The replies are full of people pointing out the ‘two grids’ claim is simply not true. Why is the Secretary of Energy coming out, over and over again, with this bold anti-energy stance backed by absurdly false claims and arguments?
Solar power and batteries are the future unless and until we get a big breakthrough. If we are sabotaging American wind and solar energy, either AGI shows up quickly enough to bail us out, our fusion energy projects bear fruit and hyperscale very quickly or we are going to lose. Period.
Intermittent renewable energy alone does require a grid to support it. It is possible that wind and solar can be cheaper than the variable cost of conventional power plants, but it’s not yet in most places without subsidy. One could theoretically replace the current system with wind plus solar plus batteries, but it would be crazy expensive. Either you have to build the wind and solar far larger and waste most of the energy and still need batteries overnight, or you need something like days of battery storage, which is very expensive. Now you could use the excess electricity from the overbuilding scenario to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is also a long way from being economical. So the thing we could do economically at current prices is pumped hydropower for storage (geographically constrained) or underground compressed air energy storage (somewhat geographically constrained, but saline aquifers are very common and the US stores a lot of natural gas seasonally that way). These have low enough storage cost to be feasible for days worth of storage. Or we could do fission (yes, I know, public perception and regulations, but it’s not clear that fusion would be much better).
Intermittent renewable energy alone does require a grid to support it. It is possible that wind and solar can be cheaper than the variable cost of conventional power plants, but it’s not yet in most places without subsidy. One could theoretically replace the current system with wind plus solar plus batteries, but it would be crazy expensive. Either you have to build the wind and solar far larger and waste most of the energy and still need batteries overnight, or you need something like days of battery storage, which is very expensive. Now you could use the excess electricity from the overbuilding scenario to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is also a long way from being economical. So the thing we could do economically at current prices is pumped hydropower for storage (geographically constrained) or underground compressed air energy storage (somewhat geographically constrained, but saline aquifers are very common and the US stores a lot of natural gas seasonally that way). These have low enough storage cost to be feasible for days worth of storage. Or we could do fission (yes, I know, public perception and regulations, but it’s not clear that fusion would be much better).