So Honda has just set the bar for conversion from petroleum to electric power (meaning omni-fuel, as there is practically no useful source of energy that isn't being used to make electricity; steam coal is used for almost nothing else).

This is bad for petroleum.  Let the Saudis drink their oil.

It is potentially very good for climate change, as electrification is key to de-carbonization.  Whether we can get the paranoia of Germany, Japan and Austria properly treated to get the job done is another matter.

HarveyD: I think that E-P's list referred to nuclear power paranoia. Most counties are not going to be carbon free without using nuclear power.

I don't oppose nuclear power, but until SMRs are mainstream, the capital cost, construction time and project risk put NPPs at an economic competitive disadvantage. I agree that they should be classified alongside renewable despite using extractive fuel because they are zero carbon base load.

Solar, wind, geothermal, backed up by stationary storage, do not require massive set-asides for decommissioning.

Decommissioning San Onofre in SoCal Calif will cost $10.4 billion, 70% of which customers must cover.

To put that in perspective, at least five 400MW Ivanpah-size solar electric generating facilities could be built for that cost, with an aggregate output roughly equal to a San Onofre generator.

The newer solar-thermal plants, with integrated thermal storage, can produce power 24/7.

Utility scale solar prices are continuing to decline.

Nuclear power is carbon free. While it is not renewable, the traveling wave reactors will burn existing waste including depleted uranium and waste from light water reactors. Some one figured out that we can produce enough power for the US for 700 years from the existing depleted uranium stock.

Solar Reserves's Crescent Dunes plant in Nevada uses thermal storage. It's true that most new utility scale projects use PV and battery costs are dropping, but it's probably too soon to write this technology off.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-concentrating-solar-tower-is-worth-its-salt-with-24-7-power/

Nuclear power may not be 'renewable', in that it uses uranium (and thorium, potentially) fuel. However, supplies of these fuels are so vast that it hardly matters. We can economically extract uranium from seawater, for instance, by raising the kWhr cost of electricity by a fraction of a cent. Supplies become essentially infinite, on human time scales. Thorium is even more abundant. Nuclear fission is the cheap, green solution. This was understood 50 years ago. Why has the nuclear power industry languished? Ask yourself, who wins and who loses?

Yes, Crescent Dunes has been offline to fix a leak in one of its molten salt storage tanks, but that does not mean we should dismiss the entire technology.

San Onofre developed a leak in some cooling tubes and has been taken offline permanently, decades ahead of its planned decommissioning.

Whether by molten salts or lithium or some other technology, energy storage is on a favorable power curve that large nuclear power plants are not. I believe, and hope, that some of the SMR technologies can solve this problem but until we see the results, its all just speculation.

The UK's newest NPP, Hinkley Point, has not made an effective demonstration for lower cost nuclear power.

Smaller scale distributed energy and storage may prove to have a resilient advantage.

Personally, I'm for an "all of the above" strategy, as long as the "all" is restricted to low carbon and zero emission solutions.

The materials cost quoted for Lithium Ion only holds if the energy density does not increase. But energy density is likely to double, and then quadruple from current levels. I agree that it doesn't seem a near-term cost effective solution for baseload, but power curves have a funny way of making the most unlikely things possible, and affordable.

I think it's more likely that some other storage technology wins for stationary applications, but the reality is, *any* storage method that wins on price makes more expensive energy sources less competitive.

Bettter grids also help to solve the reduced capacity factor of renewables. (Agree that until cost effective storage arrives, the foundation of the baseload contines to be fossil fuel).

Michael Barnard points out some of the challenges facing NPP here:

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/09/no-virginia-no-nuclear-santa-claus/

Onshore and offshore wind also continue to drop in price as the industry continues to work down the learning curve:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/offshore-wind-reaches-cost-competitiveness-without-subsidies

Cleantechnica's editor does have a POV on renewables. But the author of the article, Mike Barnard, makes some very good points on the relative economics of the technologies that are not easily refuted. I can't find it now, but I recently read an article that compared subsidies of NPP and other energy sources and Nuclear was the most heavily subsidized. Personally, I'm willing to pay higher prices for zero-carbon solutions but the real solution is to pour more money into new renewable technology and SMR, which can reduce deployment times by years.

Btw, Barnard also writes for Newsweek, Slate, Forbes, Huffington Post, Quartz, and RenewEconomy.

Cleantechnica booted you off.

Hawaii and California are poised to run that experiment, 100% of electricity from renewables by 2045.

Hawaii has already passed 100% renewables legislation, California appears to have the votes to pass SB100.

Both have abundant sun, wind and geothermal resources, so maybe they have a natural advantage over other states but I'm willing to bet if they make good progress on that goal, other southwest states will be pressed to follow suit.

Hawaii and California are poised to run that experiment, 100% of electricity from renewables by 2045.

28 years from now, by which time almost all the legislators who voted for it will be safely retired and most of them dead.  In other words, they will have cashed out already, never to be called on their broken promises.

France almost completely de-carbonized its electric grid in roughly 16 years, about twice as fast.  This legislation doesn't qualify as a "plan", because several of the technologies required to make good on the promises are not merely unavailable at the required scale and cost, they don't exist yet.

Hawaii has already passed 100% renewables legislation, California appears to have the votes to pass SB100.

So why not just make it a "100% carbon-free" mandate by 2045 and let the different technologies fight it out in the marketplace?  Why the blatant thumb on the scale?

What it if doesn't work?

Both have abundant sun, wind and geothermal resources

Ah, geothermal.  There are more than a few problems with that.  Hawaii has religious objections to tapping it on the big island, which is the only one with significant resources.  California has just 2760 MW with only 855 MW more even on the drawing board.  The total of 3615 MW doesn't equal the sum of Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, and that's it for the non-emitting year-round baseload capacity for the state.

Both have abundant sun, wind and geothermal resources, so maybe they have a natural advantage over other states but I'm willing to bet if they make good progress on that goal, other southwest states will be pressed to follow suit.

And what about the rest of the country?  Places where you have, you know, actual winter?

I've run the numbers.  A single NuScale reactor could both light and heat the city of 15,000 or so near me, likely with no backup except in the extremes of winter cold snaps.  There are no geothermal resources here, so in the all-too-common dark cold calms people reliant on renewables would literally be freezing in the dark.

main San Diego daily newspaper ran a huge front page story on the issue today.

I notice that the article doesn't even mention Diablo Canyon, let alone that the proposed agreement to shut it down would replace less than half of its generation with renewables.

This all comes to the natural gas companies as profits.  When will you realize that you've been sold a bill of goods.

I want to see the economics work. Right now they do not. Just ask Toshiba, or the Toshiba investors.

Just ask Toshiba what Jaczko's NRC did to their US projects AFTER all the licenses were issued and the contracts signed.

Nuclear works fine where government is a healthy partner, not an enemy.  China's building like crazy.  S. Korea has a bunch of domestic capacity and KEPCO's Barakah project is on time and on budget.  Rosatom is guaranteeing Finland power at €50/MWh from a new VVER.

Just get rid of the NRC and all its regulatory fees and delays and most of the problem will fix itself right there.  That would literally require the stroke of a pen signing a bill:  "The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is hereby abolished, and its functions terminated."