Making a working tech cheaper is easier than trying to discover new tech that we don't even know will have enough output. Also, if they were that expensive then I would think they wouldn't get built at all, but there are a lot of nuclear plants, not to mention we can always continue investing in renewables and eventually phase them out.
The solution for 80% of the world is solar, wind, batteries; and batteries are the only thing that matters price-wise. We have acceptable battery technologies today, the thing that is missing is manufacturing at the scale needed. Closer to the poles nuclear and geothermal make sense to add, since solar isn't as reliable and doesn't produce as much. But cheap batteries make nuclear cheaper too. It is better to keep your multi-billion dollar facility outputting near 100% of its capacity all of the time, batteries let you smooth out the peaks and valleys of demand. So all paths with less natural gas and coal lead to more batteries, they are they thing that matter.
Right, and I would include battery tech as part of renewables in practice. I really hope the next generation of batteries (i.e. solid state, and/or no rare earth metals needed, and more density) is enough of a jump for the wider change to happen.
I mean year in magical utopia world we would have build them already and it would be great, but we’d also have had serious electric cars from American auto mfgs 30 years ago in that world.
instead in our real world the auto and oil companies literally sabotaged the tech and repossessed the early vehicles that owners loved.
