Reply #4: Perhaps Spain understand that any fossil-free fuel is worth having? [View All]

[Dead_Parrot]

Nuclear baseload and solar peak is a great combination: Although I bitch (incessantly) about the cost of PV, solar thermal is terrific (and IIRC Spain has mandatory solar water heating on new buildings) and I believe Spain trialled a solar tower as well, although I'm not sure if it's still going. They are also, I think, one of the few countries with operational wave power. But they are also upgrading their reactors, bringing an extra 800MWe to the grid: That's about 8 times the power from their projected PV up to 2010, but depending on the balance between thier peak and base loads, they could match quite nicely.

Wind is less useful unless you have an on-demand backup such as gas or hydro (and possibly biomass, depending on the response times). I am, in general, opposed to gas simply because of the CO₂, but the more options you can get in the mix the higher the percentage of renewable power you can have: With solar and wind and wave and hydro and biomass, I don't see any reason why they couldn't reliably get forty or fifty percent from renewable power.

On your other point, if you live out in a rural area then having off-grid power is an option, albeit an expensive one. But over half the world's population live in cities (including the 3 million or so people in Madrid): Creating their own power is just not going to happen, and like it or not they will need to use centralised power, as will the heavy industries.

Spain are working on a lot of fronts, and I suspect their energy policy is a little more refined than "nukes are bad" or "my cabin's TV runs off a portable solar panel, rofl."