Real world numbers from the grand renewable energy experiment are not promising. [View all]

[hunter]

Last edited Sat Apr 18, 2026, 10:52 PM - Edit history (1)

These are some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations of mine, not from some spreadsheet. It looks to me that nations with aggressive renewable energy programs pay about 40% more for electricity than nuclear powered nations and their carbon intensity is about five times that of nuclear nations.

It's clear to me that renewable energy becomes more expensive than nuclear power before it reaches that celebrated point of "supplying 100%" of a nation's electricity demand for some short amount of time.

As I started writing this here in California nuclear power was carrying about 10% of the load, renewables more than 85%, and gas about 2%. In addition to carrying 10% of the load, nuclear power plays an important roll in maintaining the stability of the grid. If Diablo Canyon was shut down it would be replaced with gas power plants.

Nations with aggressive renewable energy programs are paying over forty cents a kilowatt hour for electricity. Raising these prices even further to install more renewable energy systems would not reduce carbon intensity proportionately. Raising electric rates can, however, lower a nation's carbon dioxide emissions by shrinking the economy. The harshest impacts of a shrinking economy are felt by lower income working class people.

None of these unfavorable non-linear effects exist with nuclear power. A one gigawatt nuclear power plant can replace a one gigawatt fossil fuel power plant one-to-one. If you keep building nuclear power plants you can shut down all of your fossil fuel power plants. France did this. This is reality, it's not hand-waving and creative accounting and conspiracy theories or actual lies about the costs and capabilities of renewable energy.

And here's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about...

Once you've shut down all your fossil fuel power plants, you can continue to build nuclear power plants and take down all your industrial scale solar and wind "farms" as they wear out and the cost of maintaining them escalates. After that you can make fertilizer and fuels using nuclear power. You can tear down hydroelectric dams and free your rivers...

This is the scenario that scares both the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy enthusiasts.

It scares me too, because there's no limit to growth. ( I used to be rooting for "peak oil" because it would limit growth. We later learned the peak comes after the world as we know it has been destroyed by global heating, which is not the sort of limit I was rooting for.)

Unfortunately we humans have worked ourselves into a corner. Renewable energy alone cannot support 8 billion people. It cannot displace fossil fuels entirely. If we don't quit fossil fuels entirely then billions of people will suffer and die.

Magical energy storage systems don't exist. Fusion power plants may never be practical. But we do have a seventy year old technology that is capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely, one that could carry us through a unsettling future.

It's a horrible thing to witness the fantastical beliefs of humans corroding the foundations of the natural world as we have known it and our own civilization. We've got to pay attention to the numbers. Wishful thinking won't save us.