What's changed is that the UNsubsidised kWh energy costs of wind and solar, while they do depend on location to some degree, but they are now regularly well below that of coal and even gas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That IS newsworthy. From here on out, coal is so fucking dead.

Baseload power plants are purely a coal/nuclear thing. Gas/wind/solar doesn't need baseload, they just run whenever it's needed- that's right, wind and solar provide can baseload power as well as peakload.

Baseload-only power plants are a big weakness, not a strength. They're used because the baseload power plants are too expensive to be run as peakload. If you're claiming that baseload is an advantage of nuclear, you've been had.

No, the truth is that gas beat coal, but solar and wind beats gas. Not solar OR wind. Solar AND wind- both together. Having both together is less variable than either on their own because they add statistically, and tend to cancel each others variability. And no, storage is not a thing you need right now; the grid needs more solar AND wind, but yeah, the gas is still needed as backup right now.

The Fukushima containment vessel is leaking like a sieve, it's not supposed to be leaking AT ALL. It absolutely DID NOT DO what it's supposed to do.

The one main advantage that Fukushima has is its location- the fallout is mostly going out into the Pacific where it's diluted down. But the total amount of fallout is much more than a thousandth of Chernobyl, perhaps as much as a tenth. The estimate is that, all told, there's been well over a thousand deaths from Fukushima- and that's over and above the tsunami. They're indirect deaths- not from the radiation, but they were because of the evacuation necessitated by the radiation, but I'm sure that difference wouldn't matter a whole bunch to their friends and relatives. And this whole shitstorm has been fucking expensive- around as much as the rest of the costs due to the tsunami.

It wasn't just fear, it was also cost. If nuclear reactors had been cheaper than coal, it would be everywhere now. It's not. It never will be. Indeed, nuclear reactors have slowed down the deployment of solar and wind power technologies, which are now MUCH cheaper.

And yet Fukushima happened. And it happened, because it couldn't handle what was a forseeable tsunami. The tsunami was a bad one, but it wasn't outside the range that modelling had suggested.

So all you have to do with nuclear reactors is make them, and not ever make any mistakes! Simple!

Solar doesn't take up much space at all. For comparison, arable land takes up 20% of America. Solar farms to provide all of America's electrical energy, would take up 0.6%. Petroleum-related land actually takes up more land area than that right now. And yes, there are issues with solar not working at night, but if you combine them with other sources, the problem gets much easier. And note that nuclear has similar issues too- nuclear power only gives you baseload because its cost per watt is exceptionally poor (around $6700/kW c.f. $1000/kW for CCGT natural gas); so you have to get peakload from somewhere else. If you have enough hydro, great, if you don't, there's similar problems to renewables with the daytime/nightime summer/winter variations but on the demand side.

Actually, being labour intensive is by far the best thing about coal. Petroleum needs very few people, but that means that the profits from the production can be commandeered by a small number of people. That's basically why most petrostates are oligarchies.

Coal needs a lot of relatively well paid people to dig the coal out of the ground, it's dirty, dangerous, messy, but skilled work. That means that many of the profits get distributed over a relatively large worker base which is good for the economy.

And historically, it still managed to be cost effective- but the cheapest mines are now mined out, and it's always been polluting as hell.

Generators are cheap to buy, but expensive to run. Solar panels are reasonably cheap to buy and extremely inexpensive to run.

You have to be very careful when comparing very different energy sources. Electrical energy is a low entropy (highly ordered) form of energy that can be easily converted into other forms of energy very efficiently. For example, electrical heating can, by some measures, achieve more than 400% efficiency (if you use heat pumps), you can get several kilowatts of heat for every kilowatt you put in. So the fact that ~80% of energy is not currently electric means a lot less than you'd think.

For example, replacing petrol cars with electric ones, the total energy usually goes down to half or a third for that.

So the fact that wind and solar is currently only a fraction of the total energy is rather deceptive.

Genuinely the free riders at this point are the coal plants. Utility solar and wind power is now usually cheaper than the marginal cost of coal; cheaper than the coal needed to make the energy, ignoring the cost of the plant. If you think about it, that means you would never want to use coal if you have any choice at all. And choices exist, wind, solar and gas (CCGT) are cheaper and CCGT can run for both base and peak demand and can start up and stop as needed, whereas coal can ONLY run at constant output for baseload generation.

There's an almost yearly MOT anyway, they already record the mileage, they can just connect tax to that.

Nonsense. The problem with these technologies is getting enough range, not people a large distance away stealing your watts

With resonant technologies, if you're roughly 3 times the diameter of the coils away, then the power you can receive is largely negligible fraction of the transmission power, and it only goes down from there. With beamed technologies, they actually have to point a beam at you.

In either case, with sensible positioning of the equipment, it's a non issue.

A million electric cars could fix that. Electric cars need on average about 9kWh, but they usually have 30-100kWh. The rest can be used to buffer the grid. It wouldn't completely eliminate the need for fuels on the grid, but it would bring it down to 15% or less; and it might be possible to get the remaining fuel from biofuel and so cut out fossil fuels entirely (for electricity anyway).

...instead they were drowning in smog and lead.