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[Bofferbrauer2]

haxxiy said:
I believe in fusion power - the free, abundant fusion power coming from the sun, which strikes the face of the Earth every day with as much energy as it is stored in our entire coal and uranium reserves. Photovoltaics are increasing at an astounding pace with costs falling on the same speed. In less than a decade, it could be the cheapest energy available even somewhere as cloudy and northerly as Germany and Finland.

Of course... lower demand in turn would mean the price of fossil fuels fall accordingly as long as it is technologically feasible to retrieve it. Which is why I was somewhat pessimistic when I mentioned before that India is going to burn most of their coal regardless. The Gondwana coal field is almost as easily available as the coal fields of England and France in the eighteenth century. Ditto for whatever's left of conventional natural gas.

Like I wrote before, Photovoltaics and Wind alone  would need huge battery storage and an overly robust grid to compensate for the wild fluctuations. And it doesn't care how cheap Solar and Wind energy gets per KW, the higher their amount, the bigger the fluctuations get, and as a result, the more expensive they make the bill. Case of point, the two leading nations in renewable energy from Wind and Solar, Denmark and Germany, are also the countries where electricity is the most expensive.

So until we find a way to cheaply store energy anywhere we need it to in large quantities, we will need to have some other power source(s) for the baseline.

And don't get me wrong, I'm all for expanding renewable energy production. I'm just saying that the tech isn't there yet where they could take over the whole power production and until that point, we need other kinds of energy sources to fill that gap.