Which currently-deployable renewables work at night, when there's no wind, and can produce enough for our base load needs?
Small modular reactors could well be operating before the end of the decade, with government assistance, esp. regarding permitting.
But that's beside the point, and your argument is exactly that criticized above - ie we should spend today on current tech rather than research for tomorrow. Renewables are now essentially 'baked', and from the government pov it's just a matter of tweaking regulations etc to encourage further commercial rollout.
But we should also be researching for the future, and new nuclear needs help to actually develop the technology to commercial viability, along with say, deep geothermal. In comparison fusion is pie-in-the-sky, and doesn't warrant it's outsized funding - some funding (for the science), yes.
lol, go and do some calculations, and come back and tell us how many batteries we'll need to cover base load during a couple of weeks of calm, dark-skies snow or rain.
I agree we should be investing in storage technologies too, just not to the exclusion of other options.
> Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive.
US residences currently use ~1kW per household. This means that current car-battery sized storage (~100kwh) would already last almost a week.
Note that other western industrialized nations are significantly less wasteful with residential electricity; the same storage would last the average german household already over 2 weeks for example. Part of the difference might be explained by air conditioning-- but this conveniently requires very little storage anyway.
Small modular reactors could well be operating before the end of the decade, with government assistance, esp. regarding permitting.
But that's beside the point, and your argument is exactly that criticized above - ie we should spend today on current tech rather than research for tomorrow. Renewables are now essentially 'baked', and from the government pov it's just a matter of tweaking regulations etc to encourage further commercial rollout.
But we should also be researching for the future, and new nuclear needs help to actually develop the technology to commercial viability, along with say, deep geothermal. In comparison fusion is pie-in-the-sky, and doesn't warrant it's outsized funding - some funding (for the science), yes.