America Can Achieve Its 90% Clean Energy Goals 15 Years Early (berkeley.edu) 241
destinyland writes: Most studies aim for deep decarbonization of electric power systems by 2050," argues a new study from the Center for Environmental Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. But they've produced a new report — "the first to show we can get there in half that time with the latest renewable energy and battery cost data."
"Plummeting costs for wind and solar energy have dramatically changed the prospects for rapid, cost-effective expansion of renewable energy," announces UC Berkeley's School of Public Policy.
Even with no policy changes, they predict that by 2035 America will have achieved 55% clean energy usage (due to increases in solar and wind power) while experiencing a 10% reduction in electricity costs. But under their 90% Clean (carbon-free) scenario, "all existing coal plants are retired by 2035, and no new fossil fuel plants are built," meaning the country "avoids over $1.2 trillion in health and environmental costs, including 85,000 avoided premature deaths, through 2050."
During normal periods of generation and demand, wind, solar, and batteries provide 70% of annual generation, while hydropower and nuclear provide 20%. During periods of very high demand and/or very low renewable generation, existing natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear plants combined with battery storage cost-effectively compensate for mismatches between demand and wind/solar generation. Generation from natural gas plants constitutes about 10% of total annual electricity generation, which is about 70% lower than their generation in 2019.
"Without robust policy reforms," their announcement adds, "most of the potential to reduce emissions and increase jobs would not be realized."
"Plummeting costs for wind and solar energy have dramatically changed the prospects for rapid, cost-effective expansion of renewable energy," announces UC Berkeley's School of Public Policy.
Even with no policy changes, they predict that by 2035 America will have achieved 55% clean energy usage (due to increases in solar and wind power) while experiencing a 10% reduction in electricity costs. But under their 90% Clean (carbon-free) scenario, "all existing coal plants are retired by 2035, and no new fossil fuel plants are built," meaning the country "avoids over $1.2 trillion in health and environmental costs, including 85,000 avoided premature deaths, through 2050."
During normal periods of generation and demand, wind, solar, and batteries provide 70% of annual generation, while hydropower and nuclear provide 20%. During periods of very high demand and/or very low renewable generation, existing natural gas, hydropower, and nuclear plants combined with battery storage cost-effectively compensate for mismatches between demand and wind/solar generation. Generation from natural gas plants constitutes about 10% of total annual electricity generation, which is about 70% lower than their generation in 2019.
"Without robust policy reforms," their announcement adds, "most of the potential to reduce emissions and increase jobs would not be realized."
Only future is solar backed by nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
Any other approach to energy is just nonsense. The solar stuff is coming along well, we just need to get some more advanced nuclear reactor designs into production.
As a side benefit with so much cheap power to be had, lots more economical to desalinize water or create hydrogen. California is going to have to do that eventually.
At this point, why nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
I used to be a nuclear stalwart but Tesla's giant battery in Australia proved the lack of need for "always on" power generation going forward into the future. Meanwhile we can't build a nuclear power plant in this country in any kind of cost or time effective manner. Plus, sure, we all have our favorite dream machines when it comes to nuclear but get back to me when one actually manages to get built.
Nuclear power at this point is just a bunch of toxic waste we have no clue how to deal with. Sure, we have reactor designs that can hypothetically burn that waste but those designs have been around for some time now and some how we've never had a single one built despite having an increasingly growing nuclear waste problem.
At the rate we're going by the time we even build a few reactors (we take decades to build these things) battery tech will likely be at the point that we won't need to generate nuclear toxic waste or endure the risk of another Fukushima style disaster. We're nearly there as it is.
Re:At this point, why nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
Toxic waste isn't the problem. The ridiculous costs and lead times of nuclear plants are the problem. Nuclear power is ridiculously expensive per kWh. And contrary to popular myth, "baseload" isn't even what you want; you want is load following and peaking. But nuclear demands a >= 90% capacity factors to get even its current ridiculous per-kWh prices; try to wedge it into a load-following (let alone peaking) role, and it gets vastly worse.
I'd welcome nuclear power if it could be dispatched cheaply and quickly. But just the opposite is the case. And it's been going backwards - nuclear is one of the few major technologies in our world that's shown a negative learning curve - that is, the more we've learned, the more expensive it's gotten. And the way to overcome the growing costs on existing reactor generations is to build new generations, but then you start the learning curve all over, and thusfar, each new generation has also suffered from a negative learning curve. And each new generation takes decades to iterate.
