Collapse

That doesn’t really address why he uses a source that says that nuclear is absurdly cheap compared to anything else if he also believes that their isn’t any demand to scale up production.

And yes, renewable priceing often does include the cost of the batteries needed for buffering in the commonly cited category of generation+storage. It is worth noting however that this price is much higher than it would be worth a fully renewable grid. This is because not only does it take time to actually build the renewables, which means given their consistently dropping price that by the end the batteries and panels will be cheaper than current prices, but because long range distribution is far cheaper than the direct storage that figure counts.

While renewables are intermittent at a local level, at the continental scale between solar and wind the output is actually very consistent. It costs money to build more HVDC transmission lines of course, but currently thouse are cheaper than batteries or pumped hydro, although that may change if battery prices drop as low as their manufacturers are boasting they will.

Primary energy demand will decrease as more users more to electricity given that most of that energy demand that is currently done with fossil fuels can only being turned into useful work at 40 to 60 percent efficiency, as compared to the 90 percent efficiency typically found with electrical motors. Not that it matters at all, as the only impact primary demand has at all on the cost of sources of electricity generation(the thing we are debating) is that we are going to need to see a large scale up in net electricity generation.