I have a very smart, but also ignorant, co-worker who loves renewable energy. He also loves Star Wars and Star Trek. Anyway, he keeps telling me that although green energy is expensive and unreliable now, we should keep throwing taxpayer money at it, so that magic will happen, and it will get cheaper. Like the transporter or the warp drive. Let’s take a look.

Here’s an article from the centrist UK Telegraph:

The German boss of Britain’s biggest wind turbine maker has warned energy bills will have to keep rising to pay for the green transition as he attacked “fairytale” thinking about net zero.

Joe Kaeser, chairman of Siemens Energy, suggested higher energy bills were inevitable as turbine makers grapple with huge losses, forcing them to pass on costs to their customers.

The company is the owner of the UK’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing site, in Hull, and employs thousands of British workers.

[…]Mr Kaeser told The Telegraph: “Every transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. And that’s something which the energy industry and the public sector – governments – don’t really want to hear.

“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing.

MAYBE the costs will go down:

“And then there might be innovation – about the weight of the blades, other efficiency methods, technology – so the cost can then go down again.

Will we see the UK returning to reliable, cheap sources of energy? Other countries have done it.

Sweden

Sweden had been focused on renewables, but they’re now moving back to nuclear.

Here’s the story from the The Blaze:

The Swedish parliament determined last week that in order to ensure the country has a “stable energy system,” it will have to abandon its goal of “100 per cent renewable electricity production by 2040.”

To satisfy electricity demand, which is set to double to around 300 TwH by 2040, Sweden’s right-of-center government announced June 20 that it would instead lean more heavily on nuclear energy and subsidize the construction of new nuclear plants — plants green-lit in 2016 but sidelined for fear they would be too expensive, reported Reuters.

The country, home to just over 10.5 million people, presently has three nuclear plants with six nuclear reactors in commercial operation. The state-owned Vattenfall aims to bring the tally up to eight reactors and refurbish extant facilities.

Wow, what accounts for this big change in direction? Well, the country experiences very cold winters. After poor performance from the renewables during the winter, the people started to demand results – which is why they elected a right-of-center government to make changes.

Swedish support for nuclear energy is presently at a record high of 56%, up from 42% in 2022, reported Bloomberg.

And it’s not just Sweden.

South Korea

South Korea is going back into nuclear. This article from far-left CNN is from July 2022:

South Korea, one of the world’s most fossil fuel-reliant economies, is re-embracing nuclear energy, with the government announcing Tuesday it will restart construction on two nuclear reactors and extend the life of those already in operation.

By 2030, the Energy Ministry wants nuclear to make up at least 30% of the country’s power generation – a step up from its previous goal of 27%.

To meet this, South Korea is restarting construction on two new reactors at the Hanul Nuclear Power Plant on the country’s east coast. Construction on the two reactors has been stalled since 2017, when former President Moon Jae-in – who had pushed hard to phase out nuclear energy – took office.

But with a new President in office, South Korea’s nuclear industry is returning at full speed.

Japan is restarting their idled nuclear power plants, and planning to build more next-generation nuclear reactors. They need reliable power, and they don’t want to count on their neighbors to sell it to them. They want to develop their own energy at home, and lower the prices that their citizens have to pay.