> country that has completely switched over to renewables

In predicting the future of renewable electricity generation it is very important to base our predictions on future renewable prices, not on historic prices, because renewables are getting much cheaper relative to other sources, such as coal, gas and nuclear. Existing installed generating capacity was all purchased at historic prices when renewables were more expensive.

Looking into the future we can see the US is switching to a fully renewable electricity grid. This transition is happening even with current renewable prices. The 2023 planned additions and retirements according to the EIA are

A massive increase in solar pv, wind and batteries, and a massive decrease in coal. Not much change in natural gas, but we know from Swanson's law the volume manufacture of solar pv will continue to bring down the price and lead to a spiral of increasing manufacturing capacity and reducing price. Similarly, wind turbines are getting cheaper but at a slower rate. These bite into the profitablility of natural gas electricity generation by making the gas plants into peaker plants, which are approximately twice as expensive per kWh as continuously operating plants. The gas peaker plants are then more expensive than, and have difficulty competing with, grid-connected batteries. Batteries are also increasing in volume and falling in price partly because the auto industry is going all-in with BEVs which already have 14% of the global market in 2022. BEV sales are increasing at a conservative estimate of 30% per year which means they also represent a second significant threat to the oil and gas industry by reducing gasoline consumption - gasoline being the major component of crude oil.

The wikipedia list of countries by renewable electricity generation needs updating from mostly historic 2016 numbers, but may give sources for its country-related renewable electricity data. The changes since 2016 might be similar to Australia which has significantly increased solar and wind generation in the last 10 years. (The chart of total energy consumption by Australian state shows a less optimistic picture of the transition from fossil fuels - the need to electrify more of the world's energy usage.)

Uruguay, Brazil (including one of their grids serving a largerpopulation than france being majority wind), and a fewother smaller nations.

south australia is somewhere around 15-25% renewables from what i can see

iceland is 25% geothermal 75% hydro

paraguay is 99.8% hydro and 0.2% biofuel which is honestly incredible, they use like 3x as much power as iceland

also apparently albania and the DRC are 100% hydro but that seems odd

> Yeah, no, stop spreading your pseudo conspiracy theories.

It's not a theory, it's documented fact.

> People like you focus solely on the ecology of the renewables, not the economy and more importantly the power engineering.

Tell me more about "people like me" and especially how you know this based on a two-sentence comment on reddit.

> And make no mistake, this is an issue of power engineering, not ecology.

Why would it not be an issue of both? And why wouldn't it include economic factors, public health, public convenience, transportation networks, defense, geopolitics, etc? Why is it just a single issue that you decided is different from the single issue you wrongly assumed that I was focusing on?

> The problem was, is and for a long time will continue being the transmission and storage of electricity.

That's (one of) the engineering problems, yes. There are other problems too.

> The price of generation is an issue, but in the opposite direction than you would expect. Low electricity prices are harmful for the grid at the moment as conventional "dirty" powerplants are being closed due to not being economically viable. However we need these powerplants for now to stabilize the grid.

That's a resource allocation problem.

> But people who only care about renewable energy dont talk about that. Not only because it goes against their claims, but also because they simply dont know or care about that.

Lots more assumptions that are also incorrect.

Anyway, here's the deal: I said "cheaper overall." Draw a big box around the whole problem. Government problems, transportation, engineering, everything. Ask the question: what costs more? Switching to renewables, or not switching? The answer is not switching. The economic costs due to what you are hand-waving away as "ecology" are going to be orders of magnitude greater than all the engineering problems you are fixated on - and we're going to still have to solve those engineering problems, as well as solve a whole bunch of new ones.

This has been true the whole time. It has been true since we first started using fire to lift water. The only thing that has changed over time is our awareness. We couldn't work to solve the problem more efficiently until we understood it. We first started understanding it more than one hundred years ago, and became able to do something about it in the last few decades. Oil companies and those who profit the most from them intentionally worked to reduce the public understanding of the problems specifically because solving them would cause them to be less rich. Not poor - just less rich.

Call that a pseudo conspiracy theory if you want, but it's documented. They did it on purpose.

No, I'm suggesting a semi-global organized effort to delay or sabotage anything that leads to less reliance on fossil fuels. Semi-global in the sense that the people involved are from many different countries, not in the sense that everyone is in on it. It's probably the governments/royal families of a few petro-states (Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc), along with the people who own the big oil and coal companies, along with people who are heavily invested in those companies. It's not a conspiracy in the "secret criminal plot" sense, and more like an alignment along common interests that leads to some illegal behavior and a lot of unethical/anti-free-market/imperialist behavior. It's also not a conspiracy in the "nobody knows but us" sense, because some of the groups involved are pretty open about a lot of it (e.g. Koch Industries and the Heritage Foundation).

Once you understand the problem, you can more effectively solve it.

This is true, but in the past it was cheaper to produce electric energy from fossil fuels. I'm talking about overall costs, including economic damage from climate change, the wars that are fought over scarce resources, wars that will be fought over scarcer resources, costs due to mass migration, collapse of ecosystems, etc. If you look at the big picture, it's going to be incredibly, unbelievably expensive to deal with our long term dependence on fossil fuels. But it's all externalized costs that someone else will have to pay in the future, until that someone is us, now.