Good to know. That's what I thought but was not sure. We keep ethanol free gas on hand for lawnmower, snow blower etc. Maybe we're getting a power washer after all!
For me, it’s a logic issue. You (the royal “you”) can’t say that wind/solar power can’t produce enough to run things as efficiently as oil/gas and thus isn’t necessary now - and then also say that wind/solar power not working right now is the reason for outages right now.
It's a paradox in sustainability: the cheaper energy is or the more efficient something is, the more we use it. We have never once consumed less energy over a long enough time frame. Ie, I buy a prius, but since it's so cheap, I drive more than I would if I drove an F250. The net energy usage is higher, almost as an absolute rule. Phone batteries get better, so we use them longer. Net usage goes up. The issue is renewables aren't meant to displace traditional directly because we can't just flip a switch and get wind to work the way we can turn on an oil/gas generator. They are designed currently at least, to remove some of the need when available. We will need some on demand generation capacity, probably always will. Also, there is a massive investment in the current means of production, that is threatened dramatically by the plummeting cost of some renewable, hence a lot of lobbying and nay saying. Lastly, energy production isn't very elastic. You either meet the need in the moment it's demanded or you don't. Over production isn't rewarded with a surplus you can easily and cheaply store.
But with Powerwall and similar technology, you have huge reserves you can pull from at any time. The 2 are not comparable 100% of the time... you cannot just say "I want to live off of solar/wind at 110% for the next 5 days solid" and have it work, but if your lifestyle (as in your energy consumption pattern) supports it, and you have enough infrastructure to support it (as in storage capacity and renewal ability), you absolutely can live off of wind/solar without any oil/gas.
Grid storage is the linchpin. If we can get cheap scalable storage capable of shifting energy loads by even 12 hours, it would be massive in allowing for wind/solar to displace coal/gas. Not that we're doing a lot of new nuke construction, but you could also build them above baseload in such a scenario as well.
I'm looking at installing Powerwalls in my place right now. As much as I don't have solar panel space to totally replenish them, I can still program them to pull electricity at night and top off the storage when it's stupidly cheap and then use the batteries during the day at a drastically reduced cost.
I really want the EnergyVault to work, but at this point it looks like more marketing hype than cost-effective engineering.
I actually did a paper on America's nuclear moratorium in college. Obviously Three Mile Island was the big driver, but you could definitely at least measure anti-nuclear attitudes using the Simpson's jokes at its expense. Interestingly there was a paper published before the moratorium that predicted exactly the results of such a moratorium. The paper did not predict good things.
That and the 3-mile Island accident cast a look of fear into my aunt's eyes when I spoke pro-nuclear. She's in her 80s. There was no ability to debate with her, it was a total shut down look. Probably also didn't help that her husband was an Exxon exec. More oil, plz!
Part of me also wants to go geothermal as well as Solar. Even put up a big fucking wind turbine in the back yard. All while running a big, noisy steam powered sawmill.
What's insane is that coal kills more people than nuclear ...weapons ...have in their entire history ...each month.
30% of my proviince's power is nuke, via Bruce Power. The power of the CANDU reactor, bitches. Overcomes everything but ignorance.
Coal makes for some good pizza in Connecticut, so it just seems worth the countless miners dying from cave-ins and black lung.
And construction budgets. They've been trying to get Vogtle built for years, and the thing is a damned boondoggle. Meanwhile you can deploy new solar practically by flinging panels into a field like frisbees.