Renewable optimists consistently under-estimate the storage problem by orders of magnitude. We don't have enough batteries on Earth to hold one single day's worth of electricity. And for us to actually rely on solar, we would need to store multiple months of electricity to survive the winter.
Solar is cheap because you're comparing a generation source that works on occasion with a generation source that works 24/7.
I'm not anti-solar at all. But I am realistic about what we can and can't do with it. The thing that will make a solar grid practical _today_ is focusing on variable loads. When the sun is shining, we should be cranking the AC of every home and office, smelting aluminum, filling dams, etc.
Wind can be very low for days and low for weeks.
Hydro is ecologically devastating and there aren't enough sites for it.
Where?
Maybe we should try a more global approach to energy.
Almost the entire world? The sun is up for less than 9.5 hours in winter unless you are very close to the equator.[1][2][3][4]
And that's assuming 0% cloud coverage. In reality, places like Germany only get an hour or two of real sunshine a day in the winter[5].
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/new-york
[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco
[3] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/spain/madrid
[4] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/china/beijing
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/982758/average-sunshine-...
Russia must be confronted with economic, political, and yes, military incentives to behave very differently in the future, or at least to take more responsibility for the reckless actions of their leaders. In the meantime, working towards independence from fossil fuels has become even more important, even for those who aren't otherwise known for advocating good climate stewardship.
Maybe not the national grid, but there are plenty of places in the US where the sun shines a lot more than 40% of the day during the winter. Start there. If Southern CA, AZ, NM, TX, FL, etc.. which all get a ton of sun no matter the season can reduce their reliance on the federal grid, that's a hell of a start, and we should be celebrating that as a great first step and building off of that.
I thought the whole point of alternative energy sources is acknowledging that certain locales have potential for different energy sources (solar, hydroelectric, wind, etc..) and we should as a society should take full advantage of that? We know oil isn't going away any time soon, but why aren't we saying "oh City XYZ or State ABC is abundant in (alternative energy source), let's make use of that as best as we can"?
It looks like Los Angeles only averages about 37% for the year as a whole, and Albuquerque averages about 38%, so I'm skeptical that there's anywhere that gets "a lot more than 40%" in winter. You have to take clouds into account as well, remember. Cloudy days exist even in desert areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_sunshine_dur...
Nobody is pretending that solar can provide electricity via night time generation. That's what storage systems and alternative sources are for.
The daylight story in ABQ is this:
> "It is sunny 78.9% of daylight hours. The remaining 21.1% of daylight hours are likely cloudy or with shade, haze or low sun intensity. "
Trying to sell it as "no biggie" will not work well.
That's the conceptually simple solution, but ofc there's more practical ones. Mix in wind, some nuclear, different storage solutions (Ev2grid, pumped hydro, rocks-in-a-box, etc..), demand-side solutions (VPPs), efficiency improvements (insulation, heatpumps), a few of the hundreds of advanced projects being researched (solar in space, enhanced geothermal, iron air batteries, SMRs, etc..). Combine the 1000s of solutions being proposed, researched and scaled out and you have a very solid plan of attack.
And if you combine the graphs for solar and wind from this: https://aleasoft.com/european-solar-and-wind-energy-producti...
You can nicely see that they are complementary in terms of energy production.
The latter is crucial. The cost of providing "synthetic baseload" in Germany doubles if you don't include it.
See https://model.energy/ for optimization of an energy system using these to provide synthetic baseload, using various tweakable cost assumptions and historical weather data. The cost is not outrageous, likely well below new construction nuclear.
In a place like India, you don't even need wind and hydrogen. PV and batteries will do just fine.
See [1] for a very short English description and [2] for the German original.
[1] https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/blueprint-100-... [2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/studien...
