[justatdotin]

> the intermittent nature of wind and solar

is kinda dependent on your region.

where I live, wind is pretty unreliable except at a narrow band of latitude.

but solar is -very- reliable. more like regular than intermittent. So we have two kinds of storage requirements: short term buffers for 15 mins of passing cloud cover, and overnight. Because of this manageable profile our economy is swiftly ramping up solar not just for current demand but in pursuit of 10x cheap new power to drive new industry.

[opo]

It isn't as easy as you are implying. Trying to rely only on intermittent power sources has huge storage requirements due to weather along with daily/seasonal variation. If grid energy storage was a simple problem it would have been done decades ago.

For example, one estimate is that for Germany to rely on solar and wind would require about 6,000 pumped storage plants which is literally 183 times their current capacity: >...Based on German hourly feed-in and consumption data for electric power, this paper studies the storage and buffering needs resulting from the volatility of wind and solar energy. It shows that joint buffers for wind and solar energy require less storage capacity than would be necessary to buffer wind or solar energy alone. The storage requirement of over 6,000 pumped storage plants, which is 183 times Germany’s current capacity, would nevertheless be huge.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/144985/1/cesifo1_wp5...

There is a large variation in daily electrical usage (particularly in summer months). For example in the US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Contrary to what advocates claim, people have been looking at grid energy storage for decades and it isn't as simple as they claim. As Bill Gates said in an interview: "…They have this statement that the cost of solar photovoltaic is the same as hydrocarbon’s. And that’s one of those misleadingly meaningless statements. What they mean is that at noon in Arizona, the cost of that kilowatt-hour is the same as a hydrocarbon kilowatt-hour. But it doesn’t come at night, it doesn’t come after the sun hasn’t shone, so the fact that in that one moment you reach parity, so what? The reading public, when they see things like that, they underestimate how hard this thing is. So false solutions like divestment or “Oh, it’s easy to do” hurt our ability to fix the problems. Distinguishing a real solution from a false solution is actually very complicated."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need...

Gates is investing in 4th gen nuclear and energy storage companies so he is putting his money where his mouth is.

[justatdotin]

> It isn't as easy as you are implying.

I'm not saying it's easy, I'm saying it's happening.

[opo]

>...I'm saying it's happening.

Hopefully someday, but it's not happening yet. Those big battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilization. Most current grid storage is pumped hydro and that has limited potential to expand. Like I said, it is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?

[justatdotin]

I'm no power engineer, I'm just assuming that the people pouring literally $billions into huge-scale solar infra in my region know what they're doing.