Question - Can’t We Solve Global Warming With Renewables?
Answer -
We’ve made a lot of progress with renewables, but they are still costly, intermittent, and difficult to scale. Without utility scale energy storage technologies, which remain unviable, you simply can’t run a modern society on wind and solar alone. Some places, like Germany and Denmark, have achieved higher levels of wind and solar, but they have done so through heavy, historically unprecedented deployment subsidies, that can’t be sustained. Furthermore, these societies remain overwhelmingly dependent upon fossil energy: Germany got 70 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels in 201212 versus 5 percent from solar and 7 percent from wind.