Renewables != solar.

Renewables = a mix of solar, wind, hydro, geo, and wave, backed up by storage and a more efficient grid, supplement by various local - down to household - generation options. Supported by smarter and larger grids.

The absolute criminality of the last few decades means that renewable tech is decades behind where it could have been with a no-compromise crash development program starting in the 90s.

The real problem with renewable has always been political. Renewables are inherently diverse and distributed. They're not limited to a very small number of critical supply chains and economic choke points. And some people are really unhappy about that.

Renewables are popular with most demos. What's even more popular is low LCOE. The technical challenges of energy storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the problems.

>The technical challenges of <snip> storage can be hand waved away, but not if you want to actually solve the problems.

Now it fits nuclear too.

Not sure about that.

On paper, it looks like it.

On practice, my mother pays 30€ a month of electricity in France, where nuclear energy is everywhere. She asked for a quote to get panels on her house, and they got back to her with 20000€.

Sure you can move the needle by noting I drain way more power than her, than she heats her house using fossil fuel and that the quotes could be have been reduced in many ways.

You can also note that solar panels have to be replaced several times, take much more space, don't have to including wiring in their ROI calculation (while nuclear does for some weird reason) and are created by electricity generated by fossil or nuclear fuel, so their building price is already cheap.

I wouldn't say the answer is that clear cut.

What do you mean wiring isn't included? How is a quote not the total price, including labour and material costs?

I mean that in France, the reports assessing the cost of the energy produced by wind turbines and solar panels don't include the wiring from the source of energy to where the energy is distributed.

Which is logical.

For some reason I don't know, nuclear reactors cost evaluation must include the wiring.

Since you kept talking about solar panels it was very unclear that you were no longer talking about the quote your mom got.

And that's with the ARENH screwing the French people w.r.t. the actual production price of EDF (mostly) nuclear energy.

We're close to, or even at, the point where hydrogen made with solar, then burned in combined cycle power plants, produces power more cheaply than nuclear. Of course, in a renewable energy system, only a fraction of the energy has to go through hydrogen; much will be consumed directly from the grid (or through short term storage.)