The progress we have made is great but there are still plenty of places that it may not be viable due to lack of sunshine, good weather, considerable wind.
Energy production with out long-term, long-duration energy storage doesn't solve our current problems.
Q. Has longer-duration energy storage been solved with out my awareness?
Though there are several nations that may not have enough wind and sun for their needs, these are a tiny tiny percentage of total energy needs of the globe. These nations will find ways to import energy, just as they currently do, either through electrical grids of through chemical storage of electricity as electrically-derived ammonia or methane or methanol or kerosene. Or maybe they pay somebody to do direct air capture, or through carbon capture and sequestration.
There are several ways to provide energy during the worst sun and wind lulls, and though we will likely use all of the below to some extent, we won't know the full mix until the next 10-15 years of tech development show which is the cheapest mix of techniques.
1) overprovisioning solar and wind generation to provide more during the lulls, at the cost of providing extra most of the time
2) flow batteries, such as vanadium redox, are having ever increasing pilots. There are also long-duration startups with extremely experienced teams that are taking bets on completely novel chemistries that will give us more shots on goal.
3) As we decarbonize industry, we will end up with massive amounts of energy stored in chemicals. Industrial policy is creating massive electrolyzer capacity for hydrogen, which doesn't store super well, but which will be the base for transformation into other chemicals that can be used for fuels such as ammonia (primary use is fertilizer but might end up being used for ocean shipping too). Current fossil fuel tech for creating and breaking hydrogen chains may make synthetic kerosene economical, which would allow us to keep the current airline fleet flying without modification.
4) Demand response. Currently the electrical grid has very little price information, which will not be economically efficient as we switch to nearly all primary generation having zero marginal cost, and times of great excess of electricity supply. As we build time-based prices into electricity, we will find that demand for many large energy users is quite flexible, and we will discover the true demand elasticity. This will make the entire economy more efficient than our current utility pricing schemes (at least US utility pricing, I'm not as familiar with the rest of the world.)
We don't need to know everything right now, because the energy world will be unbelievably different within 10 years. After nearly a century of almost no change, the energy world is undergoing a tech revolution which will catch nearly all the old giants off guard. Which is why so many fossil fuel majors are having to write down so many assets, and have not read the writing on the wall that even their financiers have now seen. Utilities (again, at least in the US), are significantly less sophisticated than even the fossil fuel majors, and have no idea of the huge changes they will see in the coming decades.
Thank you for your excellent response. You seem very knowledgeable on the energy sector and it's dynamics.
I agree with most of what you have written. I have to disagree on nuclear though.
I think nuclear is no different than the other avenues to clean energy and will also go through the same new tech development to reduce costs, risks, and management overhead. At least that's what I hope!
Energy production with out long-term, long-duration energy storage doesn't solve our current problems.
Q. Has longer-duration energy storage been solved with out my awareness?