That hydrogen can be used as fuel is not controversial. Of course it can. What I mean is that nobody is actually using hydrogen as part of a renewable life-cycle (i.e. generating hydrogen from excess renewable energy, and using as energy store).
>Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense.
The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation. Furthermore, even conceptually, you haven't explained HOW they would power an economy. Renewables have well known limitations. They are diffuse power sources, require huge surface areas covered with high-tech collectors, and are highly variable. The only way we can get them to work is by attaching them to a grid with natural gas or coal - because we have no way to store excess energy enough to bridge their variability. You can deny this, but it is an actual fact and the fact that you cannot point me to a region that has solved this should be quite telling.
> The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation.
Renewables have only recently become competitive (or more than competitive). This has happened so fast that existing generating capacity is still largely the old technology. Those old technologies will only be ripped out when their OPERATING costs are greater than the full cost of installing renewables to replace them.
That this old technology is still there doesn't mean it's competitive on a clean sheet basis, it just means it's not worth ripping it out yet.
The rapid decline in renewable prices leads to some interesting contrasts. In the UAE, for example, they are now bringing some Korean reactors online that were green lighted about a decade ago. They will produce power for somewhere around $.08/kWh, perhaps a bit higher. At the same time, contracts have been signed for a large PV field there that will sell power for $0.013/kWh. If they had waited on those nuclear plants and just built PV now they would have come out ahead.
What you want to look at is where new money is going, when new generating capacity is needed (and remember, power demand has been flat in the US for a decade). Renewables are taking a large share of that, and would take a larger share (in the US) with nonzero CO2 taxes.
>Ah yes, the old "nothing can ever happen for the first time" argument. Mindless reactionary nonsense.
The problem for you is that renewables have been around for years so the fact that they aren't powering any economy needs an explanation. Furthermore, even conceptually, you haven't explained HOW they would power an economy. Renewables have well known limitations. They are diffuse power sources, require huge surface areas covered with high-tech collectors, and are highly variable. The only way we can get them to work is by attaching them to a grid with natural gas or coal - because we have no way to store excess energy enough to bridge their variability. You can deny this, but it is an actual fact and the fact that you cannot point me to a region that has solved this should be quite telling.