Getting Rid of Fossil Fuels (?)

I was working on a relatively near future time-line (20-30 years), and there is a scene in which the POV character has to sabotage the local power supply.

Now my initial guess was that it'd be a field of tree-like solar-to-electricity converters, so I could just figure out a way to make a lotta smoke, or wait until night and sabotage the battery storage. But then I looked up some numbers and alternative sources like solar/wind/humans-in-pods-as-batteries account for a tiny and surprisingly unreliable percentage of total energy, with lots of coal- and gas-based standbys needed, and that looks set to continue far into the future.

So does my (anti)hero need to sneak into a coal power plant after all? Or perhaps I could alter the setting a bit: How far into the future do I have to go to have renewables consistently (not just for a few minutes at peak production) and reliably provide a vast majority of the power being produced?

The goal here is not a forecast, although I won't turn those away if you got them, but rather your sense of what would be plausible.

posted over 9 years ago

Serban Tanasa‭

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