My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
Mostly:
So it has the feel of a plan to promise to spend a lot of money several years from now, and get a lot of PR points today, and quietly cancel the project later.
Well that is, indeed, wack. I appreciate your perspective, I can’t believe I missed the “corporations lying for money” angle. I’m usually on top of it.
Not that much. Do remember there’s a lot of oil money pouring into FUDing about nuclear.
They’re talking about 5+ years on the new nuclear in these. And they haven’t done it before, so a 30% deadline slip is realistic.
You can put up a lot of wind and solar in that time.
Which needs a stable baseline to counteract lack of supply and/or a lot of lithium. And space.
The existing large-scale batteries are largely lithium. There are a bunch of iron-chemistry ones and sodium-ion ones which have been deployed over the past year, with factories going up to scale them up. I’m not expecting to be limited by lithium availability for stationary batteries.