Nuclear is such a neat concept in theory. In practice, though? It just isn't.
France (Score:2, Interesting)
The ridiculous costs and lead times of nuclear plants are the problem. Nuclear power is ridiculously expensive per kWh. And contrary to popular myth, "baseload" isn't even what you want; you want is load following and peaking. But nuclear demands a >= 90% capacity factors to get even its current ridiculous per-kWh prices; try to wedge it into a load-following (let alone peaking) role, and it gets vastly worse.
The actual real-world numbers in France beg to disagree with you.
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Every single one. It's why Chinese are heavily invested in nukes, and they care very little for expanding their nuclear weapons programs. If you're expanding your generation base today, and you're not going for nukes, there are a grand two reason for it.
Because once you get the nuke up, and if you're planning for more than a decade (with typical nuclear reactor having life expectancy in the realm of half a century), there's simply no economic or environmental argument for wind or solar. The only two problem
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"...t and don't give a fuck that places that go down the wind/solar route become massive CO2 emitters (i.e. Germany)"
Nonsense, Germany is a massive CO2 emitters because it traditionally used a lot of coal and lignite, the latter because it is domestic and cheap (as it can be surface mining). Despite also reducing nuclear, the use of coal and lignite could substantially be reduced due to the use of wind and solar and also gas (year 2000 vs 2019):
lignite 148.3 TWh vs 113.9 TWh
coal 143.1 TWh vs 57.3 TWh
nuclear
Re:At this point, why nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
Toxic waste isn't the problem.
Yes it is. Nearly every single spent fuel rod is still sitting right where it was created , in a pool. On location at the reactor site.
I'll allow for retraction before i continue to decimate your argument.
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> Toxic waste is not at TECHNICAL problem.
There, fixed that for you.
Politically it is insoluble. Just because.
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The real problem with nuclear is not the profit, but how long it takes to give any.
You need like 15 years running on red until the thing is actually done, then the profits it will give are huge, better than gas power.
But by then, the politician in charge of letting build the reactor will no longer be elected etc.. so not very politically good.
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Toxic waste isn't the problem. The ridiculous costs and lead times of nuclear plants are the problem. Nuclear power is ridiculously expensive per kWh. And contrary to popular myth, "baseload" isn't even what you want; you want is load following and peaking. But nuclear demands a >= 90% capacity factors to get even its current ridiculous per-kWh prices; try to wedge it into a load-following (let alone peaking) role, and it gets vastly worse.
That's what batteries and other energy storage systems are for, as a "wedge" between demand and load.
Australian batteries were not about storage (Score:2)
They were about gird stabilization over timescales of minutes. Keeping the frequency stable etc. And they worked well.
Australia is looking towards pumped hydro for longer term storage. There have been some plants operating for decades.
Australia will never go nuclear. Just because.
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Where is blindseer ?
Taking the day off. That's where.
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Where is blindseer ?
Taking the day off. That's where.
love you bro, be well, enjoy.
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Eventually when more and more homes and businesses get solar+battery and along with EVs joining a distributed grid etc, the reliance on the old grid/utilities to produce power will reduce so it will become more of a storage grid to capture all the excess produced by utility scale renewables. The argument for nuclear
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Dude, your pants are on fire. Because German coal power generation has been dropping steadily for the past two decades. Ane you have been told that numerous times yet you still keep lying. Why are you doing this? Is it retrograde amnesia or are you just a troll?
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So in other words you're telling me we have no idea how to deal with nuclear waste.
Re:At this point, why nuclear? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If we can't make it happen then no, we don;t no how to deal with it. You can complain all you want about the whys but if it can't happen then it can't happen.
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What are you even arguing here? Nuclear power is probably the least cost effective means of generating power. In this country building an nuclear power plants means spending decades of time and more money than any other power source would ever need. If new power is to be added to the grind nuclear power is by the the very least cost effective means of doing it.
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It's almost as if new things cost money!
