1) advanced geothermal (using drilling tech developed within the last decade, not the older ones)
2) flow batteries
3) chemical storage of electricity, whether as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol, or whatever tech path becomes cheapest.
4) for cold climates: district/neighborhood heating with massive seasonal storage
All of these are being developed, and experiencing falling prices on the tech. In contrast, building the same nuclear reactor design gets more expensive successive time it is built. This is true even of France's builds in 70s.
If we are betting on future tech, nuclear is not in the cards. It would have been great it nuclear had put coal out of business in the 1980s, rather than having a ton of build delays in the 1970s that jacked up nuclear's price. But it's ship has sailed, until nuclear can build.
If France completes a single reactor by their planned 2035 date, I will be seriously impressed. However, 1GW in 13 years is not a climate solution.
For example, the Netherlands has plenty of space for wind on the North Sea. But sometimes of course there is no wind. If there is no wind in the Netherlands, there is a good chance there will be wind north of Scotland.
With the current prices for nuclear power plants, you can easily run cables from the Netherlands to the north of Scotland and still be cheaper than nuclear.
At the moment new nuclear is insanely expensive. So we can do a lot of really weird stuff and still be cheaper than nuclear. Will nuclear get cheaper? Who knows.
What we do know is that the EU has targets for 2030, 2040, etc. We don't have time to wait for nuclear to get cheap. We need to act now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
But, it is very expensive. At the same time new nuclear reactors are also very expensive.
So we just don't know. Countries like France should build nuclear reactors and see if they can get the price down.
Countries that are opposed to nuclear, like Germany, should investigate storage solutions and see if they can get the price of that down.
People treat this question with religious mindset, as if burning fossil fuels is a sin that must be banished. In reality, there's nothing wrong with powering countries ~80% of the time with renewables + storage, and ~20% of the time with fossils - that's still a decently decarbonized grid
[1] - https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/hydropower_press...
Current water levels are at approx 47% capacity [1], compared to around 64% same time last year. Unless we get a wet spring and summer it could get exciting come next year...
[1] - https://www.nve.no/energi/analyser-og-statistikk/magasinstat...
A far more realistic solution is to be able to flex with things like gas plants that don't need to be always running and can function on demand.
California usually curtails large amounts of renewable energy in the spring, but even their smallish installs of 1-2GWh of storage recently has massively reduced that wasted energy. And they aren't even at super high penetration yet for renewables.
We will probably keep lots of backup gas turbines for a decade or two, but by the time significant nuclear could come online, other tech will probably have solved it.
And unfortunately in the US, our nuclear fleet is really close to retirement, and we are going to be losing a ton of nuclear generation capacity soon, with no way to rebuild it. We need other solutions fast.
I think sodium ion batteries will be the game changer in utility storage, like good-density (200 Wh/kg) LFP will for mass EV/PHEV electrification (sodium ion will help there too in hybrid batteries).
If we get sodium ion grid storage, another 50% drop in wind/solar utility LCOE, and residential solar gets on par with natural gas LCOE, and good-density LFP batteries deliver 100 mile PHEVs and 250-300 mile EVs in 10 years, then we might actually have a cslim hance of handling global warming
It isn't a solved problem, but there is already industrial scale deployments happening, and what that means is there is a massive market to chase and the ball is rolling fast. It's not like fusion where we are waiting on tech hurdles before the economics are even tackled.
Gas plants will have to do for flexing, much better than coal. It's not like politically they'll all get shutdown (I mean, they should or get a two year warning, but that won't happen).
I think residential solar should be vastly more subsidized. That way the solar that does get made doesn't have as much transmission losses through the grid, it gets used directly, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
I would also like a good synthetic fuels strategy that isn't a creep marketing conspiracy to keep fossil fuels business running (hydrogen "green/blue/gray" color BS falls into this category), that could handle aviation, long haul shipping, and home heating at at least carbon neutrality.
Gas plants can burn hydrogen (or methane...) produced thanks to electricity overproduced (produced when the grid doesn't need it) by renewables.
There are many ways to store energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Methods ).
