frezik

Not at all. Hydrogen electrolysis efficiency is about 70-80%. When turning it back into electricity, fuel cells are 40-60% efficient. That means your electricity costs are about double for the complete round trip.

Conversely, lithium batteries (and most other types) are over 90% efficient and directly give you electrons.

Except that this has actually been studied, and a future with Wind/Water/Solar (WWS) is completely viable without a single new megawatt of nuclear.

https://www.amazon.com/No-Miracles-Needed-Technology-Climate/dp/1009249541

There's a million other ways to go. Solar on every parking lot, over every irrigation canal, and along every highway. Some farming can be done under solar panels, as well; some commercial crops prefer shade, such as strawberries.

The US uses about 30% of its land for cows. One simple plan is that we all eat one less burger a week. Which would be a good idea, anyway.

Land usage is so not a problem as soon as you open up the dual use possibilities.

The studies on hydrogen pipelines tend to assume there's some existing reservoir of hydrogen. Making hydrogen in a green way is expensive, and that completely ruins its economic viability.

There's often enough space on those buildings for excess power. Not all those buildings have particularly intensive energy needs. Many are just warehouses.

That's the worst way to do solar, though. It doesn't get to take advantage of economies of scale in installation and inverters. Some levelized cost of energy studies put it just as expensive as nuclear.

Solar gets its cheapness when it's in fields or on top of large, flat commercial/industrial buildings.

Underground construction generally isn't cost effective. It costs way more to get dirt and rock out of the way than just building a frame upwards. There might be other reasons to do it, but you want to avoid it if possible.

Total solar manufacturing capability has been increasing exponentially. So has wind, and so have various storage methods.

Yes, we can install enough.

Thousands of people buying rooftop panels was never going to be the best way towards a Water/Wind/Solar (WWS) future. Fitting panels to the roof has to work around the roof geometry and obstructions like vents. That makes every job a custom job. It also means thousands of small inverters rather than a few big ones.

Compare that to setting up thousands of panels on racks in a field. As long as it's relatively open and flat, you just slap those babies down. You haul in a few big inverters which are often built right into shipping containers that can just be placed on site, hooked up, and left there. Batteries need inverters, too, so if your project includes some storage, then you only need one set of inverters.

I get the feeling of independence from the system that solar panels on the roof gives people, but it's just not economically the best way to go. The insanely cheap dollars per MWh of solar is only seen when deploying them on a mass scale. That means roofs of commercial/industrial buildings or bigger.

The batteries needed are a lot less than you might think. Solar doesn't work at night and the wind doesn't always blow, but we have tons of regional weather data about how they overlap. From that, it's possible to calculate the maximum historical lull where neither are providing enough. You then add enough storage to handle double that time period, and you're good.

Getting 95% coverage with this is a very achievable goal. That last 5% takes a lot more effort, but getting to 95% would be a massive reduction in CO2 output.

We also should consider HVDC lines. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and it's 1300 miles long. With that kind of range, wind in Nebraska can power New York, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, and hydro all around the Mississippi river basin can store it all. We may have enough pumped hydro already that we might not even need batteries, provided we can hook it all up.

I think there's a contingent of people who think nuclear is really, really cool. And it is cool. Splitting atoms to make power is undeniably awesome. That doesn't make it sensible, though, and they don't separate those two thoughts in their mind. Their solution is to double down on talking points designed for use against Greenpeace in the 90s rather than absorbing new information that changes the landscape.

And then there's a second group that isn't even trying to argue in good faith. They "support" nuclear knowing it won't go anywhere because it keeps fossil fuels in place.