http://ecowatch.com/2014/12/18/renewables-outpace-nuclear-energy/

Renewables Outpace Nuclear All Over the World
David Elliott | December 18, 2014

As flagship nuclear projects run into long delays and huge cost overruns, solar and wind power are falling in price. Renewables already supply twice as much power as nuclear. It’s just too bad the nuclear-fixated UK government hasn’t noticed. Renewables are winning out just about everywhere. They now supply over 19 percent of global primary energy and 22 percent of global electricity. Nuclear is at 11 percent and falling.

With many of the UK’s old nuclear power plants off-line due to faults and prospects for their ultimate replacement looking decidedly shaky, it is good that the renewable energy alternatives are moving ahead rapidly. In 2013 nuclear supplied around 18 percent of UK electricity but in the third quarter of 2014, nuclear output fell 16.2 percent due to outages, while renewable output, which had reached 16.8 percent of electricity in the second quarter of 2014, was up 26 percent over the previous year. Indeed, there were periods in 2014 when wind alone met up to 15 percent of UK power demand, over-taking nuclear, and it even briefly achieved 24 percent.

What next? The financial woes of French developers Areva and EDF may mean that their £24 billion 3.4 gigawatt (GW) Hinkley nuclear project—despite being heavily subsidized by British taxpayers and consumers—will get delayed or even halted, unless China or the Saudis bail it out. Meanwhile, wind has reached 11 GW with 4 GW of it offshore, and solar is at 5 GW and rising with many new projects in the pipeline. By 2020 we may have 30 GW of wind generation capacity and perhaps up to 20 GW of solar.

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Another examples comes from a World Wildlife Fund report, which argues that China could get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2050, at far less cost than relying on coal, thus enabling China to cut its carbon emissions from power generation by 90 percent without compromising the reliability of the electric grid or slowing economic growth. And with no need for new nuclear.

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Yet the UK remains firmly stuck in a 1950s vision of the future

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