> Making statements that imply that the "cost" only boils down to "fuel cost" is essentially lying.

And yet this is exactly how fossil fuel companies and their proponents (even individuals outside the industry, if you can believe it) justify their "lower cost". The true cost of fossil fuels is hidden due to extreme externalities such as their impact on the climate, ecology, and human health.

You realize there's options besides intermittent sources and fossil fuels? Nuclear power has been around for decades. When plants are built in series, it's a lot cheaper than the one-off plants that have been built recently. The plants built in series cost about $1-2 billion per GW.

This doesn't really contradict my point (maybe it's a reply to a different comment). Letting fossil fuel proponents hand-wave or ignore or lie about externalities won't make nuclear power happen any faster.

Pointing out the deficiencies of intermittent sources isn't ignoring the externalities of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have bad externalities to put it lightly. Intermittent sources require storage which we lack the capacity to build at anywhere near relevant scales. That leaves nuclear as the viable option.

There's also the possibility of using both nuclear and intermittent sources. But between the fact that peak demand happens when intermittent sources are at their lowest production in the evening and the fact that nuclear is just as cheap to run 100% of the time as it is to run at 50% of the time, renewables become redundant. If we're building enough nuclear power to fill in the gaps of intermittent sources' periods of non production then we're building enough nuclear power to fulfill 100% of grid demand anyway. So just skip the intermittent sources.

> Pointing out the deficiencies of intermittent sources isn't ignoring the externalities of fossil fuels.

Oh, but it is. It is such a common trope, always trotted out as a reason to keep using coal or natural gas. Often it is paired with appeals to nuclear power which isn't being built, leaving us with fossil fuel energy while we wait for something to not happen.

> So just skip the intermittent sources.

Let's say we spend $100B on new power generation over the next 10 years: $50B for nuclear and $50B for wind+storage. Which do you think will produce more watt-hours during this 10 year period? Which will reduce dependence on fossil fuels more? We both know the answer to this so consider it rhetorical.

Arguments against renewables are arguments for the status quo, which includes some imagined ideal that won't happen.

$100B on wind and solar with no storage would outperform $50B on wind and $50B on storage. But what happens when we actually try to achieve 0% carbon emissions? Once wind and solar saturate their periods of peak production they become less and less effective because more and more of their energy goes to waste. Worse yet, peak energy demand happens in the evening right after sundown, when intermittent sources are at their lowest period of production. Mitigating fossil fuel use and actually eliminating fossil fuel use are very different goals.

Solar and wind are good for the short-term goal of small fossil fuel reductions. They are not very good at actually providing the bulk of a decarbonized grid. Storage remains a fantasy, so that leaves nuclear and hydroelectricity as the only non-intermittent carbon-free sources of energy. For places with the right geography for dams, great. For everywhere else, nuclear is the only option.

There's a few other sources of energy like geothermal and tidal power, but those are similarly geographically limited.