Solar & wind are free but the equipment is expensive & highly polluting to produce.

Shadow,
>What breakthroughs?
The ones that make the means of generating renewable power more economic to build and more efficient to operate!
And of course it's not just generation but also storage. Battery technology has improved substantially and is continuing to do so. Likewise electrolysers for hydrogen production.

Then there are new ways of making steel. Electric arc furnaces, use of hydrogen to produce sponge iron, and (though it's got a long way to go before it's commercialised) molten oxide electrolysis.

Though metal refineries need to operate continuously, they don't need to operate at constant output. Instead they can pause their operations (but keep the metal hot) when they electricity is expensive, and do more when it's cheap.

And of course metallurgy isn't the only industry where these kinds of breakthroughs are occurring. There aren't many industries that won't be able to take advantage of cheap electricity and hydrogen.

Aidan,

These are not breakthroughs they are systems that have been known for years but are not even close to being economically viable.

As for slowing production to moderate electricity consumption, the problem is that most of the costs are there irrespective of your production rate.

Shadow,
IWTF do you think" technological breakthrough" means? Did you confuse them with scientific breakthroughs?

And the only one of them not even close to being economically viable is molten oxide electrolysis. But even there it's a matter of when not if. The more is invested in R&D, the faster it will become viable.

>the problem is that most of the costs are there irrespective of your production rate.
That depends on what you're doing. Where energy costs dominate, the statement is false. Where staffing costs dominate, the statement is true. Where equipment costs dominate, it depends on interest rates.

Aiden,

I do know what a "breakthrough" is and it is not simply doing the same thing slightly better or cheaper. Solar panels are cheaper but the greater cost of installing them and connecting them to the network hasn't.

Similarly, wind turbines have become cheaper per unit of power, but being rotating equipment installed at a height they still have a limited lifespan and massive decommissioning costs as well as safety issues. That they need power networks designed for their full capacity while on average they deliver 30% makes their distribution costs vastly higher.

Both of these are unreliable and need nearly 100% backup supply from reliable and dispatchable supplies such as fossil fuels, hydro or the vastly expensive batteries.

Shadow,
A technological breakthrough is the implementation of an idea that results in doing the same thing slightly better or cheaper. For instance giving wind turbine blades an internal truss structure makes them stronger, and this is one of the developments which has enabled them to be bigger.

And yes, there are occasionally bigger technological breakthroughs that enable completely new things to be done, but the small breakthroughs together are far more important than the big ones.

>Solar panels are cheaper but the greater cost of installing them and connecting them to the network hasn't
AIUI it has, though not to such great an extent. And they've also got more efficient.

>That [wind turbines] need power networks designed for their full capacity while on
>average they deliver 30% makes their distribution costs vastly higher.
Higher than they otherwise would be, but fossil fuel capacity factor is also often low.

>Both of these are unreliable
No they're not. Coal fired power stations break down far more often, with more severe consequences.

>and need nearly 100% backup supply from reliable and dispatchable supplies
Nowhere near 100%, as solar and wind are quite strongly anticorrelated.

>such as fossil fuels, hydro or the vastly expensive batteries.
And technological breakthroughs are making batteries much cheaper.
There's also the possibility of demand management.