Imagine that you’re a power engineer in 1975, designing and building the U.S. electrical grid. Coal is undoubtedly king, generating nearly three times as much as gas, oil, or hydropower. Nuclear power is a much smaller contributor, and there’s basically nothing else. Now imagine a time-traveling engineer from 2020 shows up and tells you that in 45 years nuclear power will be equal to coal, or even exceed it. It would make sense, right? Power demand is growing; nuclear is the technology of the future, and while coal generation could more than double in several decades, nuclear generation will probably increase 20-fold. Now imagine the visitor showing you the chart below, showing how it played out. You’d likely be stunned.
The chart seems to tell a story about the U.S. energy mix, one about coal and oil’s potentially terminal decline alongside the recent rise of renewables such as wind and solar.