Your comment is a perfect example of anti-nuclear hysteria based on embarrassing levels of ignorance.
In the past fracked gas and unpriced carbon externalities have been the big factors for nuclear cost disadvantages, starting roughly about now (and already in some places) renewables will be doing to gas what gas has done to nuclear and take nuclear (and coal) out at the same time as a byproduct.
A carbon tax would give a short term boost to existing nuclear over gas, which is one of the many reasons it's a good idea, but it also accelerates renewable adoption and price declines which already render new build nuclear ridiculous in economic terms.
I suspect that the minority of leftists that criticize nuclear energy will be remembered far less than those on the right that say global warming is a hoax.
Nuclear's demise has nothing to do with the liberals blocking it (if they were so powerful their efforts against coal and fracking and oil pipelines may have been marginally effective) but rather the terrible economics of it vs solar/wind as well as natural gas.
There's some on the right supporting it as well. Not everyone right-of-center is beholden to the coal/oil/gas lobbies.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/12/conservative-case-nuc...
Honest question: what's the difference between "liberal" and "left-leaning"? I thought they were basically two different terms for the same concept.
I’d answer your honest question, I really would, but there’s not a “hardness scale” type measurement for liberality or conservatism. $DEITY, that would have to make things a little easier, wouldn’t it? “Don’t project on me like I’m an L7. Firmly a 5, thank you very much. Here’s the certificate.”
Right now our energy is roughly 5-10% green. Arguing whether green energy should eventually be 95% or 100% is purely pedantic at this point. There is approximately 95% of common ground between green energy purists and pragmatists. Lets get in line.
https://ww2.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_sys...
Large Hydro 10.68%
Renewables (including geothermal, solar, and wind) 31.36%
Nuclear 9%
Like being without power for a week and half, like my elderly mother was, because pg&e can't upkeep their transmission lines? Pretty sure microgrids would make this problem better not worse. And shield against a state-level attack on our very fragile national grid.
> It really makes me wonder if the Liberals of the 60s-90s wouldn't have made it so difficult to build Nuclear power plants, if this all would be solved by now.
And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
They can't make it better, since they have to have same transmission capacity and be more complex than existing grids. And who's going to maintain it? When there are problems maintaining simpler existing grids already.
> And I really wonder, if every country in the world used nuclear power as it's primary power source, if there would still be a human-habitable world today.
What the problem with that? Nuclear is pretty well spread over the world already, and it's not like there are any problems with habitability.
If anything, it's coal that makes places barely habitable.
That's the trouble with woke activism: it's always someone else's lifestyle that needs to change. It's always someone else's money that needs to be spent. I can't take such people seriously unless they practice what they preach. And none of them do.
But sure project your unwillingness for mild inconvenience in return for a sustainable lifestyle onto others.
Going 100% green doesn't mean 0% fossil fuel btw, it can also mean that said fossil fuel is offset with CO2 capturing projects like reforestation or rewetting bogs.
Besides, the whole point of the article is that it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources.
The whole point of government is to pool resources and coordinate policy so that the collective can achieve goals that would not be achievable by individuals.
One can could easily invert you argument to expose its fallacies: "These conservatives are only good at spending other peoples money on the military budget and sending other peoples children to die. We should all give them a gun paid for by their personal funds and send THEM to fight overseas."
There are dozens of them! Dozens!
>> CO2 capturing projects like reforestation
Reforestation does diddly squat for CO2 capture. It's beneficial in other aspects, though. Prevents soil erosion. Creates habitat. Just doesn't capture much CO2.
>> doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to make money and switch 100% to renewable energy sources
Seems like that's exactly the point. You can't be 100% "green" without going back to what is essentially pre-industrial living. You can certainly pretend being "green" though, and virtue signal about it. I hate to break it to you, but your e.g. Germans (or Europeans of any other locale which has an actual winter) aren't "eating local all year round" _especially_ if they're "vegan", unless they somehow subsist on a ration of storable root vegetables and grain like people did 150-200 years ago.
But I did see some claims about a lower cost. If the cost is lower, why do we need the government to "do something"?
I haven't seen it in the article but the usual statist routine is to claim that if the government first "invests" in something (we are somehow too stupid to recognize these opportunities and avoid the overhead of government), it will somehow pay back for itself in only X years.
First, it usually doesn't. We just end up with more debt (and more expensive energy too.)
Second, it certainly won't pay back for the people who got taxed to pay for it. Has the government ever taxed less anyone who paid for some spending with an above-zero ROI? So it simply is a call for more violence (increased taxation or forcing taxpayers to take on ever more debt) and statism/socialism (ever-increasing role of the state).
Does anyone here not wonder why Tesla investors prefer to invest in Tesla rather in those green schemas that are guaranteed to provide a 100% ROI in just 5 years? Or why is Musk running a struggling, loss-making Tesla when he could easily save the world and make a profit by simply "going 100% green"? Or why despite being (supposedly) smarter about long-term investing, no government employee ever got rich investing unless it happened thanks to corruption, insider trading or regulatory influence?
If you read the article it makes exactly the point that you can go to 100% renewables with keeping our current industrial level, but since you apparently don't even want to read it...
Your argument with storability of perishable goods is just laughably absurd. News flash, we now have fridges and cans and pickles.
In a world with limited time you need to think about what to study and after many studies that I find totally unrealistic, diving into another one is just not what I'm gone be doing.