U.S. can get to 100% clean energy with wind, water, solar and zero nuclear, Stanford professor says. Scenarios show it is possible to transition to a fully renewable system without any blackouts or batteries with ultra-long-duration battery technology.

There are a lot of issues with such a statement. First, it ignores the massive infrastructure investment that is required to create a grid that can efficiently transport power from distant wind/solar farms, to the cities that need them.

And none of the wind and solar costs take into account a) gas peaker plants that are required to pick up the slack in intermittent renewables (see: europe currently), or b) the eventual cost of batteries, whenever the technology appears at a scale that can power the grid (other than a few POCs, mostly by Tesla, it doesn't exist). Current batteries are not cheap (most expensive part of an EV by far); no reason to believe future grid-scale batteries will be cheaper.

Then there's the fact that a huge percentage of the cost of building nuclear reactors is tied up in regulation ...

/r/energy Thread Parent Link - cnbc.com