Seen a graph on the BBC website which looks grim, compared to the early 2000s we producing around 30% less power ourselves, the vast majority of that drop is coal stations shutting down wih no replacement, the renewables have increased a tiny bit compared to the loss of coal power, the rest of the loss is on nuclear.
I expect coal isnt making a comeback as the environmentalists would have a field day, but that loss needs replacing with nuclear, as well as a serious ramp up on renewables probably onshore wind turbines, solar and hydro power, we have almost the most powerful tides in the world and are barely using them. as the renewables we do have seems at a joke level if they were ever intended to be our future.
We're already on the knife edge with the levels of renewables we have now. If it wasn't for France propping up our grid (at a price, of course), we'd already have serious instability issues. This is public knowledge for anyone who wants it - the data from the national grid is published. It's available online too. The underlying issue is unsolvable - we can't control renewables and we can't store anywhere near sufficient excess to load balance that way. Also, we can't build enough of an over-capacity to generate enough excess anyway, but that part of the problem is at least theoretically solvable. Theoretically. If you ignore the cost and environmental impact.
We do have some powerful tides, but they're not constant 24/7, many of the best spots are in major shipping lanes and the plausible generation is nothing like the theoretical generation. For example, Pentland Firth theoretically has a peak generating capacity of 20GW when the tides are right. In reality it might be possible to generate 1GW there sometimes.
In general (not you specifically) there are far too many people ignoring the problems with renewables in their devout pretence that renewables are a cure-all. In most cases, people are even going as far as quoting nameplate generating capacity of renewables as if it was true! It's not even meaningful. The average generating capability is about 30% of nameplate for wind and about 20% for solar, but even that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that it's unreliable, uncontrollable and only somewhat predictable. You can't run a functional grid on that. When you see talk of, for example, a wind farm generating 1GW the actual generation from that wind farm will vary from second to second from nothing to maybe 600KW and will average about 300KW. But it's the uncontrollable variation that's the biggest problem, not the average.
It might be possible to seriously ramp up the percentage of generation from renewables at some point in the future, using as yet unknown technology. But it's not possible now and we need something now. And tomorrow and next week and next year. We can't pause the game and have the tech tree researched while it's on pause. Not even if the rather odd hypothesis is correct and we are living in a simulation.
We can't go too high percentage-wise with nuclear either because that's not variable enough quickly enough for that. Not fission, anyway. Maybe with fusion, but that's not a viable solution in the present and won't be for a while if ever.
Add in the proposed 600% increase in electricity usage (needed to replace burning fossil fuels with electricity) and it looks even worse. There isn't a solution. There is no viable replacement for burning fossil fuel. "Green" hydrogen isn't it - all that does is massively increase the demand for electricity because it's just a
very inefficient way of transporting energy. "blue" hydrogen isn't it either - that wastes a lot of energy too (though nowhere near as much as "green" hydrogen) and it's only possible as a by-product of the fossil fuel industry anyway. Ethanol isn't it - it blights the environment, ruins peoples lives and is barely less polluting than burning fossil fuels. Maybe researchers will make a solution. Maybe in time. Maybe not. But it sure as hell won't come from people simply proclaiming that renewables are already the solution.
What we could use right now is a time machine and starting serious work on the solution ~30 years ago when it should have started. Without that (and that's not going to happen, obviously), we're going to continue burning fuels while scrambling for new technology to create a viable solution. We have no other choice.
