What country is getting >50% of their power generation from wind or solar? Switzerland is an interesting case because of how much they get from hydro but they are unique.

Also no nuke plant just gets built quickly. How long did it take for the new one in Georgia to be built? I’ll say it again, we should be leaning into nuclear but it’s not going to happen fast.

If we want to talk about states with a messed up power infrastructure look no further than Texas. They have plenty of wind farms but when they were having all their power issues it wasn’t due to renewables, their nat gas plants kept going offline due to extreme temperatures.

And by failed, you mean great success.

https://www.nrdc.org/bio/kelsie-goma...ornia-and-west

The current battery capacity is 16GW and will grow to 52GW at current projection by 2045. There are also some interesting energy storage experiments going on around the country that are determining the feasibility of mechanical batteries that would be able to store massive amounts of energy without a single chemical battery.

as always, the solution is complex, multifaceted, and not installed all at once. some mix of grid scale battery, pumped hydro, chemical, and other storage ideas will make us able to ween further off carbon-intensive power. it’s not all going to happen at once, and 100% is likely not achievable in any reasonable time frame, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore the technologies and work on them.

but i guess since ivanpah is shutting down all solar power is worthless

Yes. Failed. CAISO's battery farm is viable for very short periods. The storage you mention is at capacity which can only be handled for very short periods of time. It's not a long term storage solution (by long term I mean more than a few hours to a day or 2). That's what CAISO's batteries do, they are a short term shock absorber and do not solve longer term demand. Moreover those batteries need to be disposed of, where will they go? They have a short life. They can't be reconditioned. So that means now a toxic mess to deal with in a few short years. But yeah, you go Cali.

As always you post up a highly biased non-scientific article and claim it to be the end all. Thanks for reaffirming.

oh no, a toxic mess to clean up? how will the guy talking about the success of coal power deal with this information?

You must have me mistaken w/ a greenhadi. I think wind is a joke. Solar is ok. AGW is a scam. CO2 doesn’t cause runaway global warming. It adds a tiny bit of warming at the most and quickly saturates and wont add anymore to warming after that. Germany went all in on renewable energy and it backfired. Now they’re a prisoner to Russia for their gas supply.

Yeah, that’s methane. Fortunately all those fracking wells leak a ton of it.

That's what I don't understand about the renewables are evil crowd. It's going to take a long time to achieve anything resembling 100% renewable power so their solution is, eff it why bother?! Meanwhile, fossil fuel sources will continue to become more scarce which will drive up electric prices. It's not not AI data centers aren't going to gobble up an exponential amount of resources or anything, right?

Also, every day, economies of scale mean installing wind or solar is becoming even cheaper than the day prior. Economics hounds should understand this. The US has the advantage of being a developed industrial and technological 1st world country. Both left and right would be all in on developing, adopting and exporting green technologies. But no, every time we have the opportunity, people like HK start shouting "IT'S A FAILURE! DRILL BABY DRILL."

Strip mining for coal is bad. Strip mining for rare earths especially cobalt and lithium are good, because it’s going into a Tesla and green=good. Screw the facts. Coal doesn’t incorporate child labor as a huge pillar of their business model also.

When you don't understand basic science this goes nowhere. Being unwilling or unable to discuss things honestly is a real shame.