Solar pays for itself within the first 2-3 years, and lasts for decades. Batteries are cheap enough to do overnight storage at utility scale so that wind + solar + batteries do overnight power more cheaply than nuclear.
This leaves nuclear only able to maybe compete with longer-duration storage. Which is why nobody is building much.
If they last for decades, why is there so much ewaste for specifically photovolatic cells? Theoretically lasting decades, sure, but they seem to have a high chance of breaking.
I don’t think there’s a single real world instance of a city having batteries being able to sustain the load for the night without any added generation. That would be newsworthy and a massive win for renewables. They might get there eventually with sodium based batteries but that has yet to be seen.
If solar panels were discarded less and battery arrays could be cheaply made so that nuclear and coal weren’t nessesary, I’d agree with you, but I haven’t seen either of those things. They’re “likely in the future” but by that time, we could make another nuclear power plant.
And all this without even considering fusion, which in my humble opinion, would replace renewables.
Solar pays for itself within the first 2-3 years, and lasts for decades. Batteries are cheap enough to do overnight storage at utility scale so that wind + solar + batteries do overnight power more cheaply than nuclear.
This leaves nuclear only able to maybe compete with longer-duration storage. Which is why nobody is building much.
If they last for decades, why is there so much ewaste for specifically photovolatic cells? Theoretically lasting decades, sure, but they seem to have a high chance of breaking.
I don’t think there’s a single real world instance of a city having batteries being able to sustain the load for the night without any added generation. That would be newsworthy and a massive win for renewables. They might get there eventually with sodium based batteries but that has yet to be seen.
If solar panels were discarded less and battery arrays could be cheaply made so that nuclear and coal weren’t nessesary, I’d agree with you, but I haven’t seen either of those things. They’re “likely in the future” but by that time, we could make another nuclear power plant.
And all this without even considering fusion, which in my humble opinion, would replace renewables.