The carbon dioxide production in industrialized countries needs to be reduced by greater than 90%. Not 50%, greater than 90%.
Producing steel releases CO2 as a byproduct. So does producing copper, silicon, concrete and even aluminum. And aluminum is produced by electrolysis!
If the industrial countries are to reduce their carbon dioxide output while maintaining their industrial production. And if the developing countries are to increase their own productions, it's pretty clear that there can be no allowance made for the energy sector.
The energy sector has to become completely carbon free by 2050. Not "let's dream about 50% some time in the far off future" but "we need to get rid of CO2 right here and now".
Wastage might be tolerable up to 50% of energy production but it increases geometrically as you add capacity. And since there is a non-zero chance that all of a country's windmills cannot spin on a given day, either because of too little wind or too much wind, the waste curve rises to infinity as production approaches 100%. So it's not even geometric, it's worse.
In the big picture, wind power is useless. It is definitely useful for niche applications like pumping water in isolated communities, but not for large scale decarbonization of the energy sector. For the industrial energy grid, wind power is entirely useless and is in any case not as good an option as nuclear power.
We need to push for nuclear power with everything we have because wind power is just not good enough. And because the developing countries will experience a lag. The sooner and more completely Europe switches over to all-nuclear, the less intransigent China and India will be.
I've always stated that we need to pursue all possible solutions, with the following order of priority:
Do remember that I'm in France, so your arguments to do more nuclear sometimes sound silly to me from my EDF-fuelled perspective... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Energy conservation shifting demand to off-peak hours nuclear, hydro [update] wind oil, gas; the global warming costs of past usage may easily climb into the tens of trillion USD range coal
It's odd to think of giant nuclear plants as a tool for the masses. The only thing I can think of to reconcile the two views is that nuclear's non-modularity (you need a half-dozen nuclear plants to get to the cheap rates) adds extra non-monetary costs.
I've learned a great deal about energy production in the last year, since I first made that list.
