I'm not against renewables but utilizing them as our main source of energy just is not practical for long term, there are serious ecological issues that have been sidelined because of global warming/climate change. Things like rooftop solar only become viable in low density housing, but low density housing is also not good use of land.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

I agree it's not the ideal solution, but it's better than most solutions we have, depending on location.

Rooftop solar doesn't only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.

One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it's easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can't really change direction mid-construction, and you can't just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.

Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn't destroyed.

So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they're still generally an excellent solution.

The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.