Science

I still don't know how you think we should power cars and trucks. You have eliminated ICE, hydrogen, nuclear fission, nuclear isotope decay, and batteries. That leaves fuel cells and solar cells, the former lagging in efficiency compared to batteries and the latter rather impractical for weather and even moderate distances and requires batteries anyway. Oh, and animal power.

Car and truck culture is not going away this year or in 2026 and not for many years after. In any case, what would you replace cars and trucks with?

It is well known that heat flow systems are more efficient at higher temperature differentials to the surroundings than at lower and that conversion is always lossy.

Since your favoured primary energy production is nuclear fission, that still begs the question of how to convert those high energy heat flows into a form of energy useful for cars and trucks. Nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal energy, etc are not usable directly and must all be converted a form that can be transported. To what?

You may be interested in primary energy, but you raised the issue of storage for a rant and mistake the over $300 billion annual Grid and Storage investment for the actual $21 billion annual storage investment. Multiply by ten years as you did and you get over $3.5 trillion which you claim is for Storage investment but it is really almost all for Grid. The actual figure would be less than $210 billion for Storage, much less because the investment has been much smaller until the last few years.

IEA data for storage:
2 billion in 2015
too small in 2016
3 billion in 2017
5 billion in 2018
5 billion in 2019
7 billion in 2020
10 billion in 2021
21 billion in 2022
37 billion in 2023
50 billion in 2024 (extrapolated guess)

That adds up to only $140 billion since 2015.

You wrote:

which is a mistaken statistic, off by more than an order of magnitude.

Nothing prevents readers from responding to your challenge for hearts, as some have.