Yeah I agree. It is a shame about wave energy too but I think we’ll eventually figure it out. The downside is to get meaningful energy without beating the crap out of your equipment (using giant waves) you end up needing to cover huge areas with wave generators.

Ironically hydro power and nuclear are natural partners when combined with other renewables.

Nuclear covers the base load generation, and hydro trims up the remaining power production to perfectly meet demand and condition power on the grid. When renewables begin over producing the dam can ramp down to its minimum flow to meet its water license, allowing the reservoir to fill.

I think it’s going to be a constellation of solutions to replace our current energy sources. One of the most important I’ve been watching is soapstone thermal batteries. You can massively over build solar and wind if you know there’s a bunch of soapstone thermal batteries to act as demand for it.

During overproduction you turn resistive heaters inside those soapstone batteries on progressively until the grid stabilizes. Germany actually had (has? I’m not sure if they still do it) something like this for water heaters using frequency sensitive relays to help stabilize grid production. If the grid frequency started to climb relay after relay would activate adding more and more heating load to soak up demand to stabilize the grid.

If we did the same for industrial users who currently burn natural gas, or even a thermal battery to provide district heating for towns and cities using cheap overproduced renewables, you can replace a huge amount of natural gas for nuclear, hydro, and renewable peak shaving.