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Re:At this point, why nuclear? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but Tesla's Australian installation doesn't have enough capacity to actually power the grid for very long, it's mostly used to smooth out power peaks in the system that would otherwise have required keeping some other kind of plant spinned up and online. Thus the Tesla installation can sell these "smoothing" services much more cheaply and efficiently than other kinds of generation. But it's not enough to support or even mediate a grid that might consist of wind, solar, etc. That would be another scale.
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Meanwhile we are seeing practical massive advancements in battery tech but none in nuclear (no your favorite design isn't proven practical until it is built). Tesla just built a million mile battery and is saying it is ready for mass production. Meanwhile, despite plenty of hypotheticals nuclear power has been stuck in the 50's.
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I tried looking it up but their own website is a dump truck of shitty PR graphics and then I got tired of looking.
Then I figured since you're the one trying to make a point here I'll just ask you to justify it since you haven't bothered to yet. Is NuScale's tech cheaper than renewables with batteries and does it produce zero toxic waste? If so, great! I don't mind being wrong.
Otherwise you have no point.
Re:At this point, why nuclear? (Score:4, Informative)
NuScale will be much cheaper than renewables with batteries. Hell even super expensive first-of-a-kind nuclear plants are cheaper than renewables with batteries. NuScale prototype plants are projecting $55 per MWh with future economies of scale dropping that down to $30. That makes it competitive with natural gas.
And again waste is a non problem. The number of people ever harmed from used fuel is zero. It is an evil excuse to justify the continue use of fossil fuels.
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The Tesla battery is only 129 MWh. It is used for load balancing. It is not used for grid level storage. It is not even enough storage to be used for peaking storage.
One hour storage for the United States is ~450 GWh's. One hour of storage for the world is >2000 GWh's and expected to double by 2050. We would need at least 12 hours of storage assuming 2x solar/wind capacity and HVDC supergrid. Otherwise we would need days or weeks of storage.
The battery cost $50 million. Even if we assume s
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It the 129 MWh battery was $50 million, then a 450 GWh battery would be $175 billion. That's not really insane. If you made 12 hours of storage, that would be $2.1 trillion, which is the range you indicated, but is that really that bad in context? In the US, about $500 billion is spent per year on electricity from what I can find. A battery solution like that would last at least 20 years, and maybe 40 years. At 20 years, it would be about $105 billion per year. So, that's definitely in the range where it co
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Remember those costs would be every 10-15 years. And for the entire world the cost would be in the 10's of trillions. It would also require a HVDC supergrid to better transfer electricity which we are not currently building. It also requires 2x solar and 2x wind which become much more expensive as we add more to the grid. Without both HVDC and 2x renewables we would require weeks of storage. I am not even convinced 12 hours is going to be enough.
What doesn't make sense about it? The giga factory pr
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Something to consider is that while battery tech is slowly getting better and cheaper, solar is getting ridiculously cheaper.
Solar gets cheaper each year by more than I'd save over the year if I had installed it. At some point I assume that will stop happening, but over the last 3 years since I've been looking, that's held true in my area. I'm struggling to calculate ROI because the cost of solar keeps dropping at a rate that I can't really wrap my head around. I was at about 11 years to break even 3 years
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That said, I still think nuclear is the best opt
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Tesla's tiny battery proved that Australia's grid is fucked, most grids don't have that much arbitrage potential for batteries.
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Sure, we have reactor designs that can hypothetically burn that waste
No we have not, that is simply physically impossible.
A ly spread by pro nuclear idiots.
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Oh lord, do I really need to tell an adult this?
Natural disasters happen all over the world. Shit I'd be far more worried about the immediate effects of any earthquake in regards to California's nuclear plants then I would be a tsunami. They're all on fault lines.
In other words, in referencing Fukushima I wasn't highlighting only tsunamis, plenty of other naturals disasters, not to mention terrorist attacks, happen all over the world that could be problematic. I mean, if terrorists can drop a plane on the P
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If I'm not mistaken the blades don't last all that long...
And then you linked to an article that says,
Turbines from the first great 1990s wave of wind power are reaching the end of their life expectancy today.
So 25-30 years for the first major generation of mass-produced wind turbines.
I think that's pretty decent for something that doesn't need any fuel, and only requires occasional maintenance. If they last less than that now, I'd be a little surprised. MatSci has kept advancing over that time.
And if you'd look at why they're landfilling them, it's because they haven't built facilities large enough to recycle them. That's something that could be fixed in a matter of
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Why is wind nonsense?
