Since you're comparing it to nuclear, I'm assuming you mean electricity production here, not energy production?
It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
I suspect people confuse these two because in a residential context electricity plays a huge part of our energy usage, but as a whole it's a smaller part of total energy usage than most people imagine.
But any serious discussion of renewable energy should be careful not to make this very significant error.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory publishes a great diagram of US energy use: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...
The 1 megajoule of useful electricity is also ultimately dissipated as low grade heat, but it can do work first (like generating light, or pumping water uphill).
Which (not sure if you did this intentionally or accidentally) brings up an interesting point on the parent comment and the LLNL sankey:
> It's always worth remembering that electricity only accounts for ~20% of global energy consumption (in the US it's closer to 33%).
That "global energy consumption" figure includes a lot of Rejected Energy going out tailpipes and smoke stacks turning burnables into electricity. A secret bonus of wind and solar is if you produce electricity without burning things, you actually decrease the energy demand! If you're not losing 70% of your energy consumption to the Rejected category, you suddenly need a lot less total energy.
When I drive my daughter to school when it’s -40 fucking degrees, a lot of the energy I use goes into heating my vehicle, swearing, moving and swearing. But this energy also leaks through my windshield, through my exhaust system and through my engine. This energy (heat) doesn’t provide any benefit to anyone and just leaks out into the atmosphere (which we’ve already established is trying to kill me).
That’s rejected energy. Or when it’s below -40, rejected motherfucking energy. :)
So even in a residential context, electricity is only about 1/4 of the demand. Across the whole country it's less than 300TWh out of 1500TWh, under 20%.
That excludes "imported energy" though, as in goods which used energy to make but were then imported.
Sounds like a very unique experience :)
I managed to get to a gas station with some stop leak in stock... If they didn't, I was ready to crack an egg in it.
Driving can push up the low points (charge cars overnight), but heating would put a lot of demand in winter months, meaning a day time cold day in January with no wind will require a lot of dispatchable electricity, at night time in September with a gale blowing wind will be providing almost all the demand.
Nuclear doesn't really help as it's more expensive than the wind when it's windy and demand is low, and its impossible to build enough to cover the peak January demand unless you spread the fixed cost over the entire year, which means getting rid of every other form of electric production, and you'd still end up paying more per kWh than you would with other forms of storage.
Nuclear can't survive in a free market. It can't scale up to provide for areas of high demand, low supply, and it can't scale down to be affordable when there's high supply and low demand.
