I guess the deniers and the flat earth types will just keep on ranting like this.
The marketplace has already made its decision.
Coal and nuclear are out.
No one wants to invest in technologies that require larger fixed investments with long paybacks,
Cheap batteries are going to make peaker power plants a thing of the past in a decade, and a lot of that capacity (which is now largely natural gas) will shift to base load power, further crowding out coal and nuclear.
Solar and wind powered battery farms are the future. The operating costs of all three technologies has fallen considerably in the last decade, and continues to fall.
It doesn’t take a thirty year investment to build a windmill farm, unlike a coal or nuclear plant.
And now that energy can be stored when generated and sold when needed, some thing that has never happened before on a large scale, the entire economics of the electric power industry is changing.
And that trend will only accelerate because of two changes on the way.
One is the shift to electric cars. We aren’t anywhere near the tipping point there.....yet. But just about every auto maker in the world has an electric program, is introducing electric cars, or has invested in it. Gas mileage and emissions worries go away with the tailpipe!
The other is the shift to a distributed grid.
When utilities can actually count on their own customers to store, use and feed them power, they don’t have to build capacity at all. All they have to do is maintain a grid to equalize the flow.
Wall Street is betting in renewables.
100% of the new investment in electric power generation in the US in the last three years has been in renewables.
And 100% of the capacity that has been retired has been coal and nuclear.