I heard [politifact.com] the noise (from windmills) causes cancer. :-)
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Your approach is just nonsense. Nuclear is unsuitable for anything but base-load. Nuclear is hugely expensive. No, those mythical "new reactor designs" people like you believe in so strongly will not materialize (just as they have not materialized in the last few decades) and would take far too long to become operationally viable anyways.
So, because nuclear can only do base load, a lot of energy storage capacity is needed anyways. But why would you feed energy storage from expensive nuclear, when you can fe
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Your approach is just nonsense. Nuclear is unsuitable for anything but base-load.
That's why he mentioned desalination and hydrogen generation. You have excess capacity? Put it to use - more fresh water (you can even get to the point of injecting it into depleted aquifers) and some hydrogen gas for transportation use.
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Your approach is just nonsense. Nuclear is unsuitable for anything but base-load.
That's why he mentioned desalination and hydrogen generation. You have excess capacity? Put it to use - more fresh water (you can even get to the point of injecting it into depleted aquifers) and some hydrogen gas for transportation use.
Still does make absolutely no sense to feed that from nuclear. Nuclear is getting to be more expensive than renewables plus storage and that trend will continue as storage and renewables get better. Now you want to use nuclear plus storage? Do you think money grows on trees? The real way nuclear kills climate is because for the same money you get a lot more renewables.
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Still does make absolutely no sense to feed that from nuclear. Nuclear is getting to be more expensive than renewables plus storage and that trend will continue as storage and renewables get better.
That's the claim, but as I post elsewhere [slashdot.org] it isn't supported by facts. As we move from nuclear to wind/solar, our power costs are skyrocketing - at least here in Southern California. So leave Diablo Canyon alone, build another 10 reactors (that would cover all our electrical needs in the State), and if we have spare power - put it to use.
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Your numbers are defective or stem from a different problem. Maybe utilities just have too much of crumbling infrastructure to support and maybe somewhere in there is greedy?
Nuclear is established, optimized tech (no, the "mini-nukes" will not materialize in the next 50 years in any form except maybe finally as a prototype, no, there are no prototypes at this time, just non-nuclear, scaled-down fakes) and has little to no potential to get cheaper. In fact it gets more and more expensive now that the scam th
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As we move from nuclear to wind/solar, our power costs are skyrocketing - at least here in Southern California
Not here in San Diego. $20k or less will get you more than enough solar panels on a 1200 SqFt house that you can never worry about an electric bill again. Half of the houses on my block are testimony to that fact. And that price has been dropping every year.
Here, you'd be a fool not to install solar, just for the cost savings alone.
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Interesting. That is even lower than I expected. Do those $20k include storage and do you sell electricity back to the utility?
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Excellent! Thanks for the info.
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The sad truth is that there still is not a single working prototype and not even a full-size non-nuclear one. The "2 year" number is just misdirection. That is when they _start_ digging some hole. They will likely not have much more than that hole 20 years later.
These designs are already tricky in the non-nuclear side because they are not an incremental evolution of an existing design. Add that all tech gets massively more problematic with regards to safety, reliability, performance and durability when oper
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Any other approach to energy is just nonsense. The solar stuff is coming along well, we just need to get some more advanced nuclear reactor designs into production.
As a side benefit with so much cheap power to be had, lots more economical to desalinize water or create hydrogen. California is going to have to do that eventually.
Nuclear power stations are more costly than Solar/wind plus battery farms for the same amount of energy production -- further, Nuclear power stations take several years longer to put into operation. Not to mntion the cost to deal with the spent fuel and properly decommissioning Nuclear power stations in a safe way!
So the strategy of relying on Solar/wind plus battery farms, is the best effective and economic strategy.
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You won't see nuclear for the same reason the USA won't actually meet it's goals. It frankly isn't committed to solving the problem.
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Once you have nuclear, what's the point of adding solar?
Anyway, the headline is complete B.S.
"America" doesn't have "90% Clean Energy Goals", the article mentions that a group at UC Berkely does. Not to mention that "clean energy" already exists at close to 100% in the United States. There are virtually no pollution issues from energy production right now compared to the past.
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There are virtually no pollution issues from energy production right now compared to the past.
