Fifth, even if solar and wind were equivalent technologies to oil, natural gas, and coal in terms of reliability, decarbonizing the grid would remain a mammoth task. Currently, 38 percent of global power generation is carbon free, suggesting we’d “only” need to roughly triple the good slice to displace the bad. Wrong. Hydropower has already used all available appropriate geographies globally. Nuclear would first need a helluva PR campaign to sufficiently improve its image. If only solar and wind are doing the lifting, they would need a ninefold buildout to fully displace fossil fuels.
