Unfortunately, this is nowhere close to being true. Solar power has one problem that if it were completely cost free it can’t overcome; night, when the sun isn’t shining. There is no inexpensive way of storing electricity. There is no reason to believe that there will be any inexpensive way of storing electricity for the 14 to 16 hours a day when little or no power is generated by solar. Not to mention cloudy days.

Currently we are hoping to mass produce batteries that will store a kilowatt hour of electrical energy for $100 that can be charged a thousand times before they have to be replaced, using the most promising technology. It is currently more than twice that. To put this into perspective coal powered electrical generators produce this amount of electrical energy at a cost of about 2. It doesn’t matter if solar power can generate power at the same 2 a kilowatt hour if we need a hundred dollars for each kilowatt hour to store the electrical energy for the night in batteries for three years before they are worthless. Even if there was an improvement of a hundred times, an impossible idea considering the state of the technology, the costs would be prohibitive.

With no practical large scale way of storing power no matter how much solar power you install the best that you can hope for is to generate less than one half of your power with it. Less considering cloudy days. You still need more than 100% back up generation that will be carbon emitting.

The only practical way to substantially reduce carbon emissions while meeting our need for electrical power is nuclear power. Rather than concentrating on impractical solutions like solar and wind we should be researching solutions to the much smaller and easier to solve problems of nuclear power generation, more efficient reactors and fuel cycles that produce little waste and burn the waste that we have already produced as fuel. Breeder reactors that produce more fuel than they consume, fuels that don’t carry the nuclear proliferation problems that enriched uranium fission reactors do.

As much as we decry the people who refuse to face the problems of carbon emission produced climate change we must also try to make people understand that nuclear power represents the only practical solution. Anyone who believes otherwise is as much of a problem for our future as the most ardent climate change denier. Sorry, but it is true.