Imagine falling off the roof of a 565 foot building. [View all]

Imagine falling off the roof of a 208 foot tall building.

Imagine falling off the roof of a 31 foot tall building.

Which fall is most survivable?

Is there really any difference between the 565 foot fall and the 208 foot fall?

The carbon intensity of Poland is 565 gCO₂eq/kWh.

The carbon intensity of hybrid-solar-wind-gas-battery utopia California is 208 gCO₂eq/kWh.

The carbon intensity of nuclear France is 31 gCO₂eq/kWh.

Here in California adding additional wind or solar power to the grid will require the installation of additional energy storage (battery or hydro) which will only raise the price of our electricity further without a proportional decrease in our carbon intensity. Simply dumping excess solar and wind generated electricity whenever supply exceeds demand also increases the price of electricity.

California already has some of the most expensive electricity in the nation. At this point any further reductions to the state's greenhouse gas emissions by renewable energy would be the result of demand destruction and that would be most harmful to lower income people and make additional renewable energy capacity even less attractive.

Or we could increase the demand for electricity by building data centers or other energy intensive industry, keeping our carbon intensity much the same but increasing overall greenhouse gas emissions.

This past year about 23% of California's electricity was generated by fossil fuels, nearly all of that natural gas. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Back to the falling analogy, 208 gCO₂eq/kWh isn't going to save the world but 31 gCO₂eq/kWh nuclear power might make the inevitable collapse of earth's climate as we have known it more survivable.

I like to watch the behavior of California's electric grid at these sites:

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/US-CAL-CISO/all/yearly

Whereas many renewable energy enthusiasts see the glass as "half full" and not "half empty" I see a glass full of mud. Even with California's immense renewable energy and storage capacity our electricity is still much dirtier than France's electricity. Adding more renewable energy to our grid isn't going to fix that.

Like it or not, the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely is nuclear power. It usually goes unsaid, for religious reasons I suppose, that nuclear power also makes large scale renewable energy schemes redundant. This may be one of the reasons anti-nuclear activists and renewable energy enthusiasts rarely criticize the filthy natural gas industry. They may also know that their renewable energy schemes are not economically viable without fossil fuels.