So much wrong here.
I'll start off with the storage issue. I assumed in the figures I presented that wind generation only produced energy 15 percent of the time, and I assumed a well-connected power grid. Certainly you can't assume that it would not be windy at any given point of time all over the country? We also have operated wind turbines for many years and have good numbers on how often they generate electricity in the aggregate, and it is roughly 25 to 50 percent of the time. So a 15 percent scale back is actually very conservative.
The energy inputs for wind turbines and solar panels and batteries are nearly all electricity. Unless coal electrons are different from solar electrons (they aren't) it doesn't matter where the energy input comes from.
Battery costs per watt-hour are halving approximately every four years, and have done so for the last thirty years. Watt-hours per kilogram are also improving at a slower rate. There is no physics reason to believe that won't continue for some decades to come. Batteries have no moving parts except electrons and so are very amenable to being manufactured at scale in automated factories. So there is every reason to believe that even if batteries aren't economically feasible in some applications today, they will very likely be in the near future.
Again I note that halving in cost every four years implies that your costs per watt-hour will be less than 1% of today's in thirty years.
- It has been well-established for over 100 years that CO2 levels in the atmosphere warm the planet, and on the average on time scales of millions of years or less higher CO2 levels are correlated with higher temperatures and vice versa.
- We know that CO2 levels have increased dramatically since preindustrial times, and most dramatically in the last thirty years as many parts of the world industrialized.
- We know from the isotope mix of atmospheric CO2 that recent increases of CO2 are 100 percent attributable to burning fossil fuels.
- We know that 99 percent of the world's glaciers are receding. This is a worldwide phenomenon and the only explanation we have for it is increasing CO2 levels warming the planet.
Which one of those things are wrong? More than one has to be for it to be "made up nonsense".
Because all of those things can be recycled. And are in some cases but not yet all.
I'm going to make this calculation brutally simple and explain to you why fossil fuels are screwed in the short term, and likely are screwed in many cases today.
- I'll start with an obvious but important observation: the marginal costs of operating solar or wind are far lower than fossil fuels or nuclear. There is no fuel requirements, personnel requirements for operating the facilities are far, far less, and there is far less maintenance. For all practical purposes marginal costs of generating wind are tiny and for solar are pretty close to zero.
- Both wind and solar are making remarkable progress reducing costs. Solar power has halved in cost per watt approximately every four years for the last fifty years. There is no reason to believe that those cost trends can't continue for decades to come. There is no imaginable technological pathway for reducing the costs of fossil fuels or nuclear at a comparable velocity.
- If you had ten billion dollars to invest in making electricity today you'd invest it in solar or wind. That's because you will start making electricity and selling it sooner (typically less than a year from plonking down money to selling electrons), that's because the cost of the plant is less so you can sell more watt-hours for your ten billion dollars, and also because your operating costs far lower. It is really a no brainer. In fact, it is such a no-brainer that a lot of older fossil fuel and nuclear plants are considered stranded assets because they can't sell electricity at competitive prices.
- Finally, and to tie a few pieces together: one risk you run with building a nuclear or fossil fuel plant today is that you will be screwed fifteen or twenty years from now: it is very likely that newer PV solar plant backed up with batteries of comparable scale will generate electricity much cheaper than you can and you will not be able to compete, at all. Whereas since the marginal cost of your existing wind or solar plant is very small and you can compete and keep operating even if electricity is less expensive.
Just saying 
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www.enr.com
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