Only because you don't consider the conversion of stored carbon to gaseous carbon dioxide to be pollution. But if you don't want to run the clock backwards, turn the atmosphere into a big, hot terrarium and live like a lizard under a heat lamp you might want to add carbon dioxide to your list of undesirable exhaust byproducts.
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Correct, carbon dioxide isn't pollution. It's 0.04% of the atmosphere. Has been present practically forever. Generally good for plants. Most animals ignore it in the present low concentrations. Carbon Dioxide levels are estimated to have been higher than the present level for hundreds of millions of years [yale.edu].
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Carbon Dioxide levels are estimated to have been higher than the present level for hundreds of millions of years.
And I'd like to keep higher concentrations of carbon dioxide a relic of the past. Although it is a necessary part of the atmosphere it's a greenhouse gas and small increases in the percentage of it in the atmosphere cause heat to be trapped close to the surface of the Earth. I'd prefer to keep the climate cooler, the polar caps frozen, the dissolved oxygen in the oceans higher, and the coastlines just where they are. Particularly because we can.
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And other people have different preferences. For example, even assuming all the climate work is accurate, I'd prefer a more robust economy, both now and in the future, than one crippled by arbitrary carbon dioxide limits. Any problems caused in the next couple of hundred years by climate change are dwarfed by the massive differences in standard of living and the ability to deal with disasters of all kinds over that same time frame caused by most proposed solutions to limiting CO2 emissions.
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Why would I particularly care if you (as opposed to anyone else who reads what I wrote) agrees with me or not? I'm satisfied here just by being correct and pointing out the holes in your beliefs.
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If only it was true... (Score:5, Informative)
Plummeting costs for wind and solar energy have dramatically changed the prospects for rapid, cost-effective expansion of renewable energy
And yet, here in Southern California where wind and solar provide an ever-increasing share of power, we had a 7% increase in electricity rates this year [energytoolbase.com] and another 14.4% coming next year [solarmaxtech.com]. As our "plummeting cost wind and solar" generation ramps up - so do our electricity bills.
Fully expect to get downmodded because the facts (actual costs paid) don't match what some people want to believe (it's cheaper to produce)...
Re: If only it was true... (Score:2)
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That was PG&E - not SCE. If you look, the links are for Southern California Edison - the supplier of power here in Southern California where we have all that solar and wind.
Say what you want, but the claim of "it's cheaper!" rings pretty damn hollow as you watch your power bill bump up 10% every year, as we put another 4-5% of "cheap solar/wind" on the grid.
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There seem to be a few reasons your bill is going up. One definite cause is the wildfires. Even if they didn't directly affect your area, there are new statutory requirements for wildfire mitigation. Also, they're apparently facing declining sales. That very well might be a result of solar power adoption, but not in the way you think. Power generation involves large capital investments in power plants. Those large fixed costs need to be paid off by the customer base. If the customer base declines, or their
Re:If only it was true... (Score:4, Insightful)
As our "plummeting cost wind and solar" generation ramps up - so do our electricity bills.
Indeed, but just as Californian sidewalk temperature is directly correlated with pregnancy rates, there are reasons your electricity bills are changing, and it's nothing to do with the reduction in cost of wind and solar. Incidentally the price rises that are coming were agreed over 2 years ago and related to required grid works. The wholesale cost of energy production California has remained unchanged by wind, and a good reason for this is that the subsidy for wind never came from precious electricity price in the firstplace.
It's about time America join the rest of the world and get out of fantasy land when it comes to cost of energy.
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Why is the grid getting bumped up? Because now we need MORE peaker capability, we need MORE tie-ins. The costs are going up because we're putting more wind and solar on the grid.
But this shouldn't be a surprise, as there is a strong correlation [joannenova.com.au] between the cost of power and the amount of capacity from solar and wind. More renewables means more cost at the wall socket. Provably so. That's what the facts say.
Debate why you think that shouldn't be - but the facts are that it is.
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Why is the grid getting bumped up? Because now we need MORE peaker capability, we need MORE tie-ins. The costs are going up because we're putting more wind and solar on the grid.
Not at all. The grid is getting bumped up because of a lack of investment in it for 30 years and it is falling apart in the literal sense. The grid doesn't give a shit about peaker capacity, doesn't care if your wind comes from solar or nuclear, and the sad reality (sad for your argument) is that the more peaker capability you have the less overloaded your grid becomes during low energy demand and thus the less overdesigned it needs to be.
