It's moving slow, but France does have planning working through how to manage nuclear going forward. Replacment with renewables as studied by the French gov't seems not only promising but cost effective.
These stories are always very nice and the plants cost effective, but are they true? Pakistan had a 100MW solar powerplant built for them. It actually ended up producing 18MW and required extensive amounts of water to clean the dust off of the panels.[0] I'm sure they were also told that renewables are cheap and will be great, but somehow everyone missed this.
The Lazard reports mentioned in your second link are a nice read. They look forward at estimated lifetime costs of power that might be projects started today.
There will be failures on the way to a fully renewable powered grid. India just turned up a 750MW facility successfully [1]. 70% of Texas coal plants are at risk of decommissioning as early as 2022 due to the amount of solar generation in the pipeline [2]. Spain is years ahead of schedule in coal decommissioning due to low cost renewables and pumped hydro storage capabilities being developed [3]. The UK is rapidly developing HVDC undersea cables to import clean hydro from Denmark and Norway [4]. Australia has over 130GW of renewables projects in the development pipeline (5x greater than the continent's entire fossil generation capacity) [5].
Seven countries are expected to end the use of coal by 2025: Portugal (2021), France (2022), Slovakia (2023), the UK (2024), Ireland (2025) and Italy (2025) (per Europe Beyond Coal)
Politics and entrenched interests will have no choice but to accept market forces. The sun dumps enough power on the Earth in an hour to power all of humanity for a year, and it's mostly free for the taking.
> The UK is rapidly developing HVDC undersea cables to import clean hydro from Denmark and Norway
That struck me as odd, because Denmark is flat as a pancake - it's basically an overgrown sandbank laid down by Norway's fjords. But the article explains that the cable will carry power from Norwegian hydro plants, which for some reason comes via Denmark. There is a direct cable from Norway to the UK, but i suppose this adds some redundancy, which is good. And, as the article notes, allows the UK to export surplus power (from wind?) to Denmark.
On Denmark being flat, here is its highest point - note that in the photo, the highest point isn't visible, because it's behind a barn:
By going via Denmark the distance under water is shorter. Also continental Europe, mainly Germany and Benelux slurped the power first, so the infrastructures have already been there. Why not use them as much as possible, i guess? Although recently some direct point-to-point has been built.
It's low carbon generation getting built that otherwise would've been gas or coal. India only has about 7GW of nuclear generation capacity (with ~5GW in development), but has a target of 100GW of solar by 2022 (which between cheap labor and cheap hardware, is entirely feasible). Ground mount utility scale solar is very cheap per MWh, and very fast to deploy (years, not decades).
I have a feeling the civil projects in Pakistan have a different success rate than maybe other places. And even apart from that one sample is not really conclusive of anything.
You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.
Hydro in France is already built-up everywhere it was feasible. There are no more spots to build meaningful hydro power capacity. Too bad since hydro is the only renewable that can really replace the nuclear power plants.
At least with studies on the Australian grid, it seems like the need for "baseload" sources is myth fueled mostly by resistance to upgrading to renewable sources.
> You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.
That's what grid energy storage is for. Traditionally this is often implemented with hydro (sometimes even by pumping water up to a high-altitude reservoir during periods of excess power generation). There are many more exotic methods as well - e.g. the crane that stacks concrete blocks, or the train with concrete that goes up and down the hill.
More recently, grid-scale batteries are being installed at increasing scale (e.g. Tesla's Megapack), and the cost efficiency of that solution seems to be improving rapidly.
If you run the numbers, you’ll see that we are several orders of magnitude away from having anything close to the scale of energy storage needed unfortunately
Extending the grid transport capacity, allows you to transport the energy from the place where is currently blowing to the place where it is neaded. That, reduces the need to store power.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po...