I can just as easily ask: “how do we accomplish it with nuclear?”
The answer—off course—is the same in either case. We build the infrastructure. Renewables and nuclear both require a tremendous amount of infrastructure. Much of this infrastructure would even be the same in either case since we need to move from fossil fuel power to electricity (e.g. electrify rail lines, build high speed train, etc.)
There is off course difference in the electricity generation. Nuclear relies on building really big and expensive plants in locations far away from the consumption. Each design is unique and will take a while from plan to delivery. Renewables on the other hand, have the benefits of diversity of design. It can be distributed and centralized, build far away or close to consumption.
It seems to me that if you want to avoid the climate disaster, doing it without nuclear is actually the easier/more realistic option.
We know nuclear provides baseline power, but we don’t know how renewables can do so. Therefore, it makes sense to go with what is already known than to hope investments in renewable will work for baseline power.
But what we need is not baseline power, it’s load following power. And both nuclear and renewables struggle with this.
Nuclear can solve this by overbuilding and reducing power output at non-peak times. Renewables by overbuilding by and augmenting with storage. Both are proven technologies, both are expensive. I don’t really see that nuclear has an advantage here.
> Overbuilding renewables doesn't help with baseline either.
Yes it does. It means that at times when production is reduced (e.g. cloudy days or not-very-windy or only-windy-in-some-places days) then you can still generate enough power to cover baseline load.
> What storage? There's no storage that can hold enough power to offset times when renewables are not working.
What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here. Especially if we could be more aggressive about scheduling load around times with abundant generation. We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all (every few years) so we could look to solutions like biofuels here, or simply adding extra storage for critical use cases and shutting everything else down.
> What kind of timescales do you have in mind here. From what I've seen, 6 hours worth of storage would cover 95% of use cases here.
Ah yes, the good old "640 k should be enough for everyone".
From November 2020 to January 2021 Stockholm region had less than one hour of sunlight. Yes. This is on top of the fact that in mid-December there's a total of 4 hours of daylight per day.
So, let's pretend Stockholm is 100% powered by renewables. So, to live through that Stockholm would need? Triple the amount of wind farms just in case? Or triple the amount of solar panels to "still generate baseload"? Or to hope that neighbors have excess power they can spare, and import that?
And don't forget: solar and wind are extremely ineffecient compared to almost anything else. It takes 630 square kilometers in an open sea to produce less power than the smallest operational nuclear plant in France (Hornsea Project One vs. Saint-Laurent Nuclear Power Station).
> We'd still need a backup for the occasional times where you get a few days in row of low production, but this doesn't happen very often at all
This happens literally all the time. There are both daily and seasonal fluctuations. And on top of that there is anything from storms and bad weather to maintenance and human errors.
That flaw is by no means inescapable. Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently. If you loose 75% of the energy by storage you can just make 4 times the amount to compensate. So the answer here is still the same: Infrastructure. Note we also have unexplored battery technology which might make storing more efficient in the future so really the answer here is primarily infrastructure (but also research and technology).
And the same goes for the lack of baseline. A flaw yes, but not so inescapable. You can diversify the grid with distributed, stored, and centralized power, each can compensate for the flaws in the other. You can capture wind off shore, dam for hydro in the mountains, and build whole bunch of solar in the desert. You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate.
> Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently.
What does being cheap have to do with availability?
If there's no wind, you won't have that cheap energy from wind turbines. If there's no sun, you won't have that cheap energy from solar. When you have neither, there goes your energy grid.
> You can connect different climates with high voltage power lines such that if one area experiences low solar and low wind at the same time for weeks at a time, excess power generated from adjacent regions could compensate
Ah, yes. Because "neighboring regions" are immediately adjacent, and have immediate power availability and enough of it to cover any levels of power consumption for weeks on end.
Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that. Being cheap means that you can solve the issue with poor storage efficiency with more infrastructure. I.e. compensating for the inefficiency of storage is not an inescapable flaw of renewables.
Your other point still stands though, renewables are not as robust as nuclear. But the answer is still infrastructure. It just needs to be more diverse then nuclear. With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that. Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops. The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops. And that infrastructure is the same as for the problem of demand over baseline in nuclear, storage and more power production elsewhere with a robust grid.
> Sorry, you are conflating my arguments. Being cheap doesn’t solve the availability problem, I never claimed that.
I mean, you kinda did. Quote: "Renewable energy is cheap, so it doesn’t matter if you can’t store it efficiently."
Yes, it does. It does matter that you can't store it efficiently.
> With nuclear you still have a problem of demand above baseline, so you need infrastructure to deal with that.
With renewables you already have the problem with the baseline. I love how you just dismiss this as not being a problem.
> Renewables have the same problem except sometimes the baseline it self drops.
Exactly. In addition to having the problem of demand above baseline, they also have a problem that their baseline is zero.
> The answer is the same you build infrastructure that can handle such drops.
You can't solve a baseline of zero with more infrastructure. What you're basically saying is "every country has to have enough renewables to always be able to cover any amount of demand for any of their neighbours for any length of time." This simply doesn't work, and is not scalable in any shape or form.
Additionally, renewable energy is unbelievably inefficient in comparison, and it's extremely hard to "just" build more infrastructure for it.
The largest offshore windfarm that provides 1.2TW of energy covers an area of 630 square kilometers in the North Sea. That's less than Frances smallest operational nuclear reactor (1.8 TW).
And all of those 630 kilometers? Their baseline is exactly zero (if there's no wind). That nuclear reactor? Its baseline is effectively 1.8 TW 24/7.