But as usual your comments demonstrate little more than a lack of und
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The last bill I have on-hand I paid $12.76 for electricity delivery and only $7.00 for the el
That's not a technology problem (Score:2)
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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Then maybe it's because they don't want to be another PG&E https://lmgtfy.com/?q=Why+are+... [lmgtfy.com] .
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Well A) You didn't click on my source link at all did you? I ask because you aren't adressing anything it brings up.
and B) Yeah, infrastructure costs money and those costs get passed onto the consumer. If you have a problem with your local monopoly then please take it up with that state,
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So you mean that link I posted like three posts back that you never clicked on or acknowledged?
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You can just mark foe, ignore, and move on. It's better for everyone.
Arguing with a well-known troll doesn't help the discussion. Back in the day we used to say "don't feed the trolls" around here, but I guess that's been lost in time.
Nuclear: Dangers Much Less Than Previously Thought (Score:2)
https://www.thegwpf.org/danger... [thegwpf.org]
The regulations strangling the nuclear-power industry are based on deceptive and fatally flawed (and even fraudulent) studies that vastly overestimated the effects of small levels of nuclear radiation. If greens really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, they’d be out marching for new regs and new nukes.
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The Fukushima "disaster" killed less than a dozen people. The radiation levels at Fukushima are now tiny. And that was the only non-soviet disaster ever.
Chernobyl was all about soviet incompetence. Nobody is seriously suggesting such a thing would happen in the west. Remember, most of those deaths were due to refusing to evacuate the town. And even there, radiation levels are now low, and it is a great wildlife sanctuary.
Nuclear will not work because it is politically infeasible, so nobody will invest
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Why don't you move to Fukushima or Chernobyl? I hear real estate is really cheep in both locations. The money you save will easily pay for iodine tablets and dosimeters.
That would be relevant to the argument against nuclear power if people were proposing building any more second generation nuclear power plants. The last one was completed in 2016, and nobody is proposing to build another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What people want today are improved third generation nuclear power, or Gen III+.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
What people want for the near future are Gen IV nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Claiming new nuclear is unsafe because o
Economic predictions are B.S. (Score:2)
If you could accurately make an economic prediction 15 years out, you'd bet the market accordingly and make a crap-ton of money. This doesn't happen ergo predictions are B.S.
How are batteries relevant? (Score:2)
At the moment chemical batteries are for a tiny window it takes for a real power source to come online, there's a lot of money to be made arbitraging that time but for ballparking the viability of a power mix you can safely ignore them entirely.
So with that said, where the fuck is power going to come from in winter when there's little wind across the major generating areas? The US is big, but not big enough for the sun to always be up and the wind always to blow. In other words, what about night time in win
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PS. I didn't know the US had so many gas power plants though, nearly half was more than I was expecting.
Got some bad news (Score:2)
"America Can Achieve Its 90% Clean Energy Goals 15 Years Early"
Can it? Likely.
Will it? Not a chance.
About as much chance of that happening as Mexico City becoming the capital of the USA.
Electricity is onlt a small part of the problem (Score:3)
FTFY.
This focuses on electricity production, which represents about only 20-25% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US [epa.gov]. The rest is transportation, industry, buildings (heating/cooling) and agriculture (CO2: fertilizers, tractors; CH4: livestock, rice/paddy fields). Those should also be worked on, because emissions must be reduced by over 90% to avoid climate change's worst consequences. (The article, quoting the IPCC, says 50% by 2030, which is true, but then the IPCC says “net zero by 2050”.)
Unfortunately, the article only focuses on electricity; and most of the comments here are focusing on nuclear electricity, for or against. This only validates what J-M. Jancovici [wikipedia.org] (France's most visible expert on the impact of climate change and energy supply) often says: “nuclear power is 5% of the problem, but absorbs 95% of the debate.” The policy proposed in the article does retain the current US nuclear electricity production capacity; however, if the US wants to power most of its grid with renewables, as long as the emission reduction targets are met, let them. I think it will be more expensive than with nuclear, but it's possible: the US has a low enough population density to allocate the surface areas required to solar and wind. But please get rid of all those fuel-burning SUVs already, or at least make them electric if you have the (decarbonated) capacity!