ChrisCook:

a great deal of Danish wind power is actually exported, and reduces carbon fuel consumption and emissions elsewhere.

It is exported.. primarily to Norway and Sweden, neither of which have any significant amount of carbon emitting generation capacity at all.  Net ecological  gain: Zero. Net economic cost to Denmark of using nordic hydro to loadbalance our wind capacity? Quite large. Danish wind electricity importsexports are mostly used to conserve waterhead behind dams in Norway and Sweden - this reserve of power is then exported back to us when wind is low at a much higher price. Which means two things - that the actual percentage of wind in the danish power mix is in fact rather higher than export statistics indicate, and that the price of this electricity, including storage outside our borders, is much higher than we admit.

It also thereby reduces the profits of carbon-fired generators of course which accounts for some of the misleading propaganda.

Proponents of nuclear have no such excuses.

French power exports, which are typically a heck of a lot larger, go to countries that do use coal. Net ecological gain: Large.

I am quite aware that decarbonizing electricity is not sufficient, but it is nessesary. If we do not have clean electricity, the electric car merely moves pollution from tailpipe to smokestack. If we do not have clean electricity, highspeed rail becomes a carbon hog. If we do not have clean electricity replacing fossile carbon industrial feedstocks with electrochemical processes is pointless, if we do not have clean electricity, cleaning up home heating is not possible. Virtually every single other ecologically friendly policy or technological solution rests on a unspoken base assumption that electricity production is clean, so making this assumption true as rapidly as possible takes priority over everything else. It is also important to keep in mind that while a lot of these policies will dramatically reduce overall energy use, by virtue of being far more efficient than current praxis, since they all amount to substitution of electrons for gas and oil, they greatly increase electricity demand, so our policy must accomodate this.

I must be failing to communicate how very urgent I feel this problem is. I am not advocating that we should maybe build one or two more nukeplants. I am advocating that we should send construction crews to every major coalfired powerstation on the planet, build reactors next to them, (fast, thorium and conventional all, as supply chain allows) appropriating the grid connections and cooling water, and celebrate criticality at each new reactor by blowing the fracking coal station to kingdom come