Imagine falling off the roof of a 565 foot building.

[hunter]

4. The environmental impacts of large scale solar and wind projects are huge.

To replace the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant with solar would require at least 65 square miles of solar panels, batteries capable of carrying the grid through the night and four or five 500 megawatt gas plants. The gas plants would be active at least 10% of the time. The rest of that time theses gas power plants would be kept in various states of standby, with electricity consumers footing the bill for their financing, maintenance, and whatever fuel is necessary to ensure the reliability of the electric grid, even when the gas plants are not producing electricity.

For wind turbines the land area would be around ten times that.

For all that effort this "renewable" energy would still produce more greenhouse gasses than nuclear energy.

I think some promoters of wind and solar power have recognized that nuclear power plants make large scale solar and wind projects redundant. Once you replace all the fossil fuel power plants with nuclear power plants there's no longer any reason to maintain existing solar and wind infrastructure, and certainly no good reason to build more of it.

Most of the true believers don't like to look at the actual numbers. Utility sized solar and wind projects are no longer some nineteen-seventies Earth Day dream, they've actually been built. The real world performance of these systems is easily available from many legitimate sources. At this moment in California 84% of our electricity is "renewable." Only 1.7% is being generated by natural gas. If that's not very large scale "renewable" energy infrastructure, what is?

Sadly, there are also many true believers who don't actually know the difference between a megawatt and a megawatt-hour and definitely have no idea what an exajoule is. And they are more afraid of "radiation" than all the toxic emissions of their personal automobiles or the gas appliances in their homes. Arguing with them is tedious, it's like arguing with young earth creationists. Arguing with creationists never got me anywhere. Now I just do what I can to keep them out of our public schools.