People just seem to forget we have a free market. Rising demand for electricity is not a bad thing, a successful civilization will have increasing energy demands.
Rising demand will be met with new production.
Energy demand with a sharp increase (such as that which suddenly replacing gasoline cars with electric cars will require) is going to lead available capacity by a considerable distance. Renewable technologies aren't going to be good candidates for supplying this demand because they have limited time availability, and require a considerable footprint (with considerable end-of-life waste) to provide the same output as one multi-turbine nuclear plant.
Bulk power generation that is available 24/7 without storage is needed for this type of consumption. As bulk generation goes offline, it becomes difficult to meet normal consumption, let alone the high demand curves required by charging electric vehicles.Here in the states, some places are finding it difficult to meet normal demand and require rolling blackouts.
Energy demand with a sharp increase (such as that which suddenly replacing gasoline cars with electric cars will require)
Luckily we can't "suddenly" replace the gasoline cars with electric ones, either. These things take time. As long as utilities don't sit on their asses it will be fine.
Utilities want to replace all of their power plants with "green" energy.
Wind and solar take a lot of space comparatively for the amount of power the generate.
As long as utilities don't sit on their asses it will be fine.
What, like in California?
All fun engineering problems for us to solve IMO.
We already solved them. Nuclear power. But that's a NIMBY's bad dream.
(post is